No. of Recommendations: 13
Allowing millions of unvetted people to swarm the border isn't a sustainable thing.
But using civilian aircraft in lieu of military aircraft probably was. We didn't need to threaten to blow up Colombia's economy (bilateral trade between us is more than 10% of their GDP) over this specific thing. This specific thing wasn't millions of people swarming over the border - it was two flights by military aircraft. It could have been handled a dozen different ways - Trump chose an intensely threatening way. That made Colombia knuckle under immediately, but there's no way that the current Colombian government doesn't mentally move the U.S. out of the "dependable ally" box into the "unstable threat" box when making their economic and foreign policy choices going forward.
Again, China's got to be thrilled about that. Colombia's one of the largest countries in the hemisphere, both in terms of population and economy. The biggest in South America with a Pacific Coast. It's got to be towards the top of their list in global priorities. We just burned years of bilateral relations and cooperation so that we could force them to accept military flights rather than civilian flights, or not have to wait a day or two to work that out cooperatively rather than confrontationally.
That's certainly an "America First" approach - use our massive size to threaten and intimidate rather than work cooperatively with people. But it doesn't seem like an especially smart one, because even though Colombia is smaller than us and doesn't have a lot of immediate options to retaliate, they've still got lots of choices about how to structure their economy and foreign policy that are now going to be made very differently.
