“Are they just playing insane or are they actually insane?”
Amid all the economic chaos and fallout triggered by Trump’s tariffs barrage and with markets continuing to slide even after Trump’s announcement of a 90-day pause on tariffs on everyone but China, one could be forgiven for failing to hear the faintest but growing sounds of war drums. The Trump administration appears to be upping the ante in its standoff with Mexico’s drug cartels — at least according to two staunchly anti-Trump US media outlets.
First, CNN reported on Tuesday that the CIA is “reviewing its authorities to use lethal force against drug cartels in Mexico and beyond” — presumably starting in Venezuela — as the Trump administration moves to make taking on the cartels a major priority for the intel agency”:
The review does not indicate President Donald Trump has ordered the CIA to take direct action against the cartels. But it is designed to help the agency understand what kinds of activities it could legally undertake and what the potential risks would be across the suite of options, the sources said — underscoring how seriously the Trump administration is considering the possibility.
It goes without saying that this is all rather speculative. CNN offers no named sources to back up this claim, just one anonymous “US official and three people briefed on the matter.”
The same goes for the second report, which came out hours later.
Citing “six current and former U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence officials with knowledge of the matter,” NBC reported that the Trump admin is weighing up launching drone strikes on drug cartels in Mexico as part of “an ambitious effort to combat criminal gangs trafficking narcotics across the southern border.” The discussions currently involve the White House, the Department of Defense, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, according to NBC:
Still, the administration has made no final decision and reached no definitive agreement about countering the cartels. And unilateral covert action, without Mexico’s consent, has not been ruled out and could be an option of last resort, the sources said. It is unclear whether American officials have floated the possibility of drone strikes to the Mexican government.
NBC’s six unnamed sources apparently indicated that the discussions are still in their “early stages,” and that the administration has not reached a definitive consensus.
The article even suggests that Mexico and the United States “may proceed together with drone strikes, or other action”, which is, to put it mildly, an imagination-stretching claim. As the Mexican veteran journalist Eduardo Ruiz Healy recently said on his daily news program, if Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was to give the green light for drone bombings in Mexico, her popularity, currently at record levels of over 80%, would collapse overnight:
How many countries have invited another country to come and invade then? … It’s true that in Mexico there are some people who would love to see that happen. In Mexico there are a lot of people who do not love Mexico, and we have to acknowledge that. They would love to see it happen because they think they themselves would live better under the Gringo’s boot.
But that is not the case for the rank and file of Sheinbaum’s political party, Morena, which defines itself in its statute as a party of free men and women who fight for the democratic transformation of the country. They will not take kindly to any Mexican government, particularly one led by Morena, giving the US carte blanche to conduct drone strikes against targets in Mexico. Nor will most Mexican civilians, who, as Ruiz Healy points out, are an extremely patriotic people.
In her response to the latest US media reports, Sheinbaum reiterated her staunch opposition to any such military action:
“We do not agree with any kind of intervention or interference. This has been very clear: We coordinate, we collaborate, [but] we are not subordinate and there is no meddling in these actions.”
A Long Time Coming
The fact that the Trump administration is talking about using drones against Mexican targets is hardly surprising. This has been on the cards for at least two years.
In early March 2023, a coterie of Republican lawmakers called for direct US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels. They included the then-US Senator and now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Washington’s number-one chicken hawk, Lindsay Graham, and former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump) William Barr. The Republican lawmakers also called for Mexico’s drug cartels to be designated as “foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law.”
That has already been ticked off the Trump Admin’s “To Do” list — a move that some current and former US officials believe was designed “to build a predicate for lethal action”, notes the CNN article. Ominously, the CIA is also already flying surveillance drones that are capable of being armed over Mexico.
Trump himself reportedly brought up the idea of bombing Mexico as early as 2020, according to his then-defence secretary, Mark Esper. Senior members of his administration, including US Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson, a former CIA agent and Green Beret, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have also expressed openness to using military force against the cartels, with both stating at separate moments that “all cards are on the table.”
The pertinent question, as the title of this post suggests, is: will the Trump Administration take such a bold, potentially game-changing step, even as the US and global economy reel from his tariff tantrums. Put simply, are they that mad? The following tweet, from Sven Henrich, captures the essence nicely, albeit in reference to Trump’s disastrous trade war:
There are myriad reasons why drone-bombing Mexico would be a bad idea far beyond the simple fact that it will end up killing lots of innocent civilians. The following is by no means an exhaustive list:
#1: Proximity. As even the CNN article notes, it’s one thing to bomb a country on the other side of the world, as the US has been doing on and off (but mainly on) since the Second World War; it’s quite another to bomb your direct next-door neighbour:
It also highlights some US officials’ concerns that using traditional counterterrorism tools against cartels — as the Trump administration has said it intends to do — carries a much higher risk of collateral damage to American citizens than similar operations conducted in the Middle East, far from US soil.
