The Trump administration’s latest escalatory threat comes just days after Rolling Stone reported on a drug trafficking cartel operating out of Fort Bragg.
Picture this scenario: it’s 2003 and a corrupt, narco-connected government in Mexico is grappling with an institutional crisis. Lawlessness is on the rise as Mexican cartels take their fight with US authorities to the streets of Houston and San Diego. One of the cartels launches a terrorist attack on the US embassy in Mexico City. This confluence of events sparks a migration crisis as millions of Mexicans flood toward the US border, threatening US national security.
In response, a US expeditionary force launches a three-pronged infantry attack against Mexico, one heading eastward through Brownsville towards Tampico, another from Fort Hood toward Monterrey and onto Guadalajara, and the third from Arizona into Sonora. The land offensive is accompanied by a maritime attack on the port of Tampico and a lightening air assault on Mexico’s Santa Lucia airport.
Psychological warfare is also waged to convince the local population that the US invasion is good for Mexico (sound familiar?). At the same time, Mexico’s foreign minister pulls off a coup against the sitting president with US backing. Mexican special forces launch an assault on the presidential residence only to find that the president has already fled. The US invasion ends with a crippling attack on the last dredges of the Mexican Army in the mountains of Zacatecas.
Within days the operation is complete and order is restored to Mexico. The new coup government installed in Los Pinos has already called for new elections and the cartels are on the back foot. A resounding military success that never happened.
However far-fetched this all may sound, it is one of the five post-Cold War scenarios war gamed by Caspar Weinberger, the former defence secretary under Reagan, in his 1998 book, The Next War. The book was cowritten with Hoover Institute scholar Peter Schweizer and features a foreword by Margaret Thatcher.
The Next War serves, if nothing else, as confirmation that even back in 1998 — eight years before Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched his disastrous war on the drug cartels, which has left an estimated half a million people dead and thousands of victims of forced disappearance — US military commanders were contemplating a possible future invasion of Mexico on the pretext of the war on drugs.
In a 2009 article on Weinberger’s Mexico invasion scenario, the Mexican military general and academic José Francisco Gallardo Rodríguez wrote that “Mexico has been in the sights of the United States for some time, particularly now that the US is desperate to maintain its global hegemony.” Gallardo Rodríguez describes the War on Drugs as the pretext by which “the US has historically sought to intervene economically, politically, socially, and militarily in Mexico.”
The Looming Threat of US Military Force
Today, the likelihood of a full-blown US military invasion of Mexico is, thankfully, low. However, the threat of a unilateral US military attack on Mexican drug cartel targets, with all the ugly reverberations that could unleash, appears to be growing by the day.
As the New York Times revealed a few days ago, “President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations.”
They include the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the Cartel del Noreste, the Gulf Cartel, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua, and the Salvadorian MS-13, all of which were designated as terrorist organisations back in February.
A more recent addition was the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles, which Washington claims has close ties to Nicolás Maduro’s Chavista government. Some say the cartel doesn’t even exist. The US has also upped the reward on Maduro’s head from $25 million to $50 million. According to US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Maduro is “one of the largest drug traffickers in the world and a threat to US national security.”
From the Times’ article:
The decision to bring the American military into the fight is the most aggressive step so far in the administration’s escalating campaign against the cartels. It signals Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to use military forces to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.
The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.
U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, the people familiar with the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations…
Unilateral military assaults on cartels would be a marked escalation in the long drive to curb drug trafficking, putting U.S. forces in a lead role on the front lines against often well-armed and well-financed organizations. A sustained campaign would also likely raise further issues related to Mr. Trump’s push to use the military more aggressively to back a variety of his policies, often in the face of legal and constitutional constraints.
As the article points out, “It remains unclear what plans the Pentagon is drawing up for possible action, and where any potential military operations might take place.” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has so far responded to the revelations by categorically rejecting the idea that the US might invade Mexico.
“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military,” she said during a daily news conference on Friday. “We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will be no invasion. It’s off the table, absolutely off the table.”
Is Trump Mad Enough?
Back in April, we asked whether the Trump administration was mad enough to launch drone attacks against Mexico. The US president has also discussed sending kill teams to take out cartel leaders. As we noted in the post, the potential fallout could include a rupture in relations between the world’s two largest trade partners, a massive upsurge in northward migration to the US, another US-sponsored forever war, this time on the US’ own doorstep, and the definitive disintegration of the USMCA trade agreement.
