The coming war with Mexico

Another crackers Trump campaign promise that barely makes the radar

An old man spends some quality time with his wall. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Here’s a sentence I never imagined I’d need to write: It would be a bad idea for the U.S. to go to war with Mexico.

And yet here we are.

The thing about a candidate as historically dangerous, impulsive, and incompetent as Trump is that he routinely proposes stuff so off the wall that it would tank virtually any other campaign. But because of this, some of his nuttier ideas are overshadowed by everything else he does. In a previous post, I looked at one of these under-the-radar ideas — Trump’s catastrophic promise to deny federal funding to any school that requires kids to be vaccinated. Today, we’ll look at another — the Trump/Republican vow to bomb or invade Mexico.

Trump has repeatedly threatened that, if elected again, he will bomb drug cartels and fentanyl manufacturing facilities in Mexico. He has also proposed sending assassination teams or special forces units into the country. He vowed to take these actions with or without the consent of the Mexican government.

The Mexican government has been pretty clear about where it stands on this: They would not consent. So let’s be clear about what Trump is proposing: He’s proposing an invasion of Mexico. Which means he’s a proposing a war with Mexico.

Trump’s history with this threat suggests we should take it more seriously than the typical bluster he spouts during one of his campaign rally monoglogues. Rolling Stone reported last year that even then he had already asked his advisors to assemble a “battle plan” to enact shortly after he’s elected. He also reiterated his promise in an interview he and running mate JD Vance did with Fox News last month (Vance is also all for it).

The origin of the war with Mexico idea dates back to the end of Trump’s first term, when, in response to rising fentanyl overdoses, he attempted to designate drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, despite the fact that they don’t fit any reasonable definition of a terrorist. He apparently thought this would allow him to bomb the cartels as if they were ISIS cells. It turns out that it isn’t that simple. You can’t simply call people “terrorists” and immediately start bombing the countries where said “terrorists” are operating without first consulting with the leaders of those countries. Mexico’s president promptly and resoundingly dismissed the idea. This apparently irked Trump enough to take the position he advocates today: Just bomb them, anyway.

Trump first latched on to this idea in the dumbest, most Trumpian way imaginable. Here’s the NY Times, from last October:

Mr. Trump’s proposal to shoot missiles at Mexican drug labs was not something he concocted out of thin air. It came up during a meeting and was affirmed by a man in uniform.

That man in uniform was not in the military chain of command, however: He was a medical officer and an unlikely person to be advising the president of the United States on military operations anywhere.

By late 2019 and early 2020, as the fentanyl crisis was intensifying, large-scale meetings in the Oval Office addressed how to handle the problem. Some participants felt the meetings were of little use because officials tended to perform for Mr. Trump, and he would perform for them.

When the idea of military intervention was brought up at one such meeting, Mr. Trump turned to Brett Giroir, who was there in his role as the U.S. assistant secretary for health. Mr. Giroir was also a four-star admiral in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, and he was wearing his dress uniform. His main point was that the United States was unable to combat the crisis with treatment alone, according to a person briefed on his comments.

It was clear from the way Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Giroir that he had mistakenly thought he was in the military because of his dress uniform, according to two participants in the meeting. Mr. Giroir, in his response, suggested putting “lead to target,” the two participants recalled. Mr. Trump did not betray what he thought about the idea, and White House officials, troubled by the moment, considered asking Mr. Giroir not to wear his dress uniform to the Oval Office again.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper writes in his book that after the meeting discussed above, Trump continued to push the idea of bombing suspected cartels and drug sites in Mexico, but with a wily twist: Make it look as if another country had done it.

It’s a scheme from the Bugs Bunny school of foreign policy. Maybe if we put little berets and mustaches on the bombs, Mexico will think they came from France.

All of this fits is a familiar pattern. Trump tends to embrace new ideas when he hears them from people he respects for shallow, wholly artificial reasons — a guy with a strong jawline, the guy who gave him a good deal on a yacht, a guy who runs a quasi-successful pillow company. (It’s usually a guy.) In this case it was a guy in a sharp-looking uniform. Trump then internalizes the bad idea, starts pushing it publicly, and soon enough, the idea works its way into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Esper and saner voices managed to talk Trump out of the idea, but it apparently lodged into a crevice of his cerebral cortex like an old popcorn kernel, and has remained stuck there ever since.

By 2023, nearly candidate in the Republican primary supported bombing or invading Mexico. When Esper’s book came out in the spring of last year, Republicans in Congress didn’t criticize Trump for pushing a reckless, self-destructive policy. They criticized Esper for talking him out of it.