Among the issues agency lawyers are examining is the CIA’s and its officers’ liability if an American is accidentally killed in any operation, according to one of the people briefed.
Judging by the text, the CIA’s lawyers appear to be a lot less worried, if worried at all, about Mexicans being “accidentally killed in any operation,” which, of course, would be true to form. Wherever and whenever the US has used drone strikes, many innocent people have tended to perish. A 2021 investigation by the New York Times Magazine found that US airstrikes had killed thousands of civilians in countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan.
Trump is often hailed by his most devout supporters as “anti-war”, mainly because he didn’t actually start a war during his first term, unlike many of his predecessors. However, he did have — and if recent events in Yemen are any indication, continues to have — a soft spot for drone strikes.
During the first two years of Trump’s first presidency (2017-19) there were 2,243 drone strikes , compared with 1,878 in Obama’s eight years in office, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. In 2019, Trump revoked a 2016 Obama executive border requiring US intelligence officials to publish the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside of war zones. Judging by his government’s recent actions in Yemen, Trump continues to have a soft spot for drone strikes.
#2: Neighbourly Relations.
Strange as this sentence may sound, if there is one country that will particularly resent being bombed by drones of death remote-controlled by the US air force, it is Mexico. The country has already suffered at least ten invasions and incursions at the hands of its northern neighbour since winning independence from Spain over 200 years ago, most recently in the US marines’ invasion and occupation of Veracruz in 1914.
As Mexican citizens are well aware and USians unfortunately far less so, in one of those invasions — the so-called “Mexican-American War” (1846-48) — the US seized 55% of Mexico’s territory, including present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. If the US attacks Mexico again, the relations between these two highly interconnected, highly interdependent neighbours will once again sour to the point of curdling.
“There is no doubt if there were unilateral action inside Mexico, this would put the bilateral relationship into a nosedive,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States from 2007 to 2013, in comments to NBC News about the revelations. “It would be put in a tailspin, as it would represent a violation of international law and an act of war.”
Gustavo A. Flores-Macías, professor of government at Cornell University, said:
“Unilateral U.S. strikes on Mexican soil would be devastating for the bilateral relations and could be detrimental to the objective of fighting drug cartels.”
If Mexico were to break off relations with Washington, which, of course, it would be perfectly entitled to do, much, if not all, bilateral cooperation and coordination will come to an end — not only on the war against the drug cartels but on security matters in general, including border control. Which brings us to the third reason.
#3: More War = More Immigration.
If the Trump Administration is genuinely interested in tackling illegal immigration, the last thing it wants to do is sow further mayhem on its very doorstep — especially if it is thinking about spreading that mayhem to other parts of Latin America, such as Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. This should be basic common sense — something that, unfortunately, appears to be in acutely short supply in Washington these days.
If history has taught us anything, it is that war is one of the main, if not the main, causes of migration. According to estimates by the Costs of War Project, the War on Terror has resulted in the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.
Europe has first-hand experience of what this means. As the US, often with the support of its NATO allies, spread war throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of 9/11, Europe reaped the whirlwind of uncontrolled migration. As Josep Borrell would put it, the jungle invaded the garden. If the US does the same in its own direct neighbourhood, it will almost certainly face a similar fate. And that could be a serious problem for a government that ran on a platform of cracking down on illegal immigration.
#4: Another Forever War
The Global War on Terror is already 24 years old and shows no sign of ending any time soon, which, of course, was by design. By declaring war on a nebulous, undefinable enemy, the US and its NATO allies have created an unending conflict — and with it, the perfect war racket. Now, the US seeks to do the same with the Global War on Drugs — a war that is itself, officially speaking, 54 years old.
It’s worth bearing in mind that this war, declared by Richard Nixon in 1971, was ultimately created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies. That’s according to former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, who told Harper’s magazine in 1994:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Since then, the War on Drugs and aspects of the drugs trade itself have become a key tool in Washington’s foreign policy arsenal, allowing it to maintain geostrategic dominance in key, invariably resource-rich regions of the world while keeping the restive populace at home in line — or in prison, generating big bucks for the prison industrial complex. And as we’ve seen in recent weeks, the scope and reach of that complex is creeping beyond US borders as countries, starting with El Salvador, offer to house US “criminals” and deportees.
For a US government seeking to reassert its control over its “backyard” amid China’s increasing economic influence, the war on the drug cartels offers the perfect pretext. Also, as reader Ciroc correctly notes in the comments below, Trump’s real target is MORENA, an anti-neoliberal movement on the US’ doorstep, not the drug cartels…
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Nick Corbishley 