Video: Why is declaring war on Mexican cartels so popular?
A growing number of Republicans have called for military action to address the fentanyl crisis. A new video from the Quincy Institute explores what is behind this idea.
The idea of going to war with Mexican cartels to address the fentanyl crisis has been growing in popularity among Republican members of Congress and GOP presidential candidates this year.
QI’s Adam Weinstein spoke to journalist and author Ioan Grillo on why the idea of declaring war on Mexican drug cartels has gained steam in Washington but why it won’t solve the crisis.
Grillo, who is the author of three books including 2021’s Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels, says those proposing military action have that right diagnosis. “They’re right when they say the fentanyl problem is a really serious, severe problem that should be at the top of the political agenda,” he says. “There is a really serious organized crime in Mexico and they are working with corrupt government officials.”
However, warns Grillo, “where they’re wrong, and very seriously wrong, is you can’t simply send in a couple drones and send in a couple American military and solve this. It just doesn’t work strategically. “
In January, Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the cartels. A number of Senators have endorsed similar proposals, with, for example, J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) telling NBC News in July that he wants to “empower the president of the United States, whether that’s a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels.”
During the first primary debate of the election cycle last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that, if elected president, he would send U.S. special forces into Mexico on “day one.” Other candidates, including former president Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, have said that they, too, support a military solution to the fentanyl crisis.
Weinstein and Grillo also discuss the history of Mexico’s wars against drug cartels, how cartel violence has affected life in Mexico, and more.
Blaise Malley is a freelance writer and a former Responsible Statecraft reporter. He is currently a MA candidate at New York University. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
China was recently admitted as an observer to the Andean Community — a political and economic block consisting of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru and one of the Americas’ numerous organizations and forums.
Getting increasingly nervous about Chinese influence, U.S. policymakers made a concerted effort to limit the CCP's engagement in the Inter-American Development Bank and some even raised concerns about potential — albeit unconfirmed — ties between China and the recently elected secretary general of the Organization of American States. Now, with China starting to engage in another regional organization, analysts already warn it could serve as a conduit for expanding AI and electric vehicle sales into South America.
However, rather than simply seeking to deny China entry into regional affairs, the United States needs to develop policies to better engage with the region. China’s presence in the Andean Community is not an isolated diplomatic gesture — it reflects a deliberate, decades-long strategy to reshape governance norms and economic integration in the Americas. Washington’s failure to understand this strategy — and offer credible alternatives — risks ceding influence in its own hemisphere.
Inter-American organizations with Chinese characteristics
Starting in the 1990s, China has leveraged regional organizations and forums as a key component of its engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean. With the addition of the Andean Community, China is now a member or observer in nine regional organizations, including some without U.S. participation. These include bodies like the Caribbean Development Bank, where China maintains a strong relationship and is deeply involved in development projects.
Chinese engagement in regional organizations serves several objectives. First, it creates important channels for China to engage with countries despite their continued recognition of Taiwan. And second, participation in these bodies lets China promote South-South cooperation, frame its engagement as altruistic, and shape governance norms beyond its own region.
While China is engaging in a variety of different types of hemispheric bodies, many of its activities have focused on economic-focused organizations. China first became an observer in regional organizations in the Americas through the Latin American Integration Association in 1994.
Today, China is also a member or observer of several regional bodies with key economic elements — the Inter-American Development Bank, Caribbean Development Bank, Andean Community, Pacific Alliance, and Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura. In addition to those where China has a formal presence, there is clear evidence of Chinese engagement within other key economic bodies including the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, the Caribbean Community, the CAF, and Mercosur.
Furthermore, China has expanded its economic engagement with the region through bilateral trade negotiations and now has Free Trade Agreements with Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peru.
Chinese regional engagement has focused on economic organizations. Most importantly, Latin America and the Caribbean are key regions for natural resources and has helped to fuel China’s economic growth. With many strategic resources available, China continues to seek inroads. Additionally, China’s engagement in the development banks has raised concerns as Chinese companies have been particularly active in securing project funding through these bodies.
