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Why Pointing the US Military at Cartels Won’t Stop the Flow of Drugs
The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect.
Aug 12, 2025
In 2020, during the last year of the Trump administration’s first term, U.S. President Donald Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper a shocking question: Why can’t the United States just attack the Mexican cartels and their infrastructure with a volley of missiles?
Esper recounted the moment in his memoir, using the anecdote to illustrate just how reckless Trump was becoming as his term drew to a close. Those missiles, of course, were never launched, so the entire interaction amounted to nothing in terms of policy.
Yet five years later, Trump still views the Mexican cartels as one of Washington’s principal national security threats. His urge to take offensive action inside Mexico has only grown with time. Unlike in Trump’s first term, using the U.S. military to combat these criminal organizations is now a mainstream policy option in Trump’s Republican Party. According to The New York Times, Trump has signed a presidential directive allowing the Pentagon to begin using military force against specific cartels in Latin America, and U.S. military officials are now in the process of studying various ways to go about implementing the order.
While this may come as a shock to some foreign policy commentators, it shouldn’t. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and short-lived national security adviser) Mike Waltz, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ron Johnson have all left the door open to military force, whether it takes the form of striking fentanyl-production facilities by air or deploying U.S. special operations forces to take out top cartel leaders on Mexican soil.
Effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any.
The Trump administration wasted no time going down this road. The Central Intelligence Agency is engaging in more surveillance flights along the U.S.-Mexico border, and inside Mexican airspace, to gather information on key cartel locations. The U.S. national security bureaucracy was already in preliminary discussions about the possible use of drone strikes against the cartels as well. And on February 20, the U.S. State Department designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which is designed to deter Americans from working with the cartels and lay the foundation for future strikes.
This is all good politics for Trump, who recognizes implicitly that getting tough on Mexico economically and politically is red meat for his base. But politics isn’t nearly as important as policy, and the policy implications of U.S. military operations in Mexico—even if the purpose is a noble one—is riddled with costs and make managing the problems the Trump administration ostensibly cares about even harder.
First, we should remember one thing right off the bat: Using the military to tackle cartels is not a new phenomenon. The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect. Successive Mexican governments since the turn of the century, from the conservative Felipe Calderón to the leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), have relied on the military under the presumption this was the best way the Mexican state could pressure criminal organizations into extinction.
Calderón, for instance, declared a full-blown war on the cartels immediately after his election in 2006, deploying tens of thousands of Mexican troops into some of the country’s most violent states. Despite lambasting the military-first strategy during his own presidential campaign, Enrique Peña Nieto largely continued Calderón’s strategy with a special emphasis on targeting so-called “kingpins” of the narco-trafficking world. When AMLO entered office in 2018, he tried to get the Mexican army back into the barracks but wound up expanding their authority and rushing Mexican soldiers into hot spots, like Culiacan, whenever large-scale violence broke out.
The result was a bloodbath. Rather than submit to the state’s diktats, the cartels fought the Mexican state with ever greater levels of force. Politicians, police officers, and soldiers were all targeted and killed with greater frequency. Areas of Mexico previously insulated from cartel violence were suddenly drawn into the maelstrom. Although senior narco traffickers were killed and captured in the process, Mexico’s cartel landscape was shattered into a million different pieces; as my colleague Christopher McCallion and I wrote in July, the demise of the cartel’s senior leadership merely opened up these organizations to extreme bouts of infighting between replacements who sought to grab the crown.
The end product was a massive uptick in Mexico’s homicide rate, which is now three times greater than it was before Calderón declared war almost two decades ago.
Of course, the Trump administration is unlikely to mimic the Mexican government’s past strategy entirely. It’s hard to envision tens of thousands of U.S. troops deploying to Tamaulipas, Guanajuato, or Sinaloa, sealing off neighborhoods, establishing checkpoints, and conducting offensive operations against cartels that in some instances have more firepower than the Mexican army. If Washington is going to do anything militarily, it’s more likely to come in the form of air power. Bombing fentanyl manufacturing plants would be more economical and wouldn’t involve U.S. ground forces, so the risk to U.S. personnel would be much lower.
