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Farid Kahhat says that he learned to explain the world simply when he talked to his father, who had to leave school to work and when faced with his academic jargon he told him: "You've already started talking nonsense."
Now, this professor of international relations at the Catholic University of Peru seeks to elucidate the global direction for a wide audience in his most recent book, titled "The world has become a strange place."
Its pages include recent research and essays by Kahhat for podcasts on varied topics: from Donald Trump's presidency in the United States to climate change or social networks.
"Things have happened that are unprecedented, at least, since the end of the Cold War," observes Kahhat in an interview with BBC Mundo before the Arequipa Festival, where he is participating this week as a guest.
What follows is a summary edited for clarity of the dialogue with the author of other books, such as "The Eternal Return," about the radical right in the contemporary world.
image source, Personal archive
What do you mean "The world has become a strange place"?
For example, it was absolutely unexpected that one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council with the right to veto, such as Russia, was the first country in four decades to violate the principle that the acquisition of territories through war is inadmissible.
Russia did that in 2014, by annexing the Crimean peninsula. And then by attacking Ukraine.
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The United States accepted the principle that it is inadmissible to acquire territory by force. And suddenly, Trump begins to hint that he could do so in the case of Greenland – a NATO ally – and the Panama Canal.
The US had never attacked the territory of a South American country, as it did this year in Venezuela.
And what is the main difference compared to what happened before, in times of the Cold War or devastating world wars?
An author in Foreign Policy magazine says that the first decade of this century was the best decade in the history of humanity: civil and interstate wars, war casualties, and poverty are decreasing in the world—although much of this is explained by China—and life expectancy is increasing. Despite 9/11 and the call for war on terrorism, some indicators improved dramatically.
That began to deteriorate starting in 2011, with wars that began as civil but that attracted international actors, state and non-state, as was the case in Syria.
And there is a turning point with Trump, who discards all the old certainties.
In the book you point out as a great change that the US proposes returning to a scenario prior to the international order created after the Second World War. How is this, if Washington was key to creating that order that the vast majority of countries would prefer over the previous disorder, as you point out?
Trump always believed that the postwar order had harmed the United States, that it had turned it into a country with chronic trade deficits and had prevented it from deploying its full power.
It is an order that allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization without being a market economy, and enjoy the advantages of that system without meeting its conditions, according to Trump.
This has a lot to do with Trump's particular vision.
Do you agree with other analysts that we are returning to a world where, instead of international law, the military power of countries like the US, China and Russia rules?
I think Trump and Putin want to go in that direction. Xi Jinping has a more nuanced view because, contrary to what one might believe, China is not a revisionist country in the sense of wanting to dramatically change the rules of the game at the international level, since it has enriched itself from them.
We are not in the situation of the interwar period. But we already see a deterioration. For example, development aid decreases, deaths that could have been avoided with that aid increase, and we enter into endless wars that the great powers believed they could resolve in weeks.
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The good news, I would say, is that the abuses of power by the great powers have had limits.
Recent technological developments have favored defense over attack. And that helps explain why Iran could not be defeated by the US, and that Ukraine could not be completely defeated by Russia, although NATO's intervention is also important there.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney confessed in January that they knew that "the narrative about the rules-based order was partially false" and "that the strongest would exempt themselves when it was convenient for them." What's the difference then?
The difference is that this order, with all its flaws, worked enough so that we were no longer in a world in which European powers blocked Venezuelan ports to demand payment of the external public debt of the Venezuelan State, as happened between 1902 and 1903.
Nothing remotely like this happened again for more than a century, until Trump did exactly that in late 2025.
It was a world with injustices and inequities in the application of international law. But it was enforced enough for, for example, the US to respect its trade agreements, which it has stopped doing under Trump, imposing virtually universal tariffs without valid justification.
In the book you also point out that a fundamental problem is that Trump lacks a "master plan to guide his behavior." How is this?
That he declares that he wants to be unpredictable to both his allies and his enemies, and that this makes him an actor with negotiating power, suggests that he has a master plan.
But I don't think it has it, because of how it changes.
For example, the purpose of the tariffs initially was to recover industrial investment, which matures over periods of years, and therefore you should maintain the tariffs indefinitely. But then we have seen how the preservation of tariffs is negotiated, depending on the concessions that the US obtains from the counterparty.
He enters the government saying that he is the president who is going to end endless wars and then starts a war like the one in Iran, which according to his calculation was going to last days and now has been going on for six months without us knowing where it is going.
These constant changes in position tell me that there is no master plan.
What is the main challenge for Latin America in this global context?
Latin America has the peculiarity that it needs a good relationship with the United States, which continues to be an important trading partner, an important source of foreign direct investment, the main supplier of weapons, the main partner in security issues and the fight against drug trafficking.
And at times, the US has been an ally in the preservation of democracy and human rights, although that has changed under Trump.
Having to maintain a good relationship with the US, countries have historically sought to preserve their autonomy as actors in the international system. And now the radical right has a virtually unconditional alliance with Trump.
But also, in South America the majority already have China as their main trading partner and source of foreign investment. And they cannot make concessions to the US in its relationship with China, something that the US seeks according to official documents, without suffering great economic costs, not only because of interdependence.
China can also threaten us with sanctions and apply them, as it is already doing with Panama for giving in to North American pressures regarding the Chinese company that managed ports at both ends of the Panama Canal.
