Trump to Colombia: There’s a New Sheriff in Town

The Great Colombian-American Trade War of 2025 lasted less than 12 hours. The first international conflict to be fought almost entirely over social media, its casualties included the ego of Colombia’s left-leaning President Gustavo Petro, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s already dubious reputation as a geopolitical analyst, and members of the foreign policy “expert” class who continue to insist Trump’s tough approach to diplomacy will never work.

Trump, on the other hand, secured a remarkably swift and complete victory, symbolized when Colombian President Gustavo Petro retweeted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post on X declaring that victory. It was the 21st century equivalent of Robert E. Lee handing over his sword at Appomattox Courthouse.

The conflict began midday Sunday when Colombia turned away a previously approved deportation flight from the United States because it involved a military aircraft and because the illegal aliens onboard were handcuffed. President Petro, a liberal who has seen his domestic agenda hamstrung by a hostile Congress and his inability to keep together a cabinet, saw the incident as an opportunity to stir up nationalist and left-wing sentiment in his own country.

Petro seems to have believed that by objecting to how Colombian nationals were supposedly being treated on these flights (rather than deportation flights in general), the United States would concede him a public relations victory by agreeing to his demands for the “dignified return” of future deportees.

One can forgive Petro for this assumption given the context of the past four years. Under Joe Biden, Petro’s demands almost certainly would have been met – assuming there was ever a world where the Biden administration would deport planeloads of illegal aliens in the first place rather than inviting them in and giving them taxpayer-funded benefits.

The Biden team would likely have responded to Petro’s petulance by agreeing to a raft of concessions, probably utilizing civilian aircraft and perhaps even paying companies closely linked to the Colombian president several times the market rate. Biden also likely would have issued a public apology, followed by a triumphant announcement that an agreement had been reached to resume flights.

Biden’s foreign policy team then would have patted themselves on the back without grasping that by reflexively paying off every petulant local demagogue they were merely encouraging the formation of a global extortion racket against the United States. They would then wonder why, when they were paying billions to governments in South and Central America to reduce illegal migration, the number of border crossings continued to increase, not grasping that the lesson they were teaching local leaders was that the easiest way to get paid was to say “no” to America.

If there is anything his first week in office has made clear, it is that Donald Trump is a very busy man, far too busy to entertain Petro’s transparent efforts at extortion. Rather than allowing Petro to grandstand over stopping the flights and then shake down the State Department for a week to resume flights, Trump took immediate action against Colombia, threatening 25 percent tariffs on Colombian goods and closing the visa section of the U.S. embassy.

Once called out, Petro initially responded with an unhinged rant citing Noam Chomsky, Salvador Allende, and Sacco and Vanzetti (Italian immigrants executed in the 1920s) while also calling the U.S. a boring country to visit and effectively accusing Donald Trump of trying to destroy the world and overthrow him. A chorus of U.S. foreign policy “experts,” joined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then suggested that Trump had opened a trade war with an American ally, prematurely declaring that Americans would now be paying more for coffee.  

But all of Trump’s critics misjudged three things.

First, they failed to understand what was at stake. This was not a dispute over two deportation flights or whether illegal immigrants would be given additional legroom. Rather, it was about whether or not the Trump administration, like its predecessor, would set a precedent of appeasement whenever a foreign leader demanded public concessions in exchange for keeping an existing agreement. Giving in or even negotiating would have encouraged Petro to pull the same stunt in the future, along with encouraging other leaders to follow his example.

Second, they misjudged the balance of power between the sides. The dispute was not a question of whether the United States is more powerful than Colombia. That has always been the case. It was a dispute over whether Trump is more powerful within his own country than Petro is in his.

Trump was elected with a mandate both to ensure that deportation flights took place and to end the Biden policy of allowing the U.S. to be drawn into endless bureaucratic talks with every state and non-state actor. Petro, by contrast, had narrowly won a runoff election due to a split in the conservative voters. His supporters held barely 40 percent of the seats in the Colombian Congress, and his army was primarily trained and funded by the United States.

