How the U.S. should but won't respond to El Salvador's China decision

Jimmy McDonough has a smart piece on how the US should respond to El Salvador's decision to change recognition from Taiwan to China in the Global Americans with El Salvador: A pragmatic U.S. response should follow Chinese inroads. You should read the whole thing as the recommendations are pragmatic and likely to marginally improve conditions.

One recommendation is that the US not approach the region through ideological lenses.

Second, the U.S. cannot condition its assistance on the ideology of governing parties, as corruption is not confined to a single party or country. Castigating corruption in the left-leaning Salvadoran government while praising the similarly corruption-prone right-leaning Honduran government only emboldens corrupt conservatives. The U.S. must combat the pernicious notion that it only triumphs the rule of law as a way of weakening governments it opposes by demonstrating consistency in denouncing corruption throughout Central America.

The Obama administration made it a point to recognize our shared responsibility for conditions in the region and shared responsibility for bringing about reforms to improve them. The Obama administration also worked with the region's actors from across the political spectrum. Our relationship with parties of the left in El Salvador and Nicaragua and right in Guatemala and Honduras were never great but there was a clear shift away from the partisan nature of foreign policy that characterized the Bush administration.

Senator Marco Rubio has been outspoken against CICIG, which he alleges is a pawn of Guatemala's left and part of some international Russian conspiracy. He's also spoken out strongly against Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador. The Trump administration has spoken out against Ortega and the FMLN as well, and while there have been rumors of what they might want to do to CICIG, they've been rather quiet about Guatemala overall. They've proposed some cuts to foreign assistance that appear to be more across the board rather than oriented towards ideological opponents. And it cancelled TPS for El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras - no favoritism there.

It's been less than two years since Trump took office and at this point it just seems that the administration is going day to day with the region without some clear indication that it has a strategy to favor parties of the right or a strategy to engage regardless of the ideological bent of those in power in the region. Perhaps how it has responded to government repression in Honduras and Nicaragua is indicative of such a strategy but I don't know yet. Honduras has always had a special place for the US.