The U.K. is changing leaders, the European Parliament has backed its toughest migrant-return rules in decades, and Colombia has elected a Trump-backed conservative outsider. Is the globalist era finally giving way to sovereignty, borders, and political courage?
This article is a lightly-edited transcript of the “Here’s the Point” podcast by Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center.
This week, while Vice President J.D. Vance and his team remain locked in talks with Iran over a fragile 14-point memorandum that no skeptic on any side fully trusts, the rest of the world is busy proving something bigger.
British Prime Minister and head of the Labour Party Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday, less than two years after winning the largest Labour majority in a generation. The trigger wasn’t one scandal — it was May’s local elections, where Labour lost control of 38 councils and shed nearly 1,500 council seats as Nigel Farage’s Reform Party surged through what used to be the safe Labour territory.
Days later, the European Parliament passed its toughest migration law in decades, 418 to 218, authorizing deportation “return hubs” outside the EU and ending the automatic right to block removal during an appeal. Right-leaning members chanted “Send them back!” on the floor of the EU Parliament — and even Germany’s mainstream center-right voted with them.
And in Colombia, a country that elected its first Socialist president only four years ago, voters this week handed the presidency to a far more conservative outsider, who has already promised to move their embassy to Jerusalem, following Argentina’s Javier Milei and Chile’s José Antonio Kast into a South American continent that has now turned right almost everywhere except Brazil.
How should we should about these sudden shifts in global political alignment coming so suddenly in 2026?
First, in Britain, we are seeing the collapse of a Labour party that has promoted the status quo of national suicide to globalism for far too long.
Starmer’s government made a number of economic blunders and half-hearted stances and even political U-turns that made him look weak and indecisive. Even his chosen successor, Andy Burnham, who will be a fresh face for Labour, still engages all the political questions on taxes, immigration, and national sovereignty with the same fundamentally flawed worldview — a British-last policy.
While British voters in the last election didn’t outright reject Labour, it is clear there are big cracks in the Labour leadership, and it will likely result in even greater gains for Reform in coming elections. Technocratic, open border, feckless liberalism that sends police raids on the homes of social media commentators, while allowing 250,000 rape cases to go unsolved and unabated is a national crisis. Brits of any political stripe only have so much patience and stomach for moral cowardice and surrender, and Starmer is the most recent example of yet another failed British prime minister.
Labour’s political power will continue to wane as they plummet in the polls. It still remains to be seen whether a majority of British citizens have the wherewithal to reclaim their nation and their government with a massive political referendum. In any case, 10 prime ministers in just 7 years communicates to the rest of the world that the present is unstable at best, and the future is up for grabs.
Don’t count Nigel Farage or anyone else out who has real solutions to these political problems and real answers that the people are longing for. This context actually makes such ambitions for new leadership possible.
Second, even Brussels now admits that immigration without assimilation is invasion. Yes, that’s the EU Parliament.
The new Return Regulation, just voted on and passed by over 400 votes, lets EU nations detain and deport illegal migrants to offshore facilities and ends the legal gridlock that allowed endless appeals to delay their removal indefinitely.
This is the same lesson America has already learned in places like Springfield, Ohio: Importing people from other nations – no matter their origin, identity, or belief — is not the same thing as building homegrown citizens. Any nation that cannot tell that moral difference will not be a nation for long. We would do well to remember that there is a huge difference between the recognition of everyone’s inherent value, dignity, and worth as men and women made in God’s image and the justice of who should and shouldn’t have the right of entry into a country.
For far too long, Western governments have coddled lawlessness, embraced dhimmitude [the subordinate status of non-Muslims under Islamic rule], and imported violence at the expense of their own people and their future. Even the EU is recognizing that this was a massive mistake.
Third, Latin America has completed a hemispheric break from the socialist left — thanks largely to the absence of USAID funding.
Seven countries, including Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, and Costa Rica, have all taken a giant step to the right in recent years, especially more recently as they have seen less interference from their neighbors to the north — that’s us, under the auspices of USAID and NGO funding. It turns out that a more authentic South American electorate wants a Republic without bananas after all.
Bolivia ended 20 years of the Movement for Socialism rule. Chile elected José Antonio Kast, rejecting communist rule. And Argentina’s Milei, who won just a few years ago, has already taken a giant chainsaw to big government spending and bureaucracy. He was also just rewarded with a commanding midterm win for it. And this week, Colombia joined these nations, rejecting the chosen heir to Gustavo Petro’s revolutionary “total peace” project.
Make no mistake — this is not an accidental shift, but a reflection of how the world is rejecting big government socialism under the globalist machine. South America could be done with socialism, at least politically, for the near future.
Fourth, even a skeptical peace process with Iran fits a similar pattern of a monumental shift in global affairs.
What we were told for years in the United States has proven largely untrue at this point — that you cannot interfere with Iran, that doing so could be suicidal because it would lead to…we don’t know exactly what. But the neocons would rather deal with Saddam and any other country than the most dangerous one, even by proxy.
Trump has proven that untrue. The question is: How will it end? Like you, I am very skeptical it ends here in the next 60 days. Conservatives are right to distrust a regime that has been hellbent on nuclear ambitions for 40 years and has been the largest exponent and exporter of terror around the world. No one who is worrisome, distrustful, or suspicious of these talks brokered by J.D. Vance, Pakistan, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) could be accused of paranoia. It’s just common sense. Don’t believe anything — at least not yet.
Either way, the silver lining in all of this is that Iran and by extension China are about to have a reckoning in the Strait of Hormuz. More about that at a later time.
The point is that there are more reasons to be hopeful at this exact moment that the dam is breaking on globalism, open borders, socialism, and governments believing that it is in their best interests to betray their citizens in favor of utopian, platonic pipedreams.
Just as in Genesis 11, God had His purpose in taking down Babel’s tower. That tower is being disassembled once again. Truth is marching — and the truth will win.
In a noisy world, truth needs a clear trumpet. If this article helped you see today’s politics through a biblical worldview, consider supporting the Standing for Freedom Center so we can keep bringing clarity, courage, and hope to the public square.
