So the United Kingdom, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to throw its weight behind ‘Colombian democracy’ as the nation slides into yet another abattoir of civil conflict. One can almost hear the ghost of Palmerston clucking his tongue in disapproval. For those of us with a memory stretching beyond the last news cycle, this is not a new drama. It is the same tired farce of liberal interventionism dressed up in humanitarian drag, and it always ends in tears.
Let us dispense with the cant. Colombia’s ‘democracy’ has always been a Potemkin village, a fragile stage managed by money, paramilitaries, and enough American military aid to sink a flotilla. Now, as a brutal civil conflict escalates before the election, Downing Street declares its support. Support for what exactly? A government that has presided over the murder of trade unionists, the displacement of millions, and a peace process so tortured it makes the Treaty of Versailles look like a model of diplomacy.
This is the same pattern we saw in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya. The West stumbles in with noble rhetoric and exits with scorched earth. We back ‘moderates’ who turn out to be feckless or worse. We arm factions that will later turn their guns on us. We imagine that waving the flag of democracy will somehow pacify a conflict rooted in centuries of land inequality, narcotics, and organised violence. It is intellectual idiocy of the highest order.
The timing, of course, is impeccable. An election looms, and the assumption is that a few words from Whitehall will shore up the ‘legitimate’ candidate against the Marxist guerrillas. But history teaches us that when empires meddle in the internal affairs of unstable states, they invariably accelerate the very chaos they seek to contain. Remember the Roman puppet kings in Armenia? They did not stabilise the frontier; they provoked Parthian invasion.
And what of British interests? The supposed rationale is trade, influence, and a vague notion of ‘international order’. But at what cost? British soldiers will not be on the ground, but British political capital will be spent. And when the Colombian state inevitably falters, when the violence spills over, when the refugees come knocking, who will pay the bill? We will. The taxpayer. The generous-hearted liberal who imagines that signing a cheque can export our values.
There is also the matter of national identity. Britain is no longer the empire that could project power at will. We are a middling island with a deluded sense of grandeur. Every time we stick our nose into a foreign quagmire, we reveal our inability to learn from the past. We cluck about Brexit and sovereignty, then turn around and lecture Bogotá on how to run its affairs. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, even by our standards.
Perhaps the most infuriating aspect is the language used. ‘Backing democracy’ is a phrase that should be retired to the dustbin of euphemisms. It is code for backing a particular faction, one that happens to be friendly to Western capital. The Colombian government is not exactly a beacon of democratic virtue. It is a kleptocracy with a military habitually linked to death squads. But because the alternative is a bunch of Marxist revolutionaries with dubious human rights records, we must choose the lesser evil. That is the logic of empire: always the lesser evil, never the good.
I suspect the real motive is not democracy at all. It is the preservation of the global order, the system of liberal hegemony that has defined the post-Cold War era. But that order is crumbling. The American retreat from Afghanistan showed the world that the West’s commitment to its clients is temporary. Now, in Colombia, we see a similar dynamic: a desperate attempt to shore up a failing state before the inevitable collapse.
And what will be the result? More violence, more refugees, more accusations of neocolonialism. The cycle continues. We will blame the guerrillas, the drug lords, the corruption. But we will never look in the mirror and see the real culprit: the hubris of a civilisation that believes it can engineer other people’s societies from a desk in London.
So by all means, let us back Colombian democracy. But let us not pretend it is for their benefit. It is for ours. And it will work as well as everything else we have tried. Which is to say, it will fail, and we will move on to the next crisis, leaving the Colombians to count the dead.
