Messy Summit of the Americas highlights contrast in US, China hosting styles

Agenda and guest list not finalised until days before, a controversy that could have been defused if handled earlier: one critic calls it ‘amateur hour’

Disarray contrasts with China’s approach to similar events, which involve exhaustive preparation, highly scripted events, no detail left to chance

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Published: 11:00pm, 12 Jun 2022

Add to the long list of differences between China and the United States, involving everything from democracy and human rights to one-party rule and state-led markets, one more: the way the two “strategic competitors” host meetings.

The Summit of the Americas held last week in Los Angeles was a bit, well, disorganised. The agenda and list of invitees were not finalised until days before the opening ceremony while a very public brouhaha played out for weeks over Washington’s guest-list snub of left-wing Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba that often overshadowed any substantive messaging.

“It’s fricking amateur hour,” Nicholas Cull, professor of public diplomacy at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said of overall US messaging around the summit. “It doesn’t seem like they prepared with image in mind. Chinese summits are a very different animal.”

The summit – the first hosted on US soil since its 1994 launch in Miami – was aimed largely at countering Beijing’s growing footprint in the United States’ backyard. China has sharply increased investments and infrastructure projects, with China-Latin America trade exceeding US$400 billion in 2021, compared to US$295 billion for the US.

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The way the Los Angeles summit played out contrasted with China’s hosting of international meetings which are marked by exhaustive preparation, highly scripted events, not a detail left to chance, an exercise in political theatre. The contrast reflects key differences in the nations’ respective political systems and the function and culture of meetings.

One difference: the US faces a tougher challenge operating in an increasingly multipolar world as it tries to forge a democratic consensus. This frequently involves building consensus among disparate voices, a process that favours cajoling – often played out rather messily and publicly – over leverage and muscle.