Did you notice how the argument about America’s southern border shifted from building walls to waging war on cartels? Recent action inside the Trump White House has ratcheted up such discourse to new heights, mixing military strength, economic coercion, and sweeping executive decrees into a single very hard-line package. But beneath all the huffing and puffing is a complex mix of policy, politics, and unintended consequences that are worth considering.
President Trump has been no slouch in his enthusiasm to exclude drug cartels, even labeling some Latin American organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Trump’s executive orders, WOLA argues, have tasked the U.S. Northern Command with sealing off the border and keeping out that which he has labeled “forms of invasion” such as mass migration, narcotic smuggling, and cartel violence.
That’s not merely about sending some National Guard members to the border to assist Border Patrol—it’s an active-duty mobilization of Marines and soldiers, and even the Insurrection Act mobilization of soldiers against American citizens and migrants in their path.
The administration’s goals extend far past the border. Trump signed confidential directives to the Pentagon to start deploying troops abroad to fight cartels as terrorist groups. WOLA considers the move to be unjust on so many levels. To initiate the military campaign in Mexico, or for that matter, in any nation without their advance consent would be a bloody violation of international conventions and lead to a failure of diplomacy and further increase the hurdles to cooperation on other matters of immediate need, such as migration. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum promised one thing: “The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military.”
But there are more than degrees to problems. Counterarguments are that deploying the military against organized crime unavoidably misidentifies the enemy. Cartels are not insurgencies waging a struggle for political control—They’re profit-oriented syndicates interpenetrated in government, law enforcement, and the legitimate economy. Knock out a kingpin, and another one takes his place; destroy a drug laboratory, and another one is ready on the shelves to wait for the price of a sports car. The “kingpin strategy” has been tried for decades, with no success, and with little impact on street levels of drug availability or overall bloodshed.
The “war on cartels” also oversimplifies the causes of America’s drug epidemic. As George Mason University Professor Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera details, the opioid epidemic was started by producers such as Purdue Pharma, who aggressively marketed painkillers while minimizing addiction risk. To accuse Mexican cartels alone is to overlook U.S. producers’, physicians’, and domestic production. The worldwide supply chain of producing synthetic drugs neither starts nor ends in Mexico but includes China, India, and even U.S. plants.
At the same time, Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico complicates matters. Threatening to impose 25% across-the-board tariffs on the neighbors, Trump has intimidated both countries into strengthening border security and anti-fentanyl efforts. Mexico pledged to put National Guard troops along the border, and Canada appointed a “fentanyl tsar,” but these appeasement measures have been done at the price of strained diplomacy and economic instability. North American trade is threatened by the specter of tariffs as governments and businesses race to fall into place.
So what’s the alternative, then? Specialists are dead certain that true war against crime means dismantling the kleptocratic cartel-state axis, investing in prosecutors, investigators, and citizens’ watchdogs in civil society, and in good security institutions accountable to the people. Rather than paying for soldier wars, America must build stable civilian institutions, invest in public health campaigns against drug addiction, and prosecute pharmaceutical corporations. Building intelligence sharing and close partnership with Mexico and other allies attacking the demand side of drug addiction, is all part of a smarter, cheaper policy.
The myth of an easy military solution is tempting, but the world does not work that way. The American struggle with the cartels is a bombastic game, high-stakes bets, and requires more understanding of the dynamics at play. High stakes—not only for border security, but for U.S. relations with neighbors in the future, for the health of its people, and for the health of its democracy.