China’s strategy has been remarkably consistent, but what makes it so effective is how Latin American governments have embraced it.
Finding new economic partners
For their part, many Latin American and Caribbean countries have readily welcomed Chinese engagement in these organizations and sought to expand economic cooperation with the Asian nation. The promise of access to Chinese markets for Latin American exports has been a major driver of growth in the region. To fuel China’s economic miracle, many Latin American countries benefitted from the export of commodities to the Asian nation.
Although this model is shifting, it has deepened economic integration between the Americas and China. Indeed, studies conducted by the World Bank have suggested that after regional economies benefitting from economic tailwinds from a growing China, the Chinese and Latin American economies have become integrated to the point that a slowdown in the Chinese economy would result in a marked slowdown in regional economies as well.
Despite many economic benefits, there are real drawbacks. Many countries have noted that trade relations are often less beneficial for their own manufacturing bases than originally hoped for. This can lead to countries in the region that had hoped to leverage trade with China to escape commodity driven trade and dependency simply by shifting dependency to China.
The deepening ties between China and Latin America did not happen in a vacuum. They reflect not only Beijing’s long-term strategy and the region’s pursuit of new economic horizons, but also Washington’s failure to keep pace with those shifts. As governments across the Americas recalibrate their foreign policy priorities, many see China as an engaged and reliable partner while viewing the United States as reactive, inconsistent, or absent. This dynamic has magnified the consequences of U.S. missteps — turning hesitation, neglect, and rhetoric into strategic openings for Beijing.
Why the US response is counterproductive
Across the U.S. government, officials have sounded the alarm about China’s growing presence in the Americas. However, the approaches taken by successive U.S. administrations have failed to address concerns. Instead of creating a strategy to improve relations with the region, the United States often criticizes engagement with China without offering a viable alternative or makes it appear that U.S. engagement with the region is purely due to countering China rather than being a meaningful partner.
While these problems have been apparent across administrations, the Trump administration’s hardline and unilateral approach will do little to draw Latin America and the Caribbean back into the U.S. orbit. Instead, Trump’s heavy-handed threats have led to increased pushback from key nations, undermined U.S. efforts in these countries, and encouraged countries to look to China as an alternative.
At the same time, the Unted States has threatened to pull back from and cut funding to regional organizations — a move that further opens the door for Chinese engagement in the region.
Nowhere are the consequences clearer than in U.S. trade policy, where reliance on tariffs and threats has deepened regional frustration. Instead of compelling governments to align with U.S. preferences, these measures have driven many of them to diversify partnerships and pursue new trade deals — including with China — to insulate themselves from American unpredictability. This dynamic has become increasingly visible in recent years, underscoring how current tariff strategies are backfiring.
The unintended consequence of Washington’s approach has been a wave of hedging across the region. Even leaders ideologically aligned with U.S. priorities, such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, have recalibrated their policies to preserve or deepen ties with Beijing.
Milei, despite his vocal support for free markets and his close rhetorical alignment with Washington, has softened his stance on Chinese trade, while Bukele has publicly praised China’s willingness to invest without imposing political conditions. At the same time, regional trade negotiations with actors like the European Union and Canada reflect a broader desire to reduce exposure to U.S. economic and political unpredictability.
If the United States truly seeks to compete with China’s growing influence in the Americas, it must abandon the illusion that tariffs and threats alone can reshape regional loyalties. Influence is built through consistent presence, credible alternatives, and a willingness to treat Latin American and Caribbean nations as strategic partners rather than pawns in a geopolitical contest.
That means reengaging with multilateral institutions, investing in infrastructure and trade frameworks that match the scale of Chinese initiatives, and demonstrating that U.S. engagement is rooted in mutual benefit rather than zero-sum rivalry. Until Washington commits to that shift, every reactive measure will only deepen China’s foothold in the hemisphere — and every missed opportunity will make it harder to reclaim lost ground.
