Dominican Republic Delays Summit of the Americas to Next Year

# Dominican Republic Delays Summit of the Americas to Next Year

*Event date: 2025-11-03*

The Dominican Republic has postponed the Summit of the Americas until next year after consultations with invited countries, including the United States, as regional tensions over Washington’s military deployment near Venezuela continue to intensify.

According to the AFP report carried by Free Malaysia Today, the summit had originally been scheduled for December. The Dominican foreign ministry said the gathering would be delayed because “deep differences” made it hard to hold a productive meeting now. The same statement also pointed to storm damage in some countries that had been expected to attend, including Jamaica, which was hit by Hurricane Melissa.

The postponement reflects two separate pressures on the diplomatic calendar. One is the anger across the Americas over U.S. operations off Venezuela’s coast, including attacks on boats that Washington says were being used for drug smuggling. The other is the practical difficulty of staging a regional summit while some invited states are still dealing with the consequences of severe weather.

The AFP report says the U.S. deployment has fueled fears among regional governments that Washington could be preparing direct action against Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leftist president. It also notes that attacks by U.S. forces in the Caribbean and Pacific have killed at least 65 people since they began in early September. Experts quoted in the report said the strikes amount to extrajudicial killings even if the targets were known traffickers, while Washington has not made public evidence showing that its targets were smuggling narcotics or posed a threat to the United States.

The decision to delay the summit is notable because the event was meant to bring together leaders from across the hemisphere. Instead, the Dominican Republic now faces a political climate in which several governments are openly hostile to the U.S. military presence near Venezuela, and others are focused on disaster recovery at home.

The packet does not include the new date for the summit or details on whether the invitations will be revised. But it does establish the core reason for the delay: the Dominican government judged that the meeting could not be productive under current conditions.

For regional diplomacy, that is a significant signal. A summit designed to showcase inter-American cooperation has been pushed aside by the combination of security fears, political distrust and storm damage. The postponement also underlines how events around Venezuela are now affecting a broader set of Western Hemisphere institutions, not just bilateral relations between Washington and Caracas.