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Some have dismissed the war talk as overheated campaign rhetoric, or a negotiating tool to get the Mexican government to target cartels more aggressively on its own. But Trump’s worst ideas have a way of manifesting themselves into policy — think the Muslim ban, or “absolute immunity.” But also, Republicans have already been laying the groundwork for this. They’ve dubbed fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction,” and have been calling drug cartels “terrorists.” Nearly all of them now characterize the migrant waves attempting to enter the U.S. through Mexico as “invasions.” Some, including the current governor of Florida, have suggested border agents just start shooting people who cross the border illegally (as has Trump).

Not surprisingly, a poll last year found that 64 percent of Republicans now support bombing Mexico. At some point, we should probably start taking them seriously.

Destructive, counterproductive policy that treats foreign lives as disposable has long been the hallmark of U.S. overseas drug interdiction. We’ve funded the extra-judicial execution of drug offenders in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. We partnered with South American governments to shoot down suspect drug running planes without regard to the possible loss of innocent life — that is, until the policy claimed the lives of a U.S. missionary and her daughter. In Panama, the CIA (specifically, George H.W. Bush) propped up and facilitated the drug-running operation of brutal dictator Manuel Noriega. When Noriega was no longer useful for fighting communism, the U.S. then indicted him for said drug running, then (specifically, George H.W. Bush) invaded and bombed his country. We killed hundreds of Panamanian citizens in the process.

As for Mexico itself, in the mid-2000s the U.S. incentivized the country’s government to enlist its own military in the drug war. That policy toppled some cartels, but also spawned destabilizing turf wars and violence as rival factions vied to replace them. The winners then and the military have since been fighting for nearly two decades. The death toll is now approaching half a million people. When asked about the carnage, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton basically said in 2011 that tens of thousands of dead Mexicans was a price the U.S. was willing to pay to keep harmful drugs away from Americans. (It did not keep illicit drugs away from Americans.)

The arguably most destructive U.S. overseas anti-drug program was Plan Colombia, Bill Clinton’s drug eradication program that poisoned farmland, fostered rampant corruption, and pushed that country into a civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people. This too did not keep illicit drugs away from Americans.

The drug warriors don’t deny that these policies have exacted a gruesome human toll. But it’s more a feature than a bug for them. Sen. Lindsey Graham recently declared in his trademark, villainous aristocratic twang, “We need a Plan Mexico more lethal than Plan Colombia.”

There is one critical distinction between what Trump is proposing and all of these other disastrous overseas U.S. policies: With the exception of Panama invasion, all of those previous policies were carried out with the consent and cooperation of those countries’ governments. That’s the difference between a cooperative, ill-considered drug interdiction program and . . . well . . . a war.

So let’s go through the reasons why this is a terrible, awful, no-good idea.

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It misdiagnoses the problem

As with all illicit drugs, the fentanyl/opioid crisis is driven by demand. The United State has a large, wealthy population. We also have an enormous appetite for mind-altering substances. For various cultural, climactic, geographic, and economic reasons, a significant supply of those substances have historically come into the country through Mexico.

But not always. There have been periods when, due to trends in drug use, crackdowns, and other factors, a larger percentage came through Canada, shipping ports, or the airports, instead.

The point is that the drugs still get here. The illicit drug supply is like the air in a closed balloon. You can squeeze on parts of it all you like. It will just pop up somewhere else. In the 1970s, for example, Mexico was the largest supplier of heroin and other opioids in the U.S. From the 1980s to mid-90s it was South Asia. From the mid-90s to 2010s it came from South America. Now it’s Mexico again. As long as there’s demand for illicit drugs in the U.S. — and there will always be demand —someone will figure out supply.

Mexican officials have also pointed out another bit of hypocrisy to Trump’s threat: The drug cartels protect their operations with guns manufactured in the United States.

Since 2017, ATF tracing has found 8,000 - 11,000 guns per year recovered in Mexico that were manufactured in the U.S. An older DOJ study found that between 2006 and 2011, 70 percent of the guns recovered from Mexican drug cartels specifically sent to the ATF for tracing were manufactured in the U.S.

While these guns are illegal in Mexico, they’re perfectly legal to make and sell in the U.S. They end up in Mexico through theft, straw purchases, and private owners. U.S.-based gun traffickers have also been caught shipping illegal, military-grade weapons to Mexican cartels.

Under Trump and the Republican logic, Mexico’s failure to stop a drug that is killing Americans gives the U.S. the right to bomb drug facilities and assassinate cartel leaders without consulting the Mexican government. But by the same logic, America’s failure to stop the illegal flow of guns into Mexico, which have wrought absolute carnage in that country, also gives Mexico the right to bomb gun factories, assassinate gun shop owners, or take out the heads of gun companies.

