From his surprise tour of the United States, where he is holding
meetings with senior officials of Joe Biden's administration,
the Chief of Staff, Nicolás Posse, brings other news: the Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs of the State Department,
Brian Nichols will arrive in the country at the beginning of next week
and will maintain an intense agenda with Government ministers and leaders from other spaces.
It is not yet confirmed when he will meet with President
Javier Milei,
who on Monday will leave - as officially reported - on his tour of Italy and Israel, where he will hold meetings
with Pope Francis, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. .
Nichols, who speaks fluent Spanish, is
the deputy of Secretary of State Antony Blinken,
whose visit to the country could occur later, Argentine officials say
.
This is usually the prelude to a presidential bilateral, that is, a possible meeting between Biden and Javier Milei.
In fact, the Argentine sources consulted, among them from the Armed Forces, expect
the commander of the United States Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, in April.
This week, Ambassador Marc Stanley announced on television that
Biden and Milei will initially meet at the G20 summit in Brazil in November.
Biden is in an
election year
and his international agenda is taken up by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, by Israel's war against Hamas and other conflicts in the Middle East that include Iran, and by the latent tension with China.
If
Donald Trump,
Milei's friend, wins the primary elections, he will compete with the Democrat in the US presidential elections in November.
Javier Milei's Chief of Staff, Nicolás Posse, in the United States with Jay Shambaugh, Undersecretary of International Affairs of the Treasury, a key official in the relationship with the IMF.
Posse and the number one of the AFI, Silvestre Sivori, held
a meeting this Wednesday with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William J. Burns.
They also had meetings at the United States Southern Command, in Florida, according to the press office of the Chief of Staff in Buenos Aires.
In the context of
the Milei government's distancing from China,
Posse began this trip to further strengthen ties with the United States.
The chief minister was in attendance during the president's trip to New York and Washington as soon as he won the elections in November.
On Tuesday, Posse
was with U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs Jay Shambaugh.
And in parallel, the Government received strong support from the Monetary Fund, which announced a disbursement of some
4.7 billion dollars
that the organization had committed on January 10.
Half will be used paradoxically to meet debt maturities with the IMF itself.
Brian Nichols took over as Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs of the State Department on September 15, 2021. Among several other positions, he was ambassador to the Republic of Zimbabwe from 2018 to 2021.
And he is one of the most influential officials in diplomacy Democrat today.