Is Latin America's challenge to maintain a kind of balance or neutrality between the US and China?
One could have said in the past that there is no room for neutrality, because the US is on the side of democracy and human rights, and China is not. But with Trump that may be called into question.
Yes, I would say that it is in our best interest to maintain good relations with both powers - which is why some revive the term "non-alignment" - which also have significant economic relations between them.
There is no reason why they should require us to break up with one.
Is the alignment of right-wing Latin American governments with Trump consistent?
For me it is a mistake, beyond ideology.
The Shield of the Americas is a hemispheric reissue of Plan Colombia, without the resources delivered by the US to that country. Plan Colombia failed in its purpose of reducing the production and marketing of cocaine. Why will a regional plan with fewer resources be successful?
Furthermore, the Shield of the Americas places emphasis on the use of military force. And we already see in the case of the sunken boats in the Caribbean the problem that this implies. First, violation of human rights: more than 200 deaths without it being proven that they had links to drug trafficking. And, according to the federal government's own anti-drug agency, the DEA, these crashes have had no effect on the supply of drugs in the United States.
The US asks countries like Ecuador to exempt their soldiers from liability before local courts. So, it is the soldiers of our countries who will have to respond if there are human rights violations.
Isn't US support necessary against drug trafficking, a problem that worries the region?
Yes, there is a need for cooperation with the US in the fight against drug trafficking, but that already occurred with the DEA and the FBI without the need for the Shield of the Americas.
There are also things that the US does, thinking about China or other regions, that adversely affect Latin American countries, no matter how Trump's allies they may be. Peru has applied punitive tariffs to exports of Peruvian copper derivatives, because they are processed in China.
A chancellor of Argentina at the time of the "Conservative Republic" that Milei praises so much, Luis María Drago, in response to the blockade of Venezuelan ports between 1902 and 1903, put forward the thesis that it is not legal to use force or attack the territory of a country to force payment of the foreign debt. Today that is part of international law.
And Milei supported when Trump blocked Venezuelan ports between the end of 2025 and the beginning of this year, even though it was a flagrant violation of international law, not only to collect debt but also to demand access to Venezuelan oil and a change in the country's presidency.
Today's radical right seems to believe that there are things that will only happen to governments ideologically hostile to the US, but that does not necessarily have to be the case.
The support for Trump from the South American right, which previously defended the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention, is curious.
And the Shield of the Americas in its documents goes far beyond the fight against transnational organized crime: it talks about investment control, about maintaining supply chains free of unreliable sources. That means China, and it has nothing to do with organized crime.
In one of these documents, the TIAR is invoked, which is a military alliance from the time of the Cold War to act jointly in the event of a Soviet military attack.
How do you evaluate the results that the elected right-wing presidents are having with the promise of a tough hand in security?
I define the heavy hand based on two criteria. One is the most severe penalties. But more important than the length or severity of the sentence is the probability of being convicted. Therefore, more severe penalties do not make much difference.
Another criterion is the use of armed forces. In Ecuador, President Noboa approves the decree that allows him to use the armed forces in the fight against organized crime in January 2024. And, in 2025, Ecuador had more than 50 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest rate in its history.
Mexico began using the armed forces in the fight against drug trafficking in 2007, when the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 8 per year. And, by 2023, it reached 24.
I understand that, when the homicide rate increases significantly, it does not persuade many people to say that the Bukele plan in El Salvador involves violations of human rights and due process.
The Bukele plan is based on arresting more than 2% of the adult population with the profile that a gang member is believed to have: male, young, from the popular stratum, with tattoos, without higher education or a known job. And of course, it works.
But the fundamental problem in El Salvador was extortion. In our countries in the Andean area, it is drug trafficking or illegal mining, which generates income much higher than extortion. So, they are not comparable cases.
If the heavy hand is ineffective, why do people and governments insist on it?
First, because the radical right uses fear. It does not appeal to reason, it appeals to emotions. And we know that, when there is conflict between emotions and reason, emotions prevail.
The discourse of the radical right is to stoke a fear that already existed for legitimate reasons.
Kast has been denounced in Chile for overestimating the incidence of violent crimes by more than three times before he came to government. But, if the president himself says it and there is a context of growth in real crime, although not on the magnitude of the official discourse, that fear fuels support for radical policies.
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And heavy-handed policies sometimes work in the first stage. In 2024, the first year of application of the Noboa decree in Ecuador, homicide rates decrease. Then they break a record in 2025. The same thing happens in Mexico.
With the large income generated by drug trafficking or illegal mining, an actor will always emerge with the necessary incentives and means to continue the business. Therefore, the results are ephemeral.
In Peru, a study shows that crime is decreasing in the regions of Lima under a state of emergency with military presence, but it is increasing in surrounding regions. The thieves simply go to rob places where there is not so much military. And when the state of emergency ends, everything goes back to square one.
It is no coincidence that El Salvador has been under a state of emergency since Bukele came to power.
What importance do you give to Lula da Silva's electoral victory in Brazil from a geopolitical point of view?
With Lula's victory, more than half of the population and GDP of Latin America remain in the hands of leftist governments.
The radical right had won seven consecutive elections in the region. But Brazil is not just another country, and it shows that this was not a natural law: the rise of the radical right is not something unstoppable.
Political phenomena are always the product of conflicts between political actors, without a pre-established result.
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