Just so I don’t get a visit from the FBI, I’m not advocating that any foreign country bomb gun manufacturers or assassinate U.S. gun executives. Nor do I think that it’s likely to happen. I can’t imagine any foreign country willing to risk the wrath the U.S. government would unleash if it tried.

But consider all of this from Mexico’s perspective: U.S. wealth and its appetite for psychoactive substances has created an enormous demand for illegal drugs. The U.S. then makes and exports the guns drug cartels use to protect the operations they’ve built to satisfy that demand. Those guns are then used in a large percentage of the horrifying number of homicides in Mexico.

U.S.-made guns also end up in Central America, where they’re used in the violence that periodically sends waves of migrants emigrating north. Those migrants end up in Mexico, where Trump has demanded they remain while they seek asylum in the U.S. — further destabilizing Mexico

Despite all this, U.S. politicians then demand that Mexico fight its drug war on their terms — terms which in the past have wrought violence, bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and major disruptions to the Mexican economy and civil soceity. Now Republicans are vowing to vowed to bomb and invade Mexico for failing to stop the cartels armed with American guns who fulfill the American demand for opioids.

One more point here: Whatever you might think of how aggressively Mexico is fighting its drug war, the opioid trade is illegal there. The U.S. guns that end up in the hands of Mexican cartels are, for the most part, perfectly legal to make and sell in the U.S. (though illegal to send to Mexico).

(I’ll just disclose here that while I often find the right’s gun culture unhinged, I do support the right to own a firearm.)

So as Trump and the Republicans threaten to invade Mexico for failing to stop the drugs they say are destroying the U.S., Mexicans see Trump and the Republicans encourage and celebrate the manufacture of guns that Mexicans see destroying their country — and that Mexican anti-drug forces have to face when they fight the cartels.

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It won’t work

Fentanyl is popular with cartels because it’s highly concentrated. In black markets, concentrated intoxicants have higher profit margins because they’re easier to smuggle. The more tightly the U.S cracks down on the border, the more the drug cartels will turn to substances like fentanyl.

The vast majority of illegal fentanyl smuggled into the U.S. isn’t smuggled by migrants. It’s smuggled in by U.S. citizens crossing the border legally. Shooting migrants suspected of smuggling drugs won’t address the problem. Of course it’s also cruel, barbaric and inhumane. But that ship has sailed on the right. The point is, you won’t slow the flow of fentanyl unless you’re prepared to stop or dramatically slow down all legal trade and traffic across the border — unless you’re prepared to shut it down. (Trump has threatened this, too. More on that in a moment.)

Even if Trump’s military incursion works for a while, it won’t last. The spoils of the black market drive inspired innovation — innovations like drone smuggling and disposable submarines. In 2020, authorities discovered a drug tunnel from Mexico to Arizona — through terrain hostile to tunnel-building — that included “a ventilation system, water lines, electrical wiring, a rail system, and extensive reinforcement.” Two years later, authorities found another one between Tijuana and San Diego.

The illicit drug trade is lucrative. And the harder you crack down, the more lucrative it gets.

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It will quickly become a quagmire

Fentanyl is manufactured in basements, backyards, and barnyards in locales like the hills of Sinaloa. These labs are well hidden. Bombing them accurately will require extraordinary intelligence, and that intelligence will often be wrong. Even when correct, there will be collateral casualties. We’ll undoubtedly a lot of kill innocent people, just as we have in the war on terrorism.

This will turn the Mexican population (more) against us. U.S. troops will be surrounded by an increasingly hostile population. The labs we do destroy will be quickly replaced with new ones. The cartel leaders we take out will quickly be replaced too, but only after the requisite bloody turf wars, which will bring more death and casualties.

If we send in special forces, they’ll be looking for these operations door to door, a notoriously perilous, tedious form of combat that breeds resentment and tends to be exceptionally bloody.

Even if U.S. forces successfully clear portions of Mexico where the cartels currently operate, they’ll merely move to other parts of the country, or to neighboring countries, or be replaced the moment the troops leave. Are Americans prepared to occupy Mexico? For how long? At what expense?

Republicans have provided few answers for these questions. The most detail war-with-Mexico advocates have mustered to date came in a report written by former Trump DHS appointee Ken Cuccinelli, and as Zach Beauchamp explained out at Vox, it’s expectedly vague.

The proposal is thin on military detail. It proposes that “the President should conduct specific military operations to destroy the cartels,” but does not specify what exactly those operations would look like aside from involving special forces and airstrikes. If that fails, he argues for deploying unspecified “elements of the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard” to Mexico.

