He’s not even the Democratic nominee yet and already Barack Obama is getting into diplomatic tiffs with the leader of a foreign country. Last week, Colombian president–and staunch U.S. ally–Alvaro Uribe told The Wall Street Journal that Congress’ failure to pass the Colombia Free Trade Act would deal a harsh blow to American-Colombian relations. “I wouldn’t know what to say. It would be very serious,” Uribe said. Colombia is not just any ally. It is our strongest ally in Latin America, a bulwark against the hegemonic Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez. With anti-American sentiment rising across that continent, we need all the friends we can get, and Mr. Uribe is certainly one of them.

Obama doesn’t care. “I think the president is absolutely wrong on this,” he said last week. “You’ve got a government that is under a cloud of potentially having supported violence against unions, against labor, against opposition.” Obama, like much of the rest of his party these days, is in hock to labor unions. They oppose free trade deals on principle because to do so is in the short-term economic interests of their members. But the American people, as a whole, are harmed by protectionism, and so unions and other free trade opponents must therefore dress up their opposition to trade in deceptive arguments. In this case, labor has launched a campaign against the Colombian government, which, they claim, is responsible for the deaths of trade unionists. It is paramilitaries which are responsible for these murders, however, and Uribe has courageously (and effectively) taken them on during his tenure in office, along with crime in general. Considering how enormous a problem violent crime has been in Colombia over the past several decades, this is no small thing.

For all of Obama’s talk about repairing the global alliances destroyed by the Bush administration, the junior senator from Illinois does not seem to care about what his anti-free trade posturing says, not just to Colombia, but the world. What must the Mexicans and Canadians think of his anti-NAFTA demagoguery? What about the South Koreans–another, vital, U.S. ally in a dangerous region–who probably didn’t relish his crusading against their own free trade agreement? Barack Obama’s protectionist rhetoric has done an excellent job of uniting the left-wing of the Democratic Party. Should he become President, the same won’t be said about its effect on the rest of the world.