By Dominic Pino
Monday, January 27, 2025
I’m less thrilled than Jeff with Trump’s performance in
the spat with Colombia over the weekend.
It’s not out of any sympathy for Gustavo Petro, the
socialist president of Colombia, who was in large part grandstanding as an
anti-Trump hero for leftists around the world by refusing some U.S. military
flights with illegal immigrants who were being repatriated. I have no problem
with the U.S. putting him in his place, and the migrants should have been
returned to Colombia.
The question is whether Trump’s was a good method for the
U.S. to use to achieve this goal. There are several reasons to believe it was
not:
1.
The U.S. reaction seems disproportionate to the
offense. Trump was essentially threatening to blow up the entire trade
relationship between the U.S. and Colombia over which airplanes would be used
to transport a couple hundred people. That did achieve the intended result, but
then again, so would hiring Paul Clement to argue a case in small-claims court.
The reason you don’t hire Paul Clement to argue a case in small-claims court is
that it would cost a lot and the benefit would be small. The costs of Trump’s
Colombia move are mostly not financial, and the news articles about higher
costs for coffee missed the point; the tariffs would never have been imposed
had the negotiation succeeded. Nevertheless, proportionality is an important
consideration in statesmanship and diplomacy, and it can be costly to create
the impression that a country will fly off the handle at the slightest
provocation.
2.
The U.S. has a trade agreement with Colombia,
signed in 2006. This agreement was one in a wave of similar agreements between
the U.S. and countries in South and Central America. Since the end of the Bush
administration, the U.S. has let its commercial relationships within its own
hemisphere languish, and China has taken the opportunity to burnish its trading
ties with those countries. The U.S. should be seeking to undo China’s advances
and deepen its ties with Latin America, and the appointment of a secretary of
state, Marco Rubio, who is fluent in Spanish and prioritized Latin America
during his time in the Senate, is an encouraging sign on that front. But if the
U.S. is going to treat Colombia this way, despite a long-standing trade
agreement and official status as a major non-NATO ally, it could deter other
Latin American countries from taking any U.S. commitments seriously.
3.
While Petro is a socialist, Trump has taken a
similarly confrontational approach with Panama, which has a right-wing
president. José Raúl Mulino was elected in May 2024 on a promise to secure
Panama’s southern border from migrants from South America. “He has also vowed
to get tougher on crime, fight corruption, and launch a ‘full-frontal assault’
on drug trafficking in Panama,” the America First Policy Institute noted in a
May 2024 article. This is the kind of guy Trump should be partnering
with to secure the U.S. border and stop the flow of drugs, but instead he has
forced Mulino to defend his country’s sovereignty against threats to take over
the Panama Canal by force. “No better friend, no worse enemy” is a good rule of
thumb for foreign policy, and Trump has so far been unable to distinguish
between the two.
4.
The president’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs on all
goods from an entire country is constitutionally questionable. Article I
clearly gives the power to impose tariffs to Congress, though Congress has
delegated this power to the president through several laws over many years. It
did so under the assumption that presidents would seek to increase U.S. market
access abroad and use tariffs sparingly to achieve that goal, which they did
for decades. Congress was wrong to delegate that power in the way that it has,
it should take that power back, and constitutional conservatives should not
cheer for constitutional abuse.
5.
For all Trump’s caterwauling about the U.S.
trade deficit with the rest of the world, the U.S. has a trade
surplus with Colombia. He threatens tariffs on Canada
because the U.S. trade deficit supposedly proves Canada is ripping the U.S.
off, but he also threatens tariffs on a country with which the U.S. has a trade
surplus on the grounds of illegal immigration. There is no grand strategy here.
Trump just likes threatening tariffs, which is another reason for Congress to
take the power away.
6.
Where do we go from here? Trump is notoriously
fickle, so any trading relationship with any country could be at risk if this
is the way the U.S. does things now. Also, other countries follow America’s
example. If they begin to threaten American exports with tariffs of their own
in response to any minor disagreement with the U.S., that would unleash
enormous uncertainty in global markets. The U.S. is in an advantageous position
as the world’s most reliable destination for investment, in large part because
of the stability and consistency of its laws and business relationships.
Sacrificing that for PR wins over the likes of the president of Colombia is no
way to run the richest country on earth.
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