The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit drew its curtains on Tuesday in San Francisco, in the state of California, with the commitment of the United States to find a more “stable” region in the face of various obstacles facing the world today.
“So the United States has decided to focus on creating a strong and sustainable future for all,” said US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking at the opening session of the Ministerial Meeting.
The US ended the year as the host of APEC with the challenges faced by the government of President Joe Biden since it arrived at the White House in 2021, such as the devastating consequences of the two-year-old COVID pandemic, the global impact of climate change, financial support for the Russian invasion war in Ukraine in February 2022, and recently the Israel-Hamas conflict since the illegal military group attacked Israeli properties on October 7.
APEC, whose current edition will meet between November 15 and 17, is guided as a community of mutual collaboration, as shown in the 2020 Malaysia meeting. Blinken highlighted the historic results of this cooperation.
Conceived in December 1989 under the leadership of Australia and Japan, the mechanism has helped increase the gross domestic product of its members by a total of $19 billion to $50 billion together, Blinken reported.
President Biden is expected to hold two important meetings at the summit: this Thursday with the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and on Friday with the President of China, Xi Jinping.
López Obrador discusses the phenomenon of irregular immigration towards the US through the southern border as the number of immigrants has reached historical records, according to various US agencies that collect this data.
On Monday, the White House reported that Biden López Obrador will focus their meeting on “continuing to work together as partners to manage migration on our shared border and mobilize a hemispheric response to this challenge.”
This Tuesday, Blinken received his counterpart, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Peru, Javier González-Olaechea, where he also addressed the issue of “an orderly and safe migration” in the region. Peru will host the APEC forum in its 2024 version.
However, the high level of American deaths due to fentanyl consumption has raised alarms in Washington, where its neighbor Mexico is blamed for the drug’s border crossing, something López Obrador denies.
Biden-Xi meeting
The presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the summit also raises the bar of “extreme diplomacy” when seeking to restore communication relations that have been damaged between the two countries for some time.
President Biden said on Tuesday that the purpose of the dialogue he will hold with his Chinese counterpart is only to try to restore communications between the United States and China to stability after a turbulent year.
Shortly before leaving San Francisco to meet with Xi on Wednesday and attend the annual APEC summit, Biden said the two countries should return to “normal correspondence” even though they have strong differences on many issues.
“Being able to pick up the phone and talk to each other when there’s a crisis Making sure our military stays in touch,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “We’re not trying to get out of China, but what we’re trying to do is change the relationship to make it better,” he added.
The two leaders will meet at Filoli Garden, a historic house museum located in the exclusive town of Woodside, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of San Francisco, according to three high-ranking government officials. The officials asked not to be identified so they could comment on the location of the meeting, which has not been confirmed by the White House or the Chinese government.
The appearance of an apparent Chinese spy balloon The flight over sensitive areas of the United States or the fighter plane of Beijing’s military forces firing flares near a US plane in the China Sea are two of the episodes with the most intense relationship.
This year, China denied that it was trafficking fentanyl precursors to Mexico, according to the Latin American country.
The Sino-American agenda will consist of “responsible competition,” said White House Homeland Security spokesman John Kirby, pointing out what separates the two powers in their quest to become world leaders in the fields of economics and geopolitics.
