Breaking Colombia Proves That America Is Back

It was too short to be a South American telenovela, but just long enough for a comic operetta of the Belle Époque. On Sunday, Colombian president Gustavo Petro—a 64-year old former Marxist guerrilla fighter recent reports have tied romantically to a man masquerading as a woman, and whose domestic disapproval rating has exceeded 60 percent—reversed an earlier agreement with the U.S. about returning Colombian illegal aliens. The agreement was that Columbia would accept aliens who have committed crimes and been detained in the United States as they were returned to his country on U.S. military aircraft. Petro instead attempted to block them.

Mrs. Petro has yet to offer her perspective on these unconventional developments, but newly reinaugurated U.S. President Donald J. Trump was not amused. While golfing, he formulated an immediate response, announcing that Colombia would face an “emergency” 25 percent tariff on all exports to the United States, rising to 50 percent within a week if the situation remained unchanged. The U.S. diplomatic mission in Colombia would stop issuing visas for travel to the United States. Visas already granted to Petro’s officials, party members, supporters, and their families would be revoked. Customs and immigration inspections on arrivals from Colombia would be increased.

The left promptly lost it, solemnly claiming that Trump’s punitive economic measures would harm U.S. consumers, who buy from Colombia most of their cut flowers and 17 percent of their coffee—cheap commodities that apparently mean more to them than the security of their country’s borders and their own safety from foreign criminals illegally present within those borders. Quivering members of Washington’s former foreign policy establishment brooded about an unnecessary trade war, a further loss of confidence in America across the developing world, supposed benefits accruing to a less insistent China, and other petty concerns that one might expect from people whose highest ambition in life is to serve a weak-kneed globalist establishment as polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.

Within an hour, however, Petro caved, not only returning to his original agreement to take back citizens of his country who have committed crimes in ours but even offering to fly them back home on his presidential plane. Later in the day, possibly hoping to keep his plane free for jaunts with his transgendered paramour, he formally confirmed that U.S. military flights could repatriate the illegal aliens per his original agreement. In a pathetic attempt to save face, Petro authored a bitter, rambling, and bizarrely emotional X post in which he called President Trump a “white slaver,” suggested that Trump wants to overthrow and murder him, and promised fierce resistance to infringements on what he called the “freedom” of Colombia under his rule, which Transparency International ranks 87th in the world for “integrity.” Good luck with that, Señor Presidente.

Trump took no notice of Petro’s outburst but declared that the proposed tariffs would be suspended pending Colombia’s fulfillment of the renewed agreement and that the other restrictions would be lifted pending active compliance by Petro’s government. By nightfall, the crisis was resolved and the world moved on to other bold Trumpian moves.

Shorn of its eccentricities—tinpot Latin American ruler, genderbending lover, paranoid hysterics, Asian intrigue, and even a prospective bataille des fleurs—the Petro Affair (which could have more than one meaning) reveals a time-tested truth. Power politics works. Trump, unlike his mentally deficient predecessor and that unfortunate man’s weak-willed designated successor, had the courage to exercise power—not recklessly to antagonize the world, but with principle to sustain an agreement made in good faith that the other party violated on arbitrary grounds. Any responsible CEO—indeed, any statesman worthy of respect—would have done the same. The international left and its craven sympathizers within our walls might not like it but make no mistake: America is back and the illegals are going home.

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