Diplomacy is a subtle art, yet the controversy surrounding the Summit of the Americas has all the hallmarks of a sharp break. The now-recurrent decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from this hemispheric forum has ceased to be a mere incident. Officially, the aim is to protect a select circle of “democracies”. But for a growing number of Latin American and Caribbean nations, this justification has become indefensible. It is perceived as a manifestation of “imperial arrogance” and the application of a double standard that no longer deceives anyone.
Faced with this growing schism, an iconoclastic, almost taboo, question is emerging: what if, in the name of these same democratic principles, the participation of the United States itself were called into question? By turning the mirror that Washington holds up to its neighbours, a critical analysis of its own political and social system paints a portrait of a country profoundly at odds with the ideals it purports to defend. The question is no longer merely diplomatic. It is a question of consistency.
A Contested Hegemony – Genesis and Crisis of an American Order
To understand the current crisis, one must go back to the Summit’s origins. First convened by Bill Clinton in Miami in 1994, in the unique geopolitical context of the post-Cold War era, the event was presented as the celebration of a “community of democratic societies”. The project was clear: to institutionalise American leadership by merging the concepts of “democracy” and “market economy” under the aegis of the “Washington Consensus,” the framework of neoliberal reforms promoted by Washington-based financial institutions.
From the outset, the exclusion of Cuba established the founding principle: the Summit is not a geographical forum of all the Americas, but a political club to which Washington reserves the right of admission. This policy eventually bred its own opposition. At the 2012 Summit, the region’s nations unanimously declared that they would not participate in any future summit if Cuba were not invited, plunging the process into an existential crisis. This desire for autonomy was institutionalised with the creation of CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) in 2011, a regional forum explicitly designed without the United States or Canada. The 2022 crisis, where the boycott led by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was widely followed, transformed CELAC into a genuine platform for political coordination in the face of American unilateralism.
This power struggle has highlighted the standard imposed by the United States itself: to participate in the Summit, a country must be a “democracy”. It is therefore not only legitimate, but necessary, to apply this standard to its main instigator.
The Verdict of the Facts – Portrait of a Functional Oligarchy
If American democracy is evaluated not on its rituals, but on the actual distribution of power, the diagnosis is damning. The landmark study by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, after analysing nearly 1,800 policy decisions, has become an essential piece of evidence. Their conclusion: the influence of the average American citizen on public policy is “minuscule, near zero, and statistically non-significant”. The American political system corresponds neither to the model of “majoritarian electoral democracy” nor to that of “majoritarian pluralism”. It perfectly fits the theories of “economic elite domination” and “biased pluralism”. In plain terms, the majority does not rule.
This oligarchy is cemented by structural mechanisms of formidable efficiency:
- Money as a Constitutional Right: The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision blew apart a century of regulations by equating corporate political spending with freedom of speech. It paved the way for “Super PACs,” entities that can spend unlimited sums, and for “dark money,” billions of dollars circulating anonymously through non-profit organisations. Since this decision, spending by billionaires in elections has increased 163-fold. Added to this is institutionalised lobbying, whose expenditure ($3.5 billion per year in 2012) is five times the amount of campaign contributions, and 84% of which comes from corporations.
- A Biased Electoral Architecture: The popular will is also distorted by the very architecture of the system. Gerrymandering, the partisan redrawing of electoral districts, uses “cracking” (dispersing opposition voters) and “packing” (concentrating opposition voters) techniques to create maps where politicians choose their voters, not the other way around. The Electoral College, meanwhile, is a direct legacy of slavery. It was a compromise to allow Southern states to count 60% of their slave population in the calculation of their political weight, granting them disproportionate power. Today, this system continues to produce anti-democratic effects, allowing candidates to win the presidency while losing the popular vote and diluting the political power of African-American voters, who are heavily concentrated in Southern states where their vote is “submerged”.