The proposal fails to answer basic questions. For example: How many troops would an operation require, and where would they be deployed? What would the casualties look like on both sides? How would a US troop presence suppress drug trafficking and production when it failed to do so in Afghanistan? If the cartels start using locations where American troops aren’t, does the war expand to more parts of Mexico or even other countries? And would any gains be sustained after a US withdrawal?

Other Republican plans out there are even less specific.

In the Senate, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Kennedy (R-LA) have proposed designating nine cartels as foreign terrorist groups. The text of the legislation does not provide any explicit permission to use military force or any framework for its use, but Graham said in a press conference that his intent is to authorize it in some unspecified fashion . . .

Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Mike Waltz (R-FL) have written a more specific Authorization for Use of Military Force for the cartels, one modeled on the laws that permitted the use of force against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Like Graham, Crenshaw insists that any use of force wouldn’t constitute an invasion — that he primarily envisions the military assisting with surveillance of cartels, and that any bombings or troop deployments would be coordinated with the Mexican government.

But there are no such restrictions in the actual legislation, which authorizes the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against cartel targets — specifically permitting its use against “foreign nations” deemed to “have trafficked fentanyl” into the United States. This opens the door to direct attacks on, let’s say, Mexican soldiers who are on the take from Sinaloa.

And again, the Mexican government has made clear that it will not cooperate with a U.S. military incursion into its borders. So any plan that assumes such cooperation is, already, not a serious one.

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It will backfire

Even drug cartels have a code. They go out of their way to avoid harming U.S. law enforcement, and they don’t target U.S. citizens. When underlings have violated this code, or when U.S. citizens have suffered collateral harm, the cartels have bent over backwards to make amends. The last thing they want is to bring the full force and weight of the U.S. government upon themselves.

This of course doesn’t excuse the times drug violence has harmed American citizens. We should naturally seek justice in those cases.

But while what Trump is proposing won’t end the illicit drug trade, it will create an existential threat to the current cartels. It will back them into a corner. Cartels avoid U.S. casualties because they want to remain in operation. If they know the United States is sending its military to kill them, there’s no incentive to adhere to the code. They’re likely to lash out — against U.S. law enforcement, U.S. citizens, possibly U.S. politicians.

The ongoing soft civil war in Mexico would likely then spill across the border. And that would only draw us further in.

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Mexico isn’t our enemy

Depending on how you measure it, Mexico is either our first, second, or third biggest trade partner. Any military action taken without consent of the Mexican government would bring most of that trade to a screeching halt. That risks about $855 billion in annual commerce. It would threaten millions of jobs, particularly in California, Texas, Louisiana, and the industrial Midwest.

When Trump threatened to completely shut down the border during his first term, economists warned it would result in a shortage the goods from Mexico, including computers, cars and car parts, gas, chemicals, and produce (goodbye avocados!). Mexico is also a big consumer for U.S. agriculture. So corn, soybeans, poultry, pork, and dairy farmers would also take a hit. We’d also see major interruptions in supply chains that flow through Mexico. When the Border Patrol shut down just one official crossing in San Diego for just a few hours in 2019, businesses in that city lost $5.3 million.

All of this economic damage would come in addition to the calamitous economic effects of Trump’s other disastrous campaign promises, like across-the-board tariffs and mass deportations.

The consequences of major trade disruption would be even worse for the Mexican economy. And that, ironically, would almost certainly lead to another wave of migrants coming to the U.S. from Mexico.

And about those mass deportations: To carry out that steaming pile of authoritarian policy, Trump will need extensive cooperation from Mexico. He’ll also need the Central and South American countries the migrants came from to agree to take them back. If those countries refuse Steven Miller’s migrant-filled planes — which seems like a strong possibility if a Trump II administration pairs anti-migrant hostility with bombing a Hispanic country — the U.S. will be stuck with millions of people we just yanked from their homes, with nowhere to send them. They’ll fester in Miller’s tent cities.

Trump could try what the U.K. recently attempted — to send migrants to third party country, likely a developing one, to process their asylum claims. But even under that utterly inhumane plan, the U.K. planned to pay Rwanda to “host” around 50,000 people. Trump wants to deport millions.

Typically, humanitarian crises happen to countries by way of war, natural disasters, or famine. We’ll be among the few to have willingly imposed one on ourselves.

Just making this point feels like a surrender the creeping surreality of this moment. “The Republican nominee’s promise to start a war with Mexico will make it difficult to fulfill his promise to deport six percent of the U.S. population” is just an utterly crazy thing to need to write. And this particular plan is only about the tenth nuttiest thing to come out of Trump’s mouth this year.

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