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Top image credit: Saronic launches 'Marauder' Autonomous Ship After Gulf Craft Acquisition/Military Style [YouTube/Screenshot]
These autonomous maritime vessels are having a moment, and the Pentagon and weapons industry alike want in on it. Flush with cash from venture capitalists and, increasingly, the DoD, which has awarded hundreds of millions in contracts to this end, defense-tech start-ups, including Saronic, BlackSea, and Blue Water Autonomy, have been building a new generation of myriad autonomous and semi-autonomous maritime vessels.
Such vessels range from row-boat size drones, to hundreds-of-feet-long larger unmanned vessels (Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles, or LUSVs), to submarines. The diversity of these vessels, from tactical surface craft to strategic underwater systems, boasts various capacities, including tracking and patrolling, carrying cargo and payloads — and increasingly, exercising lethal capacities within kinetic contexts, like firing lethal payloads, carrying out anti-missile defense, or even throwing themselves at targets to attack them, where a human in the loop could remotely carry out such tasks from afar.
Proponents tout this new generation of autonomous and semi-autonomous vessels as a way to engage militarily without risking human lives, and meet the Navy’s current fleet needs — all at a lower cost than manned ships. But between ongoing technical challenges building the vessels, AI’s tenuous track record as a military tool, and concerns that such systems’ presence in hostile waters could more easily spur conflict escalation, ongoing efforts to procure autonomous maritime vessels must proceed carefully to ensure their proliferation does not cause more harm than good.
To this end, RAND analysts Kanna Rajan and Karlyn Stanley write that uncrewed vessels could take on potentially dangerous missions during conflict, such as delivering supplies, keeping armed service members out of harm’s way.
Dan Grazier, Senior Fellow and Director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, told RS that autonomous vessels could meet specific needs in case of kinetic engagement. For example, they could offer a way to break through enemy attempts at area denial: an enemy's weapons, such as long-range missiles, that would normally deter U.S. ships, would not pose the same threat to uncrewed ships that are seen as disposable.
Grazier also told RS that uncrewed systems could cheaply alleviate the Navy’s ongoing fleet deficit, caused by its poor procurement track record.
“The Navy fleet is actually shrinking… mostly because of failed major shipbuilding programs, like the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and the Zumwalt-class programs,” Grazier said. “If we have American companies that are building effective uncrewed systems that could supplant the big, major manned shifts, then… that might go quite a long way towards solving the fleet size problem.”
Unintended consequences loom large
But other practical issues plague these autonomous vessels’ roll-out — as do a host of ethical and security-related ones.
First, feasibility challenges persist: technical issues, in tandem with human error, led to small autonomous American vessels crashing during recent tests. And although smaller autonomous vessels have already seen combat in the Black Sea, Medium and Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles (LUSVs), which have been in development for years, might altogether be a harder challenge for America’s defense industrial base.
“They've been working on the USV and the LUSVs for like 10 years now,” Michael Klare, professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Arms Control Association, told RS. “They've had trials. They've had them do exercises, elaborate exercises, and they… are still having difficulty getting the AI systems to work, so that these ships can operate autonomously,” he said. “The technology [for LUSVs] has not yet been developed far enough for them to be deployed with real forces in a real combat situation.”
If deployed in hostile waters, experts told RS that these vessels’ presence could escalate tensions amid already precarious geopolitical conditions. This might be especially true in the South China Sea, recently the site of several maritime confrontations.
“Defense officials in China have to worry about worst-case scenarios…and that makes everything a lot more [volatile] in a conflict,” Klare told RS. “They don't know what [adversaries’] unmanned vessels are doing, and [they may not] necessarily know where they are. They have to assume the worst,” he said. “In a crisis it's harder to keep control over the pace of escalation…you could have unintended escalations occurring.”