The “Racial Contract” – Hierarchy as the Pillar of the American Order
America’s democratic deficit is inextricably linked to its deepest foundation: white supremacy. As theorised by the philosopher Charles W. Mills, the true unwritten constitution of America is a “Racial Contract”. It is a tacit agreement among those defined as “white” to establish themselves as full citizens, while defining non-white populations as “sub-persons”. This is not a simple matter of prejudice, but a political system of domination that continues today in modern and devastating forms.
- The “New Jim Crow”: Prison as a Tool of Political Exclusion: The legal scholar Michelle Alexander has shown that mass incarceration, triggered by the “War on Drugs,” functions as a new racial caste system. While studies show that illegal drug use rates are similar, or even higher, among whites, enforcement has been selectively targeted at communities of colour. The result is a system that imprisons black men at a rate five times higher than that of white men. The statistic from the Sentencing Project is chilling: a black man born in 2001 has a one-in-five chance of being imprisoned in his lifetime. But the most insidious aspect is what happens after release from prison. A felony conviction leads to a “civil death”. Ex-offenders are “locked out”: they lose the right to vote in many states, are excluded from access to social housing and food stamps, and face massive employment discrimination by having to tick “the box” on application forms. It is a powerful and legal mechanism for removing millions of citizens, overwhelmingly non-white, from the democratic process.
- Education, a Machine for Reproducing Inequality: The state school, a pillar of democratic citizenship, has become a tool of stratification. The central problem lies in its heavy reliance on local property taxes. This system mechanically creates a de facto educational apartheid: wealthy districts, where property values are high, raise substantial funds for their schools, while poor districts, which host a disproportionate share of students of colour, have meagre budgets. This system does not merely reflect inequalities; it institutionalises and perpetuates them across generations, ensuring that the populations who would have the most interest in challenging the status quo are structurally less equipped, intellectually and civically, to do so.
- Violence and Suppression: Added to this picture are contemporary voter suppression strategies that target minorities (voter ID laws requiring documents that the poor and minorities are less likely to possess, such as in Texas where a firearm licence is accepted but a student ID card is not) and systemic police violence. Studies show that Black and Hispanic people are more than 50% more likely to experience non-lethal force from the police, and that Black victims killed by police were 23% less likely to be armed than white victims.
The Empire and its “Blowback” – When Foreign Policy Corrupts Democracy
Finally, the imperial posture of the United States is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy domestic democracy. The concept of “blowback,” from CIA jargon, describes the unforeseen consequences of covert operations that ultimately “come back” to strike the country. The overthrow of the Iranian prime minister in 1953, which sowed the seeds of the 1979 revolution, or the support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, which contributed to the formation of Al-Qaeda, are classic examples.
This state of “permanent war” (against communism, drugs, terrorism) justifies a massive expansion of executive power, creating an “imperial presidency” that operates in secret and with little accountability. It also justifies mass surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security. This dynamic directly fuels what the theorist Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism”: the fear of an external threat, manipulated by the executive, pushes fearful citizens to meekly grant exceptional powers, replacing democratic debate with security management.
A Question of Consistency for the Future of the Americas
So, should the United States be excluded from the Summit of the Americas? To ask the question is not to call for an empty-chair policy, however tempting it may be. It is to use a mirror to reveal a fundamental hypocrisy that undermines the credibility of the entire inter-American system. The right that Washington arrogates to itself to exclude nations in the name of democracy is the international projection of a domestic order that is itself oligarchic and racially hierarchical, which has always functioned by defining the “included” and the “excluded”.
The growing refusal of the region’s nations to bow to this logic is not an expression of support for the regimes in Havana or Caracas. It is an affirmation of sovereignty. It is a rejection of the right of one power to unilaterally define the rules of the game. It is a call for genuine multilateralism. For the Summit of the Americas to have a future, it must cease to be the private club of a declining hegemony and become what it should always have been: a dialogue between equals. A dialogue where every participant, starting with the most powerful, would at last be prepared to confront its own profound contradictions.