Ripping up Trump's 'battle plan' of attack on Mexico's cartels

The former and perhaps future president Donald Trump has been asking his aides to draw up battle plans, we are told. The Iranians are not the target, at least not this time, and neither is Vladimir Putin or the Chinese communist party.

The enemy in his crosshairs is Mexico. Or, more specifically, the narcotics traffickers that operate with impunity in its northern states. Trump has requested options to use military force to smash the cartels.

The conversation around Mar-a-Lago seems to have been inspired in part by a policy paper from the Center for Renewing America written by former DHS official Ken Cuccinelli. In his descriptively titled “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels,” Cuccinelli advocates just that — a multistage, multiyear military operation to crush the criminal organizations causing havoc at the border and across the United States. Since those cartels have “declared nothing less than a war on the American people and our way of life,” he writes, we need to wage a “defensive war” against them as well as the “foreign governments known to provide financial or logistical support.”

Trump and Cuccinelli hardly alone in pushing this idea. As recent reporting in Rolling Stone pointed out, Republicans in both the House and Senate have proposed bills authorizing military action to stop the flow of migrants and (especially) fentanyl. Former attorney General Bill Barr even wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating an invasion. 

Their frustration is understandable. Overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 49, and fentanyl is primarily responsible. The drug is now the “single greatest challenge we face as a country,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a Senate panel Wednesday. And getting control of the border remains a top (if not the top) priority for many GOP voters. It is easy to see how reasonable people could support drastic measures when everything else seems to have failed.

This particular drastic measure, however, is not the answer. The case against military action on the drug cartels might appear so obvious as to need no articulation. But for those as yet unconvinced, or those who perhaps have not thought through the matter much, a few points should suffice to keep US forces north of the border.

First, any military operation would almost certainly fail to destroy the cartels. Cuccinelli and Trump imagine that such a war would unfold like a conventional conflict, with cartel members quickly splattered all over the walls of their mansions by American special forces and cruise missiles. Crushing them would be simple. A cakewalk, even.

In reality, like terrorists and guerrillas, organized criminals are not a fixed target. Were preparations for an invasion to commence, drug cartel members would not dig in and prepare for a fight to the finish against U.S. troops; they would disappear into the hills and/or the back alleys of Mexican cities, robbing U.S. invaders of convenient targets. We would be bombing where they were. 

Cuccinelli blithely assumes that the government of Mexico could be convinced to cooperate with, and might even welcome, a U.S. invasion. People generally do not appreciate being conquered and occupied, however, no matter how righteous the cause. The United States would find very little enthusiasm for such an operation from the Mexican people, even if their government could be pressured into allowing it to happen. It would hardly be the first time that U.S. troops entered Mexico uninvited, after all, and few Mexicans have forgotten that the United States took half their country in the last century. 

To paraphrase a famous saying about guerrilla warfare, a narco-criminal needs the people like a fish needs water. And they would have the support of the Mexican people, even those who despised them until the Americans showed up.

U.S. soldiers would be forced to occupy big sections of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and other Mexican states, setting up checkpoints to separate criminals from civilians. The operation would look a lot like the war in Afghanistan, but with the civilian population quite aware that the cartels would reemerge and rebuild the moment the Marines left.

The second reason to oppose the use of force against the cartels is that, even if such an operation somehow succeeded — and the careful reader will have deduced that success is exceptionally unlikely — it would not stop the flow of drugs into the United States. A massive military presence might slow that flow temporarily, and force the cartels (and competing trafficking entrepreneurs) to adjust their delivery techniques. But as long as the demand remains high enough to produce spectacular profits, the supply will find a way. When the Colombian cartels waned, suppliers emerged in Mexico; if the moles in Mexico are whacked, new ones will soon pop up elsewhere.

The sad truth is that there will never be an end to the drug trade as long as Americans are willing to spend exceptional amounts of money to get high. Supply will always meet their demand. A U.S. occupation of northern Mexico would do nothing to help our national overdose crisis.

Overall, the costs of a “defensive war” against the cartels would far outweigh any imaginable benefits. Invading a neighbor generally causes far more problems than it solves, as Russian President Putin can attest. The economic ramifications of invading one’s second largest trading partner would be uniformly unpleasant. Our relations with Mexico and the rest of Latin America would not recover in our lifetimes. And any moral high ground (not to mention allied unity) that the United States could claim after Putin’s invasion of his neighbor would be sacrificed if we did essentially the same thing. None of these predictable costs would be offset by any significant benefits.

Finally, perhaps it is worth keeping in mind that any invasion of Mexico would also involve a hefty human toll. Although the United States does not fight with the medieval barbarity of Russia, civilians inevitably find themselves in the way during war. No matter how careful we were, the innocent would suffer alongside the guilty. Many young Americans in uniform would risk, and sometimes lose, their lives, all for no purpose whatsoever.

Hopefully the half-life for this idea will prove to be short. Perhaps the former president has just been investigating his options, or considering making one of his signature bluffs. But this notion needs to be beaten down, and hard, because using military force to go after the cartels is one of the worst suggestions to have floated around Washington in quite some time.

The hard truth is that the cartels are not so much killing Americans as providing us with the tools to kill ourselves. Were they to disappear, someone else would get those tools to us. The key to decreasing the damage from fentanyl is change at home, not abroad; killing cartel members might provide a feel-good outlet for our national frustration, but it would do nothing to help the millions of Americans suffering from addiction, all of whom would remain at high risk of becoming the next statistic.