Petro, a leftist and former rebel, has emerged as one of the world’s most vocal critics of this U.S. foreign policy, periodically landing himself on Trump’s blacklist.
The Colombian president avoided any direct barbs against Trump, instead citing their February meeting in the White House as an example of the intercontinental dialogue he wants to see. Prior to that meeting, Trump had called Petro a “sick man;” afterwards, he said Petro was “terrific.”
During the conversation with POLITICO, which took place in the gilded front room of the Colombian ambassador’s Vienna residence, Petro reserved his bluntest criticism for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and former Trump adviser and billionaire Elon Musk.
Rubio championed “Western civilization” bound by “Christian faith” at the Munich Security Conference in February, identifying mass migration as a crisis destabilizing societies “all across the West.” Musk, meanwhile, has characterized “empathy” as Western civilization’s Achilles’ heel.
Petro condemned what he saw as their promotion of a “white, Christian, Western civilization,” and warned against trying to revive “the age of the Crusades.” Such slogans belong to history, he said, and would generate an “enormous level of violence within each society.”
He then went on to praise Europe’s diversity, which he described as an “asset” despite the potential for conflict: “I believe that understanding societies in their diversity does not mean nullifying European history or European history in America,” he said.