Stop Killer Robots spokesperson Peter Asaro questioned autonomous vessels’ ability to correctly discern civilian from military ships.
But this misidentification risk is already at play: back in February, the Navy deployed autonomous Saildrone Voyagers, unmanned surface vessels (USVs) for counter-narcotics surveillance in the Caribbean, where the Trump administration has subsequently ramped up a campaign against so-called “narco-terrorists.” Here, if a USV were to confuse civilians for narcotics smugglers, it follows that mistake could lead to U.S. forces attacking them, thus inadvertently escalating already-sky high tensions in the region.
And these vessels’ proliferation could have other consequences. For example, Klare and Asaro told RS that the proliferation of autonomous submarines within military contexts, could work to destabilize countries’ existing nuclear arms control regimes.
"If the [adversaries’] submarines become detectable and can be tracked in real time [by autonomous submarines], then you erase a country's invulnerable second-strike capabilities” based underwater, Klare said. “In a crisis, a country that feels threatened might decide to use its nuclear weapons first — before it comes under attack.”
Zooming out, experts spoke to concerns about the proliferation of AI in weapons systems within targeting contexts, where autonomous systems, rather than humans, might be entrusted to make life-or-death decisions.
To date, most autonomous vessels’ lethal capacities have been designed with a human in the loop, where a person involved would be remotely making decisions that kill. But, considering military officials and defense tech company higher-ups have repeatedly pushed to remove that human, saying their slow decision making could inhibit AI-machines’ warfighting capacities, this could change.
Ultimately, observers warn humanity surrendering this final decision-making authority to machines, in maritime autonomous vessels and other autonomous weapons systems, crosses a fundamental ethical threshold.
"I don't have a problem with remote-controlled weapons,” Dan Grazier told RS. “I do worry about autonomy [in this context]. I don't like the idea of a machine making a life-or-death decision…as a society, as a species, [we] need to figure this out — sooner, rather than later."
Ultimately, if autonomous maritime vessels are to help, rather than harm, they must be procured with these practical and ethical concerns at the forefront — lest intentions of saving armed service members’ lives at sea create a more precarious future of war for those on land.
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Top image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth meet with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy (not pictured) over lunch in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 17, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
It’s ironic that in the same week that President Donald Trump escalated the drug war in the Caribbean by unleashing the CIA against Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, the Department of Justice won an indictment against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the architect of the failed covert strategy to overthrow Maduro during the first Trump administration.
The one thing the two regime change operations have in common is Marco Rubio, who, as a senator, was a vociferous opponent of Maduro. Now, as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, he’s the new architect of Trump’s Venezuela policy, having managed to cut short Richard Grenell’s attempt to negotiate a diplomatic deal with Maduro. Regime change is on the agenda once again, with gunboats in the Caribbean and the CIA on the ground. What could go wrong?
Donald Trump’s penchant for turning the metaphorical war on drugs into a real one by deploying the U.S. military dates back to his first administration, when he threatened to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorists and proposed launching missiles to blow up drugs labs in Mexico. During the recent presidential campaign, he declared, “The drug cartels are waging war on America—and it's now time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Apparently, he meant it.
Back in office, he named six Mexican cartels, the Salvadoran gang MS-13, and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for military action against them. Early on, White House officials seriously debated military strikes against cartel leaders and infrastructure inside Mexico, but decided that cooperation with the Mexican government would be more fruitful. Nevertheless, the unusual appointment of a veteran Special Forces military officer to head the Western Hemisphere Affairs office of the National Security Council signaled that Trump was still was serious about resorting to military force to wage the war on drugs.
