Trump's Colombia standoff signals the end of post-nationalism

Donald Trump has rounded off a dramatic first week in the White House by upending the consensus on migrant repatriation. America began using military aircraft to return migrants earlier in the week, and yesterday two US military planes took off for Colombia carrying returning migrants. But Colombian President Gustavo Petro blocked them from landing; in response, Trump threatened punitive tariffs and other retaliatory measures against Colombia. Petro swiftly backed down.

What was so shattering about Trump’s actions was their foundation in assumptions that have, at least officially, been long treated as obsolete: that nations have borders, and that national interest has primacy over the international kind. My first political memory was the fall of the Berlin Wall — a highly symbolic boundary — and the quarter-century that followed it only solidified a high-status public consensus that borders and boundaries were relics of the past. In their place, we’d have international rules concerning conflict resolution, human rights, trade, tax, and climate, and everything would become steadily more global and democratic.

The aspect of this post-national worldview which proved most contentious, from a non-elite perspective, was migration. Bodies such as the UN set out a post-national vision of migration simply as a fact of the coming borderless future, and something that must be accommodated by states and metabolised by their populations. But as international migration has accelerated, this view has come increasingly into tension with the preferences of local populations in destination countries.