In Colombia, Harry and Meghan’s damaging ‘smoke and mirrors’ sham statesmanship

Here they go again. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have embarked on a splashy, fake royal tour — and they did it while King Charles III and his family were on their annual summer vacation at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

Their four-day vacation in Colombia may have served the Montecitos’ business and public relations interests well. But it threatened to do Britain’s foreign policy—and, by extension, America’s national security—a disservice.

Official royal tours, like US presidential visits abroad, are designed to advance the UK’s foreign policy interests. Beyond high-level meetings and flashy receptions, these high-stakes diplomatic ventures are measured by the bilateral nation-to-nation outcomes they are expected to deliver — and their lasting positive impact.

Harry and Meghan couldn’t make that happen.

Apart from a D-list celebrity, the oft-whining duo had nothing to offer Bogotá in the long run. Photo ops, media hype and sugary goodwill are fleeting. Without Whitehall purpose and oversight, there is little to gain for Colombia or the UK.

Sussex Inc. undoubtedly had a lot to gain, however, and therein lies the rub. Not-so-private global tours masquerading as royal tours are undoubtedly valuable from a corporate branding and marketing standpoint.

It would be a hopeless task for the son and daughter-in-law of the reigning King of England and head of the Commonwealth of Nations to profit from sham statesmanship. Harry, of all people, knows better. His grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, set the global gold standard for duty, country and public service.

The trip was justified as part of an effort by Harry and Meghan to promote mental health and “protect young people from online harm.” Commendable on the surface, until you consider the pair’s track record of getting the message across.

In the eyes of many, the Duke and Duchess are the multimedia standard-bearers of bullying within the family. In his memoir, Spare, Harry crudely uses the now nine-year-old Princess Charlotte as a weapon, presumably in an attempt to publicly shame and humiliate her parents, the now Prince and Princess of Wales.

It was not without irony, then, when Harry claimed in Colombia that “the spread of false information via AI and social media means ‘we no longer debate facts.’” After all, Queen Elizabeth had sent that same sharp message to Harry and Meghan, rejecting their claims of royal racism by releasing a statement saying that “memories may vary.”

Bad or unfit as messengers, the timing of their fake royal tour was suspect. The royal family, as Queen Elizabeth had been wont to do for decades, had gone on a private family holiday to Balmoral in August. It raises questions about whether their trip was intended to serve the interests of Colombia or to embarrass Harry’s family.

Harry and Meghan’s decision to travel to Colombia in August was likely a deliberate message to cancer-stricken King Charles and Queen Camilla. The Netflix duo still have no intention of playing by family rules — or adhering to Queen Elizabeth’s edict that they can’t be half-in, half-out.

It’s also hypocritical. Harry’s public excuse is that he’s unwilling to travel to the UK as a family due to security concerns — and yet they’re touring one of the world’s most crime-ridden countries in their own interests.

This was no time for Harry and Meghan to be playing “world-wide privacy tour” games in Colombia, a country still struggling to emerge from more than 60 years of ongoing guerrilla warfare and to overcome the social damage caused by drug cartels.

Colombia is in dire need of more than the “smoke and mirrors” statesmanship of a Montecito for-profit brand-oriented couple, especially now that the South American country finds itself at a fragile crossroads over how best to move forward as a democratic nation.

For the first time, human security is front and center in Colombia. President Gustavo Petro wants to move Bogotá away from the country’s past dependency, “Mano Duro” (zero tolerance) and overtly militaristic approach to Colombia’s devastatingly high crime rates, drug lords and economic inequality, and instead “address their root causes.”

As Juliana Rubio noted for CSIS, Mano Duro resulted in the intertwining of “national security with issues of crime and violence.” As a result, she notes, “issues that had been the purview of local police … became strategic military concerns, sometimes blurring the lines between the roles of the national police and the armed forces.”

Washington, however, is concerned about how that balancing act is playing out. Ninety percent of the cocaine entering the U.S. comes from Colombia — and Colombian cocaine production is growing rapidly as global demand grows.

Colombia is central to US national security. President Biden rightly told Petro at the White House in 2023 that “Colombia is key to the hemisphere.” Earlier, in March, General Laura Richardson, commander of US Southern Command, noted that Colombia is “mil-to-mil” important to the US as Washington pushes back against Russian and Chinese machinations in “Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”

Without Downing Street advice, Harry and Meghan naively played checkers in a dangerous world of superpower 3D chess. It’s annoying that this is normal. They did it in Nigeria and Jamaica. Their Netflix series and the naming of the 56-member Commonwealth of Nations as “Empire 2.0” unwittingly played into the hands of Russian and Chinese disinformation in sub-Saharan Africa.

Selling fancy jams, dog biscuits and hosting a cooking show are all very well and good under the guise of Meghan’s American Riviera Orchard Brand. But using countries like Colombia as a marketing backdrop and as tools to overshadow the royal family is absolutely not OK — especially given the far-reaching and ongoing global national security implications for the UK and US.

In the old days, before Hollywood, Harry could have been a suitable defender of global statesmanship. No longer. He and Meghan chose freedom and dollars over royal duty. Now it’s high time they stopped their smokescreens and disappeared from the global stage of statesmanship for good. Colombia has real, substantial needs, and Sussex Inc. can’t even begin to address them.

Mark Thoth writes about national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Zoet served for 30 years as a military intelligence officer.