Donald Trump has never been shy about endorsing candidates in foreign elections. In Latin America, which his administration has elevated as a top priority in its national security strategy, the President has backed the winning horse in countries as varied as Argentina, Honduras, and Chile. He can now add Colombia to the mix.

Last weekend, millions of Colombians went to the polls to choose between Trump-backed Right-wing populist Abelardo de la Espriella and the Left-wing Iván Cepeda. Yesterday, the latter conceded after a tight result, meaning that de la Espriella will be the country’s new leader.

For Trump, de la Espriella’s biggest appeal is how he plans to tackle Colombia’s criminal groups. On this specific issue, de la Espriella has presented a hard line: no negotiations and no concessions. The previous administration, led by Gustavo Petro, had a “total peace” strategy, which sought to negotiate de-escalation agreements with several criminal organisations. Colombia’s next president is primed to return to a war footing by launching an air campaign against the National Liberation Army (ELN) — a Marxist guerrilla group — and building mega-prisons in the Colombian countryside.

This will be music to Trump’s ears, who has institutionalised a military-led counternarcotics policy, partly by conducting strikes on boats in Latin American waters allegedly ferrying drugs to the US. Washington is also leaning on the region’s governments to militarise their own security strategies. Some, like Ecuador, have not only agreed to buy into Washington’s approach but have wholeheartedly embraced the US military as a critical partner in their own fights against the drug gangs.

With de la Espriella scheduled to take the oath of office in August, US-Colombia relations are set to improve. The incoming Colombian president has already vowed to join Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” programme, which aims to use transnational corporations for military strikes against drug gangs. Still, the United States and Colombia have their work cut out for them. The security situation in Latin America’s third-largest country has deteriorated for years. And far from curbing the trend, further militarising the so-called war on drugs will merely exacerbate it.

Despite this, the Petro administration is set to leave office with the country more violent than when it came in. Last summer, a Colombian intelligence report assessed that the ranks of armed groups had increased by 45% since 2022, the year Petro assumed the presidency. In April, Colombia registered the most violent quarter in a decade, with 35 massacres committed during the first three months of 2026. More than 70,000 Colombians were internally displaced in 2025, double the figure from the year before.

Yet as bad as the metrics are today, they could always get worse if the strategy is wrong. Trump and de la Espriella would be wise to keep that fact under consideration as they contemplate unleashing a full-scale war to neutralise these groups into submission. History shows that militarising counter-narcotics policies is not a panacea for success. Politically, it’s tempting to fall back on military force because it provides politicians with an easy way to brag about progress.

But tactical wins don’t equate to strategic victories. Just like the boat strikes have failed to diminish the flow of cocaine into the US, waging war on cartels and criminal factions in Colombia is highly unlikely to stem the cocaine trade. We can say this with confidence because Washington and Bogotá already have first-hand experience. Despite $10 billion of US military and security-sector support to the Colombian army under its “Plan Colombia”, the South American country remained the most prolific source of cocaine destined for US markets. Today, the high demand for cocaine is fuelling record-breaking cocaine production levels.

Nor is military force going to pacify Colombia. If anything, a war paradigm could result in the opposite of what the US wants: larger criminal organisations like the National Liberation Army or the Clan de Golfo fracturing into smaller outfits, which then battle each other, strain the resources of the state and increase civilian fatalities. Even though there has been success in El Salvador with this approach, it is exactly what has occurred in Mexico over the last two decades and has failed.

This isn’t to suggest that military pressure should be discarded entirely. There are circumstances, particularly if a government is in negotiations with armed groups, where airstrikes can serve as an effective pressure tactic to keep them at the table. But if Colombia’s next president truly believes he can bomb and arrest his way out of the crisis, he will be roundly disappointed. And the US, which enabled a strategy that failed to work in other countries, will hold much of the blame.

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Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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