Still, if the objective is to bomb the cartels into submission or convince them to stop producing and shipping drugs across America’s southern border, then an air campaign will fall flat. We can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty because there’s first-hand experience to go by. The U.S. Air Force did something similar in Afghanistan in 2017-2018, taking out opium labs in Taliban-controlled areas to deprive the Taliban insurgency of the revenue it needed to wage the war.
But as the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction reported, the bombing campaign failed to do anything of significance. The U.S. air campaign didn’t dent the Taliban’s revenue streams to the point where it made a negotiated resolution on U.S. terms possible. As David Mansfield, the world’s leading expert on Afghanistan’s drug patterns, wrote in a 2019 report, “It is hard to see how the campaign offered anything in terms of value for money, with the cost of the strikes and ordnance used far outweighing the value of the losses to those involved in drugs production or potential revenues to the Taliban.”
Why would Mexico be any different than Afghanistan? If anything, denting cartel revenue via an air campaign would be even more difficult than it was with respect to the Taliban. Unlike heroin, fentanyl is a synthetic drug that can be easily produced, isn’t particularly labor intensive, and doesn’t require acres upon acres of poppy fields that can be easily located. Sure, the United States is bound to find some of these facilities, but the cartels responsible for production will still have a monetary incentive to set up shop somewhere else. Fentanyl nets the cartels billions of dollars every year; this is a very large financial resource that the Sinaloa and New Jalisco Generation cartels—or frankly anyone in the business—will be hard pressed to pass up.
And if even if they magically did find a new line of work, other players would step into the void to increase their own market share.
These are only several problems associated with treating the U.S. military as a panacea to the drug problem. But the important thing to take away is that effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any. And it will inject immense tension in a U.S.-Mexican relationship that Washington should be strengthening, not undermining.
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Failed 'War on Drugs' Redux? Secret Trump Order Would Aim US Military at Overseas Cartels
"The legality of this move should certainly be under scrutiny," said one international relations expert.
Aug 08, 2025
The New York Times reported on Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a secret order directing the United States Department of Defense to use the American military to combat drug cartels in foreign nations.
According to the Times, the order gives the military authorization to carry out operations against cartels both at sea and on foreign soil. What's more, the paper reported that "U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after" the cartels.
The report then outlined some of the thorny legal issues involved with bringing the military in to handle what has traditionally been a matter for law enforcement. Among other things, the Times said that it's an unresolved question whether "it would count as 'murder' if U.S. forces acting outside of a congressionally authorized armed conflict were to kill civilians—even criminal suspects—who pose no imminent threat."
Shortly after the Times report broke on Friday, The Guardian reported that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Friday tried to shoot down any talk of an American incursion into her country.
"The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military," she told reporters during a news conference. "We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will be no invasion. It's off the table, absolutely off the table."
Experts who cover Latin American relations were quick to raise alarms about the Trump administration's plans, which they said would likely lead to needless civilian deaths while also failing to curtail the flow of drugs into the United States.
"The legality of this move should certainly be under scrutiny, but we should also discuss the mountains of evidence that show militarizing the war on drugs has never resulted in minimizing the market and rather increased violence against civilians massively," commented Renata Segura, the director of Latin America and the Caribbean Program at the International Crisis Group.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, commented on Bluesky that he's long been warning about unilateral military involvement in Latin America to fight the drug cartels and linked to an analysis he published earlier this year at Just Security in which he declared such a strategy to be "almost certainly illegal" and "definitely counterproductive."
In his piece, Finucane argued that any plans to bomb drug labs would likely turn into a Whac-A-Mole-style game given how "low-tech" and simple to build such labs have become, as evidenced by the American military's failed efforts to bomb opium-processing facilities in Afghanistan.
Additionally, Finucane warned that Mexico would likely look to retaliate against the U.S. for violating its sovereignty with military operations in its territory, which would damage Trump's goal of stemming the flow of migration to the southern U.S. border.
"Mexico could respond by curtailing or terminating assistance in stemming the passage of migrants through its territory," he explained. "Further, the unilateral bombing of drug labs or killing of narcos would also shut down the possibility of counter-narcotic cooperation with Mexico in the future."
