When exactly did the conduct of hemispheric relations become the kind of errand a person finishes before the coffee gets cold? I ask because on Sunday afternoon the United States and Colombia were, by any honest reading, in an economic confrontation. By Sunday evening they were not. Somewhere between those two states of affairs, a 25 percent tariff was threatened, a 50 percent tariff was promised by Tuesday, two deportation planes were turned around midair, and a South American head of state was offered the choice between capitulation and dinner. He chose dinner. I understand the instinct. I just wonder what we are calling this.
My friend Eliza — who has spent twenty years in and around the State Department in the sort of jobs that do not get announced in press releases — called me around four on Sunday, which is how I knew something had already happened and something else was about to. She said, and I am quoting, “Margaret, I watched a trade policy get negotiated on a phone in a golf cart.” I asked whether she meant that figuratively. There was a long pause. That pause is the column.
The official line is that this represents a return of American leverage, a muscular foreign policy, the art of the deal finally applied to a hemisphere that had grown accustomed to our patience. Fine. I am willing to stipulate that the leverage worked. Leverage usually does; that is what makes it leverage. What I am less willing to stipulate is the idea that an entire bilateral relationship — migration, coffee, cut flowers, cocaine interdiction, decades of counterinsurgency cooperation — can be recalibrated in the span of a single NFL broadcast and we are all supposed to treat this as evidence of seriousness rather than the opposite.
A bipartisan lobbyist I will not name, because he asked me not to and because he buys the wine, put it this way at a dinner in Kalorama last week, speaking generally about the new tempo: “The problem isn’t that they’re fast. The problem is that fast is the whole strategy. There’s nothing underneath it.” He said this while cutting into a piece of halibut that cost more than most Colombians earn in a week, which I noted silently and am noting now.
Let us talk about the tariffs themselves, briefly, because nobody else seems to want to. A 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods, had it actually taken effect and stayed, would have hit American grocery stores first — coffee, bananas, roses for the Valentine’s Day aisle that is already being built in every CVS in the country. It would have hit them inside of ten days. This is not a secret. This is how supply chains work, and anyone who has ever run a florist or a Publix knows it. The tariff was threatened on a Sunday. It was rescinded on a Sunday. Somewhere in a warehouse in Miami, a man who imports cut flowers for a living aged four years in six hours, and nobody is going to write him a thank-you note.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a professional relationship with the concept of “the historical record,” asked me a question at brunch yesterday that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She asked how future historians are going to reconstruct any of this. Not the policy — the policy is easy. The Truth Social posts. The deleted Truth Social posts. The phone calls that don’t get logged because they happen on phones that don’t get logged on. “We are,” Judy said, stirring her coffee with the flat affect of a woman who has read too many Presidential Records Act memos, “going to lose this decade.”
I raise this not because I believe the previous administration was a model of transparency — please — but because the entire justification for this new tempo is that it produces results the slow, deliberative, paper-trail version of government could not. And maybe it does. I am genuinely asking. But “results” is a word that has to mean something more than “the other guy blinked first on a weekend.” Otherwise we are just running the government the way a podcast host runs a feud, and the feud is with a country of 52 million people whose cooperation we actually need on approximately nineteen things more important than two planes.
Here is what nags at me. The Colombian president, whatever you think of him — and I think quite a bit, most of it unprintable — is not a stupid man. He folded because the math of a 25 percent tariff is the math of a 25 percent tariff. That is not diplomacy. That is a man with a bigger checkbook winning a staring contest with a man who has a smaller one. We used to understand that this is the easy part of being a superpower. The hard part, the part we used to be reasonably good at, was doing it in a way that didn’t make the next twelve countries quietly start pricing out alternatives to us. I wonder if anyone in the building is tracking that number. I have asked. Nobody is tracking that number.
Eliza called again Sunday night, after it was all over, after the president had declared victory and the Colombians had declared victory and the planes had been rerouted and everyone went back to whatever they do on a Sunday night in January. She said one more thing, and then she said she had to go. She said: “The scary part isn’t that it worked. The scary part is that it’s going to work again next weekend, against someone else, and the weekend after that, until it doesn’t.” I asked her what happens when it doesn’t. She said she didn’t know. I don’t either.
So I am just asking. If this is what competence looks like now — a weekend, a tantrum, a tariff, a climbdown, a victory lap, a Monday — what did we spend the last eighty years pretending was hard? And when the weekend comes that the other side doesn’t blink, which weekend will that be, and will any of us recognize it in time to be afraid?