As international incidents go, the mess between the United States and Colombia seemed easily avoided. Colombian officials said their country would accept planes of migrants who tried to enter the United States illegally, but they objected to military jets landing on Colombian soil.
With this in mind, Colombia did, in fact, turn away deportation flights, prompting a rather hysterical response from Donald Trump, who announced “emergency” tariffs and a diplomatic response that the Republican president described as “a Travel Ban and immediate Visa Revocations on the Colombian Government Officials, and all Allies and Supporters.”
But just as Americans started facing the prospect of more expensive coffee and cut flowers, among other products, the two countries came to an apparent agreement. NBC News reported:
The White House said Sunday that Colombia has agreed to all of President Donald Trump’s terms after Trump threatened to impose sweeping retaliatory measures against it, including tariffs and visa sanctions, after it denied entry to two U.S. military deportation flights.
Of course, the fact that the U.S. administration appears to be getting the outcome it wanted makes it far more likely that Trump will use similar tactics with other countries going forward.
But stepping back, it’s hard not to notice that this was hardly the only international incident the Republican created in the first week of his second term.
Trump’s comments about wanting to “clean out“ Gaza and relocate Palestinians to other countries have reportedly “astonished moderate Arab leaders who had been looking forward to working with him.”
His comments blaming Ukraine for Russia’s invasion will likely do little to end the war.
Trump’s ambitions about acquiring Greenland have led him to make increasingly provocative comments directed at officials in Denmark — a NATO ally. “I think we’re going to have it,” the president said over the weekend, referring to taking control of Greenland. He added, “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen.”
The Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze is affecting international programs “aimed at alleviating hunger, disease and wartime suffering around the globe, as well as ones that help nations with economic development.”
Panama submitted a formal letter to the United Nations last week, rejecting the Republican’s comments about reclaiming the Panama Canal.
The German ambassador to the United States last week reportedly wrote a diplomatic report warning that Trump’s return to power will pose new threats to American democracy and our constitutional system.
And in case that weren’t quite enough, Trump also had some comments last week about the international BRICS coalition, which he occasionally pretends to understand. “They’re a BRICS nation, Spain,” the president told reporters. “You know what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out.”
Spain is not, in reality, a part of BRICS — and Spanish officials did notice Trump’s screw-up.
At this pace, the new American president should be able to alienate just about every other country on the planet by, say, mid-summer.
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