Risa Brooks, a political scientist at Marquette University, argued on Bluesky that a U.S. military campaign in Latin America could be part of a broader effort to politicize the military and make it into an institution primarily loyal to the Republican Party.
"Missions that involve the U.S. military in counter cartel, as well as immigration and law enforcement roles, embroil it in controversy, because the public's attitudes about those missions are so polarized," she explained. "People that support the administration and these missions applaud the military's involvement. Those that don't come to mistrust it. The public starts to see the military as supporting one side in U.S. politics."
All of this, Brooks added, "normalizes the idea of the military as a partisan force" that is expected to serve at the behest of a political party rather than a nation.
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'World's Leading Trump Whisperer' Sheinbaum Gets Another 90 Days for Tariff Talks
"Sheinbaum continues to run circles around Trump," said one observer.
Jul 31, 2025
On the eve of President Donald Trump's dramatic tariff hike on countries around the world, the U.S. leader and his Mexican counterpart on Thursday announced another 90-day extension in trade deal negotiations.
"I have just concluded a telephone conversation with the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, which was very successful in that, more and more, we are getting to know and understand each other," Trump wrote on his Truth Social network. "The complexities of a Deal with Mexico are somewhat different than other Nations because of both the problems, and assets, of the Border."
"We have agreed to extend, for a 90 Day period, the exact same Deal as we had for the last short period of time, namely, that Mexico will continue to pay a 25% Fentanyl Tariff, 25% Tariff on Cars, and 50% Tariff on Steel, Aluminum, and Copper," Trump added. "Additionally, Mexico has agreed to immediately terminate its Non Tariff Trade Barriers, of which there were many."
Sheinbaum wrote on the social media site X that she "had a very good call with the president of the United States, Donald Trump. We avoided the tariff increase announced for tomorrow and secured 90 days to build a long-term agreement through dialogue."
Trump had threatened to impose a 30% tariff on Mexico, the United States' largest trading partner, on Friday, absent an agreement. However, for the third time, Sheinbaum negotiated her way around his ultimatums. In March, the last time she did so, The Washington Post's Mary Beth Sheridan and Leila Miller dubbed her "the world's leading Trump whisperer."
The aplomb with which Sheinbaum has handled Trump has earned her widespread praise in Mexico and beyond, and has strongly contributed to her 80% approval rating.
"Sheinbaum secures another pause on Trump's tariffs," Mexico City-based journalist José Luis Granados Ceja said on X. "Given yesterday's positive economic news that shows a growing economy, shrinking inequality, and a drop in poverty, the Mexican government is accomplishing extraordinary things in a very unpredictable situation."
Eric Michael Garcia, the Washington, D.C. bureau chief of the British news site The Independent, said on X that "Sheinbaum continues to run circles around Trump for the exact opposite reason the [European Union] conceded to Trump: The success of Trump's presidency relies on the border with Mexico. She can open the spigot anytime he crosses her."
Mexican journalist Jorge Armando Rocha opined on X that "among all nations, Mexico has the best possible trade agreement with the United States."
Some observers warned against Mexican triumphalism or complacency, given Trump's volatility and past threats against Mexico—including talk of an invasion targeting drug cartels. The United States has launched three major invasions and even more minor incursions into Mexico, including an 1846-48 war waged on false pretenses that ended with the U.S. taking more than half of Mexico's territory.
As Trump makes progress in talks with one U.S. neighbor, he's making threats against another. On Wednesday, Trump said that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's decision to conditionally recognize Palestinian statehood "will make it very hard" to complete a trade deal ahead of the president's August 1 deadline to avoid 35% tariffs on all imported Canadian goods not covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that "at some point this afternoon or later this evening" Trump will order tariffs against dozens of nations with which agreements have not been reached.
Although Trump administration officials promised "90 deals in 90 days," only around half a dozen tariff agreements have been reached, including with the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
In stark contrast with these agreements, Trump also imposed a 50% tariff on Brazil for prosecuting his friend and fellow far-right insurrection inciter Jair Bolsonaro, widely known as the "Trump of the Tropics" during his tenure as president of the South American giant.
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