Colombia and the United States are now discussing joint military strikes against the country’s armed groups, a shift that arrived within days of far-right newcomer Abelardo de la Espriella taking office. De la Espriella built much of his winning campaign on promises of budget cuts and coming down on narco-traffickers “with the wrath of God.” He’s since aligned himself closely with Washington, praising Trump’s ongoing strikes on suspected narco boats in the Pacific—strikes that have now killed 221 people. Trump has responded in kind, promising $1 billion in U.S. security assistance to back de la Espriella’s crackdown. A security plan this heavily centered on military force, however, raises questions about violence spilling further across the region and about sovereignty for the governments watching it unfold.

At a gathering of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A.C.C.C.) in Panama, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the joint strikes directly, answering “yes” when asked whether he’d discussed the plan with his Colombian counterpart against armed groups like the E.L.N. and F.A.R.C. remnants. “Designated terrorist organizations, with partnered governments, will be legitimate targets of the United States government,” he said, naming Colombia specifically. Colombia’s new Minister of Defense, Jorge Eduardo Mora, matched that tone, telling the same gathering that “the time has arrived for the narco-terrorist cartels to confront the power and the capabilities of the entire hemisphere, led by the United States.” Not everyone in the room shared that confidence. For months, critics have argued that the U.S. boat strikes amount to war crimes deserving scrutiny from the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.). Hegseth didn’t so much rebut that criticism as go on offense against it, calling the court a “lawless power grab” and urging every coalition member, Colombia included, to withdraw from it. That’s a striking ask, given that Colombia is a signatory to the Rome Statute that created the I.C.C. in the first place.

Washington has run this play before. Back in February, under then-President Gustavo Petro, a leftist who had spent much of his term trying to negotiate peace with Colombia’s armed groups, Trump secured a nearly identical joint agreement targeting the Gulf Clan cartel and E.L.N. leadership. Colombian forces killed seven E.L.N. fighters within days of that deal going into effect. Two Colombian presidents from opposite ends of the political spectrum have now reached for the same military solution inside of a single year, and the U.S. strikes underpinning both agreements keep drawing the same human rights criticism no matter who’s negotiating in Bogotá. A partnership built primarily around strikes and body counts, rather than addressing what actually sustains these groups, risks becoming one more chapter in a cycle that’s run for decades rather than the resolution it’s being sold as. Pushing a close ally to abandon the I.C.C. on top of that only adds to the concern, since it treats military speed as more important than the legal accountability meant to catch abuses exactly like the ones already being alleged.

The conflict itself goes back to the 1960s, when groups including the F.A.R.C. and the E.L.N. grew out of rural land disputes and leftist insurgency, later funding themselves through the cocaine trade that made Colombia the world’s top producer for decades. The U.S. has had military skin in this fight since the early 2000s through Plan Colombia, a multi-billion-dollar initiative whose human rights record is still debated today. A 2016 peace deal ended the F.A.R.C.’s insurgency as an organization, though splinter factions and the E.L.N. kept fighting. Petro built much of his presidency around a “total peace” push with those remaining groups, an effort that struggled to hold as violence surged ahead of this year’s elections, including the assassination of a presidential candidate. De la Espriella’s win fits a wider pattern across Latin America, where weak economies and rising crime have pulled several countries toward hard-right, crackdown-first leadership. (Our Crisis Index page has the fuller chronology for anyone wanting more of that history.)

So where does this actually leave Colombia? Two presidents, with very different politics, have reached one answer: more military force. That alone says something about how little ground negotiated peace has managed to hold onto in this country. But force brings its own bill, paid in civilian lives, in questions of regional sovereignty, and now in the legal norms Washington is asking its own allies to walk away from. None of that touches the poverty and land disputes that produced these armed groups in the first place, and until something does, expect this cycle to keep finding new administrations willing to try the same fix.