It is a truth universally acknowledged, though rarely stated in polite company, that the United States of America is in possession of a foreign policy that oscillates wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous. The latest dispatch from the hemisphere: Donald Trump is, reportedly, eyeing a ‘reset’ with Colombia. One can almost hear the ghost of Monroe rustling in his grave. For those of us who have watched, with a mixture of horror and fascination, the steady decline of American statecraft, this is a moment rich with irony. The man who built a political career on wall-building and tariff-wielding now seeks to mend fences with a country that has, for decades, been a crucible of both American intervention and neglect.
But let us not be churlish. The practical implications for the British businessman are, as they say, non-trivial. Latin America, that vast and volatile theatre of resource extraction and political melodrama, is once again open for business. And British capital, ever the opportunist, is already sniffing the air. From the lithium flats of the Atacama to the coffee highlands of Antioquia, there is money to be made. The question, as always, is whether we have the stomach for the game.
Consider the historical parallels. The Victorian era saw the British Empire projecting soft power through railways and banking, often in the very same territories now being re-courted by the new American administration. We built the infrastructure; they built the resentment. Today, the machinery is different—hedge funds and consultancies rather than steam engines and gunboats—but the dynamic remains eerily familiar. The reset is not a clean slate. It is a carved-out space for capital to flow, unimpeded by the messy entanglements of national pride or historical grievance.
And what of the intellectual decadence that accompanies such moments? The think tanks will churn out reports on ‘emerging markets’. The conferences will buzz with talk of ‘synergies’ and ‘value chains’. All of it a thin veneer over the brute reality: we are better at extracting wealth than we are at building societies. The fall of Rome was preceded by a similar loss of nerve, a retreat into abstraction and financial manipulation while the barbarians gathered at the gates. Our barbarians are climate change, demographic decline, and a creeping authoritarianism that respects no border.
Yet the opportunity remains. For the brave, the foolish, or the merely desperate, Colombia offers a proving ground. The country has peace, of a sort. It has resources, of a sort. It has a government eager to please and a population wary of gringos but desperate for capital. The British entrepreneur who can navigate the labyrinth of local politics, who can charm the bureaucrats in Bogotá and the caudillos in the regions, may well find a fortune. But let us not mistake fortune for progress. The reset is a transaction, not a transformation.
In the end, the Trump-Colombia gambit is a symptom of a larger malaise: the inability of the West to craft a coherent vision for its own future, let alone for the world’s. We lurch from reset to reset, crisis to crisis, hoping the next deal will be the one that saves us. It will not. But for now, at least, the markets are up and the planes are full. And that, dear reader, is all that matters.
