The news from Colombia is a fresh cause for alarm, though perhaps not for the reasons our breathless financial pundits will recite. A Trump-backed populist has claimed the presidency in Bogotá, and the City of London’s corporate class is already reaching for the smelling salts. The FTSE 250 trembles. I read their anxious reports with a dry smile. The pattern is depressingly familiar. We are watching the slow, messy death of the liberal international order, replayed yet again in a different hemisphere.
Let us strip away the diplomatic veneer. The man who has won, whoever his precise name is – and it hardly matters, for they are all interchangeable in their rhetoric – has ridden a wave of righteous anger and cultural grievance straight into the Casa de Nariño. He promises to drain the swamp, to restore national pride, to reject the cosy consensus of the globalist elite. Sound familiar? It should. It is the same script that won Brexit, that elevated Trump himself, that now echoes from the Vistula to the Rio Grande.
But what of British investors, those nervous souls who have parked their capital in Colombian bonds and mining concessions? They fret, as they always do, about expropriation, about capital controls, about the return of a churlish nationalism that does not respect the soothing rhythms of quarterly returns. They miss the point entirely. The real threat is not to their short-term balance sheets; it is to the entire edifice of managed globalisation that has enriched the few and insulted the many.
We have been here before. Cast your mind back to the 1930s, when another wave of populist strongmen rose to power in Latin America, promising national rejuvenation and a break from the gringo yoke. The result was a jumble of economic experiments, some tragic, some merely farcical. The British Empire, already in decline, watched with growing impotence as its commercial interests were trampled. The pattern is repeating. The only question is whether this new caudillo will be a Vargas or a Perón, a reformer or a destructionist.
The irony is thick enough to cut. The American-backed consensus that has held Colombia in its orbit for decades, that has funded its war on drugs and its peace processes, is now being repudiated by a candidate who drew inspiration from the very American president who symbolised that consensus’s collapse. Trump broke the mould, and now his acolytes are pouring the molten metal into new shapes. The global system shudders, not from a single earthquake, but from a thousand smaller tremors, each making the cracks wider.
Do not misunderstand me. I take no pleasure in this. I am not a romantic who cheers the rise of populism as a corrective to liberal smugness. I am a historian who notes the patterns and despairs at the repetition. The intellectual decadence of our age is perfectly captured in the West’s inability to offer a compelling alternative to these nationalistic spasms. We have forgotten how to speak of duty, of complexity, of the slow and patient work of civilisation. We have left the field to the demagogues.
So let British investors be wary. But let them also be wise. The risk in Colombia is not merely political; it is civilisational. The old order is passing, and we have no new order to replace it. We are watching the death rattle of liberal internationalism, and the sound is not a whimper but a roar. The Andes will soon echo with it. The rest of us should listen.