See what a whit of respect can do for a man? Until last weekend, you had perhaps read mention of Colombian president Gustavo Petro only once or twice, in those genteel and softhearted tones American elites tend to affect when they ponder elites less fortunate. Life must be hard over there. Well, look at him now.
“You may kill me, but I will survive through my people, who existed before yours, in the Americas,” he tweeted at Trump. Lines better recited from a balcony in Piazza Venezia — too fine to be thumbed out on a touch screen. (Besides, nobody was trying to kill him; a U.S. agency had averted the last attempt.) “We are the people of the winds, the mountains, the Caribbean Sea, and of freedom.” Magniloquence generates surplus steam. You might think Petro that morning had routed an armada. He had in fact turned away aircraft carrying Colombian criminal repatriates from the United States. Can’t blame him. That’s a study-abroad cohort you don’t want to see return. He quickly capitulated once Trump had a word online. Smartphone diplomacy requires no multilateral summits. President Petro would receive his compatriots and even offer Colombia’s air force uno for their transport. Spat settled? No.
More from the Twitter rhetor: “Our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Córdoba, the civilization of that time, of the Roman Latins of the Mediterranean.” (Why not also the blood of Nueva Granada, that of Alonso de Ojeda and his conquistadors, a friend wonders.) Notice the old guerrilla’s spark and snap. Trump had hooked up Petro’s soul to a defibrillator. Such spirit had probably not possessed him since his paramilitary days in Zipaquirá. A young M-19 radical (nom de guerre: Aureliano), briefly reanimated. Now, in the sloping of a political career misspent on greenish-red climate change sloganeering, he sounds like the leader of an important sovereign nation. Is this the first time he’s being treated by the global hegemon as the leader of an important sovereign nation? The leader of an important sovereign nation fully capable of claiming responsibility for its citizens, and obliged to? The leader of an important sovereign nation worthy of a public wrangle?
Trump’s reaction was churlish and tart. Also, urgent and straightforward: the way you recognize a fellow with whom you must reckon. “The moment called for careful diplomacy” — read: monthslong negotiations, State Department reports, inaction — advises Quico Toro in The Atlantic, “not a fit of pique.” A fit of pique seemed to do the job just fine. It is right and just and proper for a state to accept its citizen deportees. The last, perhaps only other, time President Petro had meaningfully interacted with his American counterpart was in 2023, well past Joseph Biden’s best-by date. They had discussed climate change, naturally. Also, counter-narcotics and continental migration. Touchy matters in the Americas. (The latter issue was assigned to Kamala Harris — a graver insult to the Latin American people than a threat of economic sanctions, surely.) Smooth relations are worth neither party’s time if they depend on a courteous non-acknowledgment of the friction between them.
Both Trump and Comrade Aureliano would take a brusque brush over polite indifference any day. I say they’ll get on surprisingly well. Alliance and enmity (which between nations cannot and should not be permanent) are bonds available only to equals. Otherwise, the first is submission and the second bullying.