The United States’ “Best Friends”

Now that the United States’ “best friend” in the Arab world has suffered the fate of so many other governments that have fallen out of favor in the past, the advantages of leaving behind Colombia’s obsessive and parochial pretension of being that country’s “best friend” can be seen.

Not that the United States is disloyal to some of its best allies. Generally speaking, the North Americans’ “betrayal” is toward authoritarian and corrupt regimes that were allies strictly for reasons of temporary convenience. Of course, the United States could be criticized for supporting regimes that oppress and exploit their people, but one must recognize that in international relations, on occasion it is not possible to reconcile domestic interests with foreign ones. The United States could argue that those who have deals with authoritarian governments, like Cuba, are reprehensible too. Or that the Colombian administration should pressure its neighbor, Venezuela, so that it respects democracy. The North American administration’s obligation is to look after its citizens’ interests, something that it does carefully, unlike the leaders who try to be unconditional friends of the United States in order to protect their personal political interests.

Some countries use the United States’ “protection” as a letter of marquee to impose authoritarian and extremely conservative policies. The serious democracies have independent foreign policies and good relations with the majority of countries without dependencies that might reduce their right to look after their strategic interests, which tend to be different from those of the world powers. With the exception of England, which maintains a special historical relationship with the United States with the purpose of maintaining world influence, those who still get too close to the United States do it with a logic from the Cold War, but no longer to protect themselves from the enemy power, which does not exist. Rather, they get close to the United States to advance extremist political agendas.

Uribe’s administration did it trying to play the role of North American bishop against Venezuela, unaware that not only did the bipolarity fall behind, but that the United States’ former unipolar power is disappearing. Because of that, the United States never took in earnest Colombia’s anachronistic request to sign a military protection agreement against Venezuela in exchange for access to military bases that it already had. After George W. Bush’s failed answer to bin Laden’s challenge and the financial crisis of 2008, the world stopped acknowledging the United States’ position as the great hegemony that it had been since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That is why it was necessary for the Santos administration’s foreign policy to rescale the relation with the Unites States in order to end the 12 year phase in Colombia called by some “intervention by invitation.” Other countries are also taking advantage of the influence crisis that Obama’s administration is going through. The White House itself appears to have received the Colombian initiative with relief, because it interprets that it will allow them to overcome the excesses of the Uribe–Bush relationship, like the solitary support of the Iraq invasion and Uribe’s challenge to the countries of the region.