For all the pretense Petro made of having other options, including growing closer with China, Beijing could offer him kind words but little else. Contrary to the perception of a high-spending practitioner of global bribery, China was too cheap to spend a few hundred million dollars to bail out the Maldives, losing influence in the island nation that controls the Indian Ocean’s subsea cables to India. China could hardly make up any shortfall from aggressive U.S. tariffs on Colombia.

In other words, Colombia needs the United States. Petro knows that, and so do his domestic opponents. They would have cast any effort to sustain a long-term conflict with Trump as a betrayal rather than a defense of the national interest.

Finally, Trump’s critics misjudged the new president’s willingness to use America’s leverage. The United States and non-U.S. officials who have grown accustomed to the slow pace of the Biden administration have been trained to respond to any crisis by preemptively declaring it a morass, content in the knowledge that it will drag on indefinitely.

Ocasio-Cortez went in for the attack because she believed Petro would stand firm. Otherwise, she would not have accused Trump of harming Americans through tariffs which, in the end, never went into effect. While she may have stood by Joe Biden to the end, she has internalized the idea that Biden’s America never resolved any challenges.

In the end, there were no tariffs. Petro meekly retweeted the White House’s own statement and pledged to allow flights to resume.

In the process, Trump won something more than a public relations victory over Colombia. He has sent a clear message around the Western hemisphere and arguably the world about how he will approach similar efforts to extort the United States.

Latin America is full of figures similar to Petro – left-wing activists who talk a big game at home about being anti-American and cozy up to America’s critics yet nevertheless have received plenty of help from Washington. Bernardo Arevalo in Guatemala, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Luis Arce in Bolivia are all arguably in office in part because of the pressure the United States placed on their opponents.

In Bolivia, following a coup which deposed former President Evo Morales after he tried to steal the 2019 elections, the U.S. pressed for new elections, which Arce, a member of Morales’s party, won. In Brazil, Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited in 2022 in a thinly veiled effort to boost Lula and sink then-President Jair Bolsonaro, a blatant interference in Brazilian internal affairs that contributed to Lula’s 51 percent to 49 percent victory. In Guatemala, efforts by the attorney general and legislature to block Arevalo’s ascension to the presidency were short-circuited by the U.S. State Department imposing sanctions on both the attorney general and a majority of the Guatemalan Congress.

Of those leaders, Arevalo at least has shown genuine gratitude, taking the lead in opposing the Maduro regime in Venezuela and trying to build a pro-U.S. Latin American left. However, he has been almost alone in doing so. Lula has persecuted his predecessor, attempted to ban X, and flirted with both Russia and China. Petro’s stunt this weekend is hardly his first.

Until now, Petro and Lula have been indulged, with the Biden team ignoring their provocations and appeasing their extortion. The irony is that, as Donald Trump has proven, there was no need. Both are weak at home, without congressional majorities and opponents eager to bid for the friendship of the United States. They may profit by scoring cheap public victories over a weak American leader like Biden. Still, if they were ever to adopt a genuinely anti-American policy, they would find that Trump has more friends in their countries than they do in the United States.

That is a new factor. Donald Trump, in his first term, was an American figure. In 2025, he is the leader of an international movement, which means disputes between Trump and foreign left-wing leaders are now cast not in nationalist terms but in terms of left vs. right.

For many Colombians, the disagreement between Petro and Trump was not between the U.S. and Colombia, but between Donald Trump and their weak, unpopular left-wing president, as became clear when Petro tried but failed to rally nationalist sentiment. Similarly, Lula abandoned his war on X when it became clear that it came off as an attack on the free speech of his citizens rather than an attack on the supposedly malign influence of an American company.

This provides Donald Trump with leverage that he not only lacked in 2017, but that no U.S. president has wielded since perhaps Franklin Roosevelt. Trump expertly used that leverage this weekend.

Not every country will be as easy to crack as Colombia. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum won her election with 60 percent of the vote last summer, and her Morena Party controls the legislature, local governments, and, after recent reforms, the courts. That goes a long way to explaining why Mexico has been treated with a relatively softer touch than Colombia or even Canada, where a deeply unpopular Trudeau was easy to topple.

However, Sheinbaum is almost alone as a popular left-wing leader today. Gustavo Petro is more representative of the type of demagogue who bedeviled American policy in Latin America. After Sunday, Petro and those like him understand there is a new sheriff in town.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.