Imagine what kind of toll that would take on each country’s economy, not to mention all the innocent lives that will be lost or ruined. It would also make life a lot more difficult for the tens of millions of Mexican-Americans living in the US and the roughly 1.6 million USians living in Mexico. As NC reader Cristobal put it in a comment to the previous post, Trump seems determined to plunge the US and Mexico into a more dangerous co-existence:
For years the US has enjoyed the enviable security of being bounded by large oceans to the east and west, and weak and friendly nations to the north and south. Mr. Trump may, if he is not careful, end that privileged status. He could cause the neighbor to the south to become not so friendly.
Mexico may have a third card to play (maybe a trump card) in that the US southwest is as much Mexican as it is American. As the Tigres del Norte sing: I did not cross the frontier, the frontier crossed me (or words to that effect). If things get ugly there could be real problems.
And all in return for what?
Further militarising the war on drugs is unlikely to hamper the flow of drugs; it just creates yet more cycles of violence. We have already seen this play out in Colombia and Mexico, and is currently playing out in Ecuador.
The Andean nation is experiencing its most violent year on record a year and half after Daniel Noboa’s US vassal government designated the local drug cartels as terrorist organisations and declared an “internal armed conflict” against them. In late 2023, Ecuador, like Peru, asked Washington to draw up anti-drug initiatives modelled on the disastrous Plan Colombia. Now the country is reaping the whirlwind.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, have repeatedly made the point that waging a war on drugs in Mexico serves little purpose if nothing is done on the demand side in the United States, the world’s largest narcotics marketplace. As Christopher Fettweis, a professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans, wrote in Responsible Statecraft last May, the drugs always find a way:
Those proposing the special forces “solution” to the fentanyl crisis do not appear to grasp the basic economics: supply will always find a way to high demand, and new narcotics entrepreneurs will always arise. When the Colombian cartels waned in the 1990s, one may recall, other suppliers quickly emerged in Mexico. If the current moles in Mexico are whacked, new ones will soon pop up elsewhere. Killing the middlemen of the drug trade never solves the problem.
While we’re on the topic of drug cartels, it’s interesting to see the word “cartel” being used to describe a drug-trafficking organisation in the United States. Not only that but said organisation is operating out of Fort Bragg — the same North Carolina military base that helped train up members of the Mexican Special Forces that ended up deserting and founding the Zetas, the notoriously violent cartel and insurrectionary group that terrorised Mexico during the first decade of this century.
As the Mexico-based US journalist Kurt Hackbarth notes in the following clip from the (often excellent) Soberania podcast, the word “cartel” is hardly ever used to describe US-based drug trafficking organisations.
The US’ Failed Kingpin Strategy
The US has been using the “kingpin” strategy of targeting the management and leadership of Mexico’s drug cartels for the best part of the past two decades, and all it seems to have achieved is to fuel more violence — and by extension, demand for US-made weapons. As we noted in our previous post, any blowback from a unilateral US military attack against Mexican targets would inevitably find its way across the US border and into US cities:
As the Ukraine war has shown, drone warfare is a massive leveller, allowing smaller or technologically less advanced nations or even non-nation actors to project power and defend themselves effectively against larger adversaries. They include… Mexico’s drug cartels.
Even the normally war-loving Atlantic Council cautions that a unilateral military action against Mexico would come with serious risks attached, especially given the capacity of Mexican drug cartels to retaliate against US targets:
Mexican cartels are not merely criminal organizations; they operate as paramilitary entities with deep financial resources, global supply chains, and sophisticated logistical networks that extend into the United States. It is unlikely that such groups would passively absorb US attacks. Instead, as history shows, cartels are highly likely to retaliate both pre-emptively and reactively. They possess a substantial capacity for terrorism that, when coupled with their established presence within the United States, could escalate conflict far beyond what proponents of a purely military solution may anticipate.
Trump has wanted to attack Mexico’s drug cartels since his first term in office. In 2020, the then-45th US president asked Mark Esper, his secretary of defence, about the feasibility of launching missiles into Mexico, to “destroy drug labs” and annihilate cartels. He even ventured that US involvement in such an attack could be kept secret. Esper refused to even entertain the idea, calling it crude, absurd, and counterproductive, for which he paid with his job.
But today Trump is surrounded by legions of yes-men and -women, while his obsession with launching an attack on Mexico seems to have grown…
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Nick Corbishley 