The focus then shifted to Venezuela. The day before the New York Timesbroke the story about Pentagon planning for action against cartels, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the U.S. government was offering a $50 million reward for information leadings to Maduro’s arrest, accusing him of the “use cocaine as a weapon to 'flood' the United States.” Trump claimed Maduro was directing Tren de Aragua in “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States,” a claim that the intelligence community concluded was untrue, despite pressure from Trump political appointees to make the estimate conform to Trump’s claim. The two senior career intelligence officers who oversaw preparation of the estimate were summarily fired.
In August, the Trump administration deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean, including three guided-missile destroyers, an amphibious assault ship, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine. The following month, U.S. forces began air strikes on vessels allegedly smuggling narcotics in international waters off the Venezuelan coast. When Democrats and some Republicans questioned the legality of summarily killing civilians who posed no immediate threat, Trump informed Congress that he had determined that the United States was in a state of “armed conflict” with unnamed “drug cartels,” whose drug trafficking constituted an attack on the United States. Therefore, traffickers were “unlawful combatants” subject to being killed on sight. Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of U.S. Southern Command, resigned on Thursday, reportedly because of concerns over the extrajudicial killing of civilians in the air strikes.
When Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump and asked for his help to oust Maduro, U.S. escalation ratcheted up another notch. Last week Trump acknowledged that he has approved lethal CIA operations inside Venezuela. Asked if he had given authorization to “take out” Maduro, he refused to answer. In the same news conference, he also revealed that he was considering military strikes inside Venezuela. B-52 bombers have been dispatched to fly just off the Venezuelan coast and U.S. Special Forces air units are conducting exercises in the area as a “show of force,” according to one official. Some 10,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to the region.
Yet despite this impressive show of military prowess, it seems unlikely that the Trump administration is prepared to invade Venezuela. The forces currently deployed are nowhere near enough to occupy the country, which is five times the size of Iraq, Washington’s last misadventure in nation-building. Moreover, Trump has repeatedly promised his MAGA base there would be no more “endless” foreign wars, telling a 2024 campaign rally he would “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars.” Even the air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities caused consternation in his “America First” base. And nobody has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize for starting a war.
The more likely next steps are targeted attacks on drug storage sites, on individuals involved in trafficking, and perhaps on members of the Maduro regime—the sort of strikes the White House contemplated launching against Mexico back in February. That could slow or even stop the flow of drugs through Venezuela, but Venezuela is not a drug producer. Colombia is the producer and if it can’t send its drugs through Venezuela, it will send them through Mexico or up the Pacific coast in homemade “narco-submarines.” The obvious futility of trying to stop drug trafficking by waging covert or overt war against Venezuela suggests that the real motive is political—to bring about regime change.
Can the CIA’s covert operatives pull it off? In the places where they’ve been successful (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973), the key has been to turn the military against the civilian government. That’s not likely in Venezuela. The so-called “Cartel of the Suns” is a loose network of military officers profiting from a wide range of criminal enterprises, including collaboration with Colombia cocaine traffickers. Regime change in Caracas, especially the establishment of an opposition government led by María Corina Machado and friends, would pose a grave threat to the military’s interests. They might dispatch with Maduro, but if the infrastructure of the regime and armed forces remains intact, nothing would change.
The CIA’s efforts to foment a coup have already failed once. In 2019, at the peak of popular opposition to Maduro’s regime, with Washington promoting oppositionist Juan Guiadó as the legitimate president, “Operation Liberty” was a plan to split the army as a catalyst for regime collapse. Instead the plan collapsed when no significant military units defected.
If a military invasion and occupation of Venezuela is not feasible and a successful CIA instigated coup is unlikely, what is the end game for Trump’s escalating conflict with Venezuela? Will the president be satisfied with more performative displays of military force until the next crisis pushes Venezuela out of the headlines and off his agenda? Will he be satisfied if Nicolás Maduro is replaced by some other member of his regime so Trump can claim victory? Or will he finally conclude that Marco Rubio’s obsession with regime change in Venezuela is just as much a dead end as John Bolton’s was, and give Richard Grennel the nod to go back to Caracas and make a deal?
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