Colombia’s president is a foreign guest Trump should listen to

On Friday, all eyes will be on the President Trump’s first overseas trip. But before Air Force One goes wheels up, he’ll welcome an overseas visitor — Colombian President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Juan Manuel Santos — whose country’s example is cause for Trump to reconsider his foreign policy approach.

The 17-year successful partnership between Washington and Bogota, which brought Colombia back from the brink of becoming a failed narco-state and helped transform it into a thriving hemispheric leader, is an implicit rebuke to “America First” foreign policy.

{mosads}The underlying premise of “America First” is that an activist foreign policy is an unaffordable burden, and that we should instead focus on our own narrow security interests, and build walls to keep threats outside. Colombian cocaine and heroin reached its epidemic apex in the 1990s and made clear that border fortifications alone weren’t enough when transnational crime syndicates like the Medellin cartel could rent their own private air force.

We had to curb supply and build enough capacity in Colombia to fight the cartels. Colombia’s failing institutions could not be dismissed as someone else’s problem; American foreign policy was also domestic policy when drugs were pouring into our country. The United States couldn’t build a wall, we had to help build a working country.

“America First” abandons this leadership and portends to addresses terror by military means alone, ironically inviting an outcome avoided in Colombia. You pay now or pay later: a failed narco state without working institutions, bordering Venezuela, could’ve also been a lawless safe harbor for extremists who could’ve walked right in, a Taliban-era Afghanistan of the Western Hemisphere.

Moreover, the proposed “America First” budget guts precisely the programs — preventative, long term development and functional, cross-disciplinary diplomacy — which made Colombia a success. The White House budget director calls it a “hard power” budget. Colombia took more than hard power. It took more than eradicating the cocoa-crops of southern Colombia.

A comprehensive vision — judicial reform, educational opportunity for poor and indigenous populations as an alternative to the cartels and the FARC, improving human rights and building civil society — was essential. Plan Colombia became Paz Colombia, not just fighting drugs but helping victims of the world’s longest running conflict, removing landmines, and demonstrating American staying power. You can’t do that with an “America First” budget that puts diplomacy and development last.

Next, trade is a tool, not a scapegoat. As in our transformative relationship with Vietnam, the promise of trade was an incentive for change in Colombia. Today, Colombia has the fourth-largest economy in the Western Hemisphere, and American exports are growing by more than $1.1 billion, creating jobs in both countries — and the promise of a trade agreement was the leverage to win long-sought protections for Colombia’s labor unions. The administration should be seeking more countries to do the same.

In addition, crises always require urgent, high level attention from the U.S. secretary of state, so it takes a fully functional State Department staffed by trusted professionals to focus on long term, cross-cutting issues. During Secretary John Kerry’s time at Foggy Bottom, it meant not just secretarial and vice presidential visits to Bogota and Cartagena, but daily collaboration by an assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, joined at the hip with those leading the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and a U.S. special envoy for the Colombian Peace Process, who 26 years earlier had been assistant secretary under President George H.W. Bush.

None of this happened without focused, hands-on management. No one was asked to pass a partisan loyalty test. Today, only one subcabinet official has been announced for the State Department, and none for USAID, which may be subsumed into the State Department, sacrificing long-term development work to shorter-term national security metrics. Foreign policy at its best is an orchestra, not a solo act.

Finally, you can’t consider any policy in isolation. For five decades, our Cuba policy isolated us in our neighborhood instead of isolating Castro. When Secretary Kerry called President Santos to tell him we would be normalizing relations with Cuba, Santos posited it might make possible a more active American role supporting Colombia’s fragile peace process in which the Cubans were already active. Less than two months later, the U.S. announced a special envoy. The Obama administration’s Cuba opening restored our freedom of action in the Western Hemisphere.

The influential role the U.S. played in Colombia’s peace process — helping end the world’s longest-running active conflict which had claimed 220,000 lives and displaced 6 million — might not have been welcomed had we not first opened dialogue with Havana. The Obama policy wasn’t a favor we did for Cuba. It benefited our interests in our neighborhood. It shouldn’t be reversed, and  it’s a Trump campaign promise that should be abandoned. No one knows better than Santos.

Sometimes in foreign policy, it’s better not to be disruptive. Patient partnership for almost 20 years over three administrations, both Democrat and Republican, strengthened our hemisphere, helped make Colombia strong and prosperous, and combatted the flow of narcotics. In the process, the U.S. only paid about 5 percent of the overall costs. When he meets Santos, Trump should brush up on this approach because in foreign policy, that’s the real “art of the deal.”

David Wade served as chief of staff of the U.S. Department of State from 2013 to 2015 and chief of staff to Senator John Kerry from 2008 to 2013.

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