According to a report last week from NBC News, the Trump administration is considering launching drone strikes against cartel leaders and infrastructure in Mexico.
If the report is accurate, it shines more light on the rumored discussions within Trump’s team about engaging the cartels militarily in an effort to stop, or at least hamper, the flow of fentanyl across the southern border.
What made this latest revelation notable was that, reportedly, the Trump administration is willing to conduct these operations even if the Mexican government opposes them.
The US has already been shifting more military, intelligence, and law enforcement assets toward combating the cartels. Earlier this year, Trump officially designated six cartels as terrorist organizations. And reports suggest that the CIA has stepped up drone flights over Mexican territory to identify fentanyl labs along with the whereabouts and routines of cartel operatives. So, in many ways, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before direct operations begin.
It’s remarkable that this has to be said at all, but starting a war using the same approach as the disastrous War on Terror directly on our southern border is a terrible idea.
For starters, it almost certainly will not stay contained to a couple outposts and labs in northern Mexico. The fantasy that some seem to have that the US can launch strikes with unmanned aircraft, sit back, and watch the cartels collapse—bringing the bulk of the American drug trade down with them—is just that, a fantasy.
In reality, the cartels would most likely not sit there and take it without responding. That could take a lot of forms. They may launch drones of their own over the border, targeting American infrastructure. Or they could purposefully move women and children into targeted areas or even bomb them themselves to turn public opinion against the strikes. It’s naïve to think these groups are above doing something like that.
Or they could go to war with the US. Our military would, of course, crush them in a conventional war, but these cartels don’t fight conventional wars. Cartel wars are nasty irregular conflicts where the preferred strategy in recent decades has been to target low-level operatives—which have meant rival cartel soldiers or police officers—and their families. These groups also use torture extensively against those targets, not primarily to gain information but to terrorize and demoralize the other side.
As brutal as these cartels have been to each other and to Mexican police, they have so far generally avoided targeting US law enforcement. That could easily change if US forces begin targeting the cartels directly.
And American soldiers and cops and their families would not be untouchable because they’re on this side of the border. As irregular warfare scholar Bill Buppert explained in a recent interview, the cartels have extensive networks and operations within the United States. It’s not as if drugs are dropped off a few miles past the border and then magically find their way to users in towns and cities across the nation. The cartel footprint is already here.
Any kind of serious retaliation against American operatives or their families would almost certainly escalate the conflict and bring about a full-on war right on our border.
The Terror Wars the US launched across the Middle East—which also began with the use of “surgical” strikes—not only spiraled out of control and brought an unfathomable scale of death and destruction to that region, they created one of the largest refugee waves in modern history. Tens of millions of people fled north into Europe, where many remain today.
Trump just won the election thanks in large part to the popularity of his promise to secure the border. Why on earth does his team think it’s a good idea to replicate the conditions that caused Europe’s mass migration crisis directly to the south of our country?
And that’s not all. A hot war with the cartels also hands governments like Russia or Iran an easy way to give Washington a taste of its own medicine by waging a proxy war on our border.
All of that is bad enough, but on top of that, it won’t even work. Attacks on the cartels will not stop the drug trade, and they especially won’t put an end to fentanyl production.
These cartels are not unaccustomed to having their infrastructure seized or destroyed, and their leaders captured or killed. That has been happening continuously for the last fifty years. Over that period, as individual cartel leaders were taken out and specific smuggling routes or stockpiles were discovered and dismantled, the cartel model has thrived—not despite the crackdown on the drug trade that started under Nixon, but because of it.
When the War on Drugs was launched in the 1970s, the illegal drugs being smuggled into the US were mainly coming from South American countries like Colombia via propeller planes or small boats. As law enforcement agencies like the new DEA put an end to that, drug trafficking shifted to over-land routes that were much harder to stop.
The cartels in northern Mexico grew to prominence because the approach and extent of the crackdown on drug smuggling created demand for their services. Many leaders and even several entire cartels have come and gone, but the demand for their services remains strong.
Americans pay over $100 billion a year for illegal drugs. As long as that remains the case, people will find a way to meet that demand.
That’s especially true thanks to the adoption of synthetic drugs like fentanyl. Now, all it takes is a couple hundred dollars worth of industrial chemicals and a tub to produce millions of dollars worth of fentanyl—which, thanks to its potency, is also much easier to hide and traffic than plant-based drugs. Even successfully taking out all the Mexican cartels would not be enough to stop fentanyl production. As long as prohibition laws keep fueling demand for it, fentanyl is here to stay.
As Americans, we have to start facing the fact that so many people in our country are desperate for substances that make them numb to their lives. If we can begin to address some of the many factors that are causing that while abandoning the prohibitionist policies that have been driving people to rely on criminal organizations to get their fix for over half a century, our drug and trafficking problems will improve drastically.
But the worst thing we can do is significantly escalate the approach that brought this terrible status quo about in the first place. Destroying some more cartel infrastructure or taking out a few more drug “kingpins” will not suddenly start making a difference. And using the military to do so risks making our current situation significantly worse. The American public has enjoyed a lot of distance from the direct consequences of Washington’s wars for a long time. Starting a hot war on our own border under the naïve theory that it will effectively dismantle the drug trade and stay contained will bring an abrupt and unnecessary end to our long period of peace on the home front.
