That was quick. A day after Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro denied entry to American planes returning deported Colombian migrants from the United States, Petro—who complained that the migrants were not being treated with “dignity”—not only backed down, but was retweeting President Donald Trump’s press secretary.
Trump had brought him to heel in a matter of hours with a threat of crippling tariffs and other sanctions.
With more than a little justification, Trump and his supporters are claiming victory and touting the Colombian’s cave as proof that America’s days of being pushed around—especially in its own hemisphere—ended January 20.
Perhaps so. After four years of relative neglect by the Biden administration—during which Beijing, Moscow, and even Tehran made deeper inroads into Latin America—Trump is already effecting a hard swing of the pendulum back toward American primacy in its neighborhood.
In a broader sense, though, this show of strength in America’s near-abroad could portend weakness if it comes at the exclusion of traditional foreign policy concerns in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
In his first term, Trump wisely resisted the temptation to retreat and let aggressive dictators expand their territory and influence across Eurasia—the supercontinent that accounts for three-quarters of the world’s population and nearly two-thirds of the world’s economy. By holding the line in the Western Pacific, Eastern Europe, and the Persian Gulf, Trump logged important achievements: delivering heavy blows to ISIS, negotiating Mideast peace agreements, ditching Washington’s accommodationist approach to China, and (in that rarest of successes for a U.S. president) keeping America out of new wars.
Those weren’t just headlines for me—I proudly served in the Trump White House, first as his senior director for Asia policy, and then as deputy national security adviser.
Now, however, there are signs that the president might succumb to the allure of hemispheric seclusion in his second term. Isolationists masquerading as “restrainers” are being maneuvered into mid-level positions at the Department of Defense—some of them critical of Trump’s policies that kept the peace. Trump himself toyed with the idea of withdrawing from NATO in his first term, though he thankfully held fast and successfully pressured allies to spend more on their defense.
