Let us not mince words: the victory of a Trump-backed populist in Colombia is a deliberate slap across the face of the Western liberal order. The establishment media, that grand chorus of the righteous, will wring its hands and mourn the ‘erosion of democratic norms’. But they miss the point entirely.
This is not an erosion; it is an explosion. A rebellion against the tired, transactional pieties that have governed the hemisphere since the Monroe Doctrine was a wheezing adolescent. The victor, a man who makes Boris Johnson look like a monk, has ridden a wave of disgust against a bog-rotted elite.
And he has done so with the explicit endorsement of a former American president, a man who himself embodies the spirit of a Visigoth sacking the Senate. The strategic balance? It is already broken.
The West’s allies in Bogotá were never allies; they were clients. Now they have elected a man who will likely treat US interests with the same disdain that Rome’s provincial governors treated the whims of a distant emperor. This is not a tragedy.
It is a farce, and one that should be studied with the cold, analytical eye of a Gibbon. The intellectual decadence of the Western commentariat, who insist on seeing every populist victory as a populist defeat, is precisely what has brought us to this pass. They cannot grasp that Colombians, like Britons and Americans before them, have simply tired of being lectured by a priesthood of globalists who have delivered nothing but stagnant wages and open borders.
The new president may be a clown, but he is a clown with a mandate. And that mandate is to burn the village in order to save it. Whether he succeeds or fails is almost irrelevant.
What matters is that the Western allies, those invertebrate creatures of habit, now face a partner in Bogotá who will demand to be treated as an equal, not a vassal. That is a reckoning long overdue. And if it leads to chaos, so be it.
Chaos, after all, is the mother of invention. Or, in this case, the hammer that shatters the glass house of liberal internationalism.