No, America shouldn't invade Mexico
Only a cooperative approach can help solve the fentanyl crisis
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The MAGA wing of the GOP often tries to distinguish itself from other parts of the Republican Party - and from the mainstream foreign policy consensus - by opposing military action. They are critical of past American nation-building efforts in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and they are against American help to Ukraine. But no-one should mistake them for pacifists: many just happen to like Vladimir Putin and prefer to focus on gearing up for conflict with China. And they reach for military power far too eagerly when they think it suits their political interests.
Right now they’re busy proving this by advancing an incredibly unwise idea: that America should use military power in Mexico to combat the drug cartels who are flooding the American market with the deadly drug fentanyl. I’ll let the proponents of the idea speak for themselves:
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants.
That’s a lot to take in. So why on earth are they saying this?
The fentanyl crisis combines two things that are absolutely important problems, but which are also particularly susceptible to Trumpian demagoguery. The first are so-called “deaths of despair” caused by drugs, alcohol and suicide, which have contributed significantly to the incredible fact that U.S. life expectancy has been declining in recent years. Deaths of despair disproportionately affect white, rural areas, and drug overdoses involving fentanyl are a significant cause of them. As you can see on the below graph from the National Institutes of Health, fentanyl went from being involved in basically zero overdose deaths a few years ago to being by far the biggest cause of them in 2021. The increase in fentanyl deaths has caused a huge portion of the increase in overall overdose deaths, which have doubled since 2015.
The second salient feature of the fentanyl crisis is that it does indeed have a significant international dimension. Fentanyl is manufactured in labs using precursor chemicals, and according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, most of the fentanyl trafficked by the two Mexican cartels that Republicans want to bomb “is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemicals sourced largely from China”.
Given these two aspects of the problem - a social crisis affecting white, rural voters and a way to blame foreigners for it - it’s easy to see why Republicans are making hay. On the surface it seems like an easy way to advance their worldview that foreigners (Mexico and China) and uncaring liberal elites (the Biden administration) are conspiring to harm the GOP’s base of white, rural voters. They don’t like to dwell on the fact that most of the increase in fentanyl overdoses occurred during the Trump administration, or that Trump himself did essentially nothing to address the domestic roots and effects of the opioid crisis while he was in office. They want to focus on accusing Biden of weakness and outdoing each other in promising decisive action under the next Republican administration.
More does need to be done to address the fentanyl crisis. But the solutions that Republicans are proposing, plus their idea way of framing the problem as being one that can be solved through unilateral action, is completely wrong. We know this because the United States has tried it before.
U.S. military intervention in Mexico
The U.S. has intervened militarily in Mexico a number of times over the past hundred years. Every time the result has been a dramatic hardening of Mexican nationalism against the United States in ways which make it harder to work on areas of common interest afterwards. Time and again the United States has discovered that the costs associated with alienating the Mexican people and their government far outweigh the very small benefits which can be achieved through unilateral action.
Perhaps the most famous example of intervention was the pursuit of Pancho Villa by General Pershing in 1916 - 17. Villa was a prominent figure in the Mexican Revolution who the Wilson administration had for a time supplied with weapons and equipment in the hope that he would become ruler of all of Mexico. When Wilson later switched his support to Villa’s rival Venustiano Carranza, Villa launched a raid on New Mexico and killed over a dozen American citizens.
The Wilson administration now had a choice: it could turn the other cheek and allow Villa to get away, or it could sent troops into Mexico in hot pursuit. If it chose the latter course it was going to have to do it unilaterally, because there was little chance that Carranza - who Wilson now recognized as the leader of Mexico - would allow American troops into the country. This was especially true because Wilson had authorized another unilateral invasion of Mexico at Veracruz in 1914, about which Mexican opinion remained furious.
Wilson chose the unilateral route, and the American army then spent close to a year tramping around northern Mexico with the latest high-tech military gear. Although it failed to capture Villa, the Punitive Expedition managed to end up fighting and losing a battle against Carranza’s troops. Fearing a larger war which the United States was not prepared to fight, Wilson ordered Pershing’s troops to withdraw northwards. A lot of myth-making about the expedition followed, but it basically ended in defeat.
An intervention in Mexico today could be expected to follow a similar pattern. What started as a series of supposedly “surgical strikes” against drug gangs would mobilize Mexican nationalist opinion against America. The Mexican government would feel the need to respond, perhaps leading to clashes between U.S. and Mexican forces. The Republican president would quickly be faced with a choice between backing down or widening the conflict, sending (more) troops into Mexico and getting bogged down in a counterinsurgency campaign like Iraq or Afghanistan. The flow of drugs might stop or slow down temporarily, but eventually the American troops would go home. They’d leave behind an alienated society and a government unwilling to help them combat the cartels again in the future.
Operation Intercept
You might demur that a Republican president wouldn’t really be this stupid - no president is going to actually order an invasion of Mexico. Even if we allow that this might be true, there are other things a MAGA president might do. For instance, rather than intervening directly, the next Republican administration might follow the approach which Richard Nixon took when he inaugurated the War on Drugs in 1969 - a dramatic crackdown on the Mexican-American border.
Nixon’s effort, which was designed in part by Sheriff Joe Arpaio - yes, the same one - was called Operation Intercept. When he came to office in 1969, Nixon had vowed to do something to address what he characterized as a narcotics crisis affecting America’s youth. Incredibly, the focus of his beef with Mexico wasn’t heroin or acid but marijuana, a substance which is now legal in 21 states. In order to stem the flow of Mary Jane, Nixon ordered that every vehicle and person crossing the border into the United States be subject to a thorough search, “creating an instant nightmare for millions of legal commuters and commercial traders”.
Operation Intercept wasn’t very successful at intercepting drugs, but it led to outrage both in Mexico and the United States. Border communities were especially badly hit because legitimate cross-border trade became so difficult. The Mexican government believed it had received no real warning that the operation was coming, which is hardly surprising because even the State Department was caught by surprise. Many Americans opposed the policy as well, believing that it harmed the nation’s economy and its relations with Mexico without much hope of ending the drug problem. Whoever ordered it, former Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater said, “must be a mental retard”.
But the Nixon administration later claimed to have a secret goal: coercion. G. Gordon Liddy, who later became infamous for his role in Watergate, explained it this way: "Operation Intercept, with its massive economic and social disruption, could be sustained far longer by the United States than by Mexico. It was an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will."
And it’s true that although the Mexican government reacted furiously to Operation Intercept, it did eventually agree to join the United States in an anti-marijuana campaign. But it also fed long-term resentment which only made future cooperation more difficult. And the same gambit isn’t likely to work today, not only because of Mexican nationalism . Economic interconnection between Mexico and the U.S. is so far advanced that a similar attempt to close the border would do enormous economic damage to the United States. Cross-border tourism and commerce is now worth north of $500bn a year. This is one reason why Trump never went through on his numerous threats to close the border. Even in the 1960s, when Liddy boasted that the U.S. could maintain a shutdown longer than Mexico, Operation Intercept only lasted a few dozen days. Nowadays it wouldn’t even get that far.
Cooperation is the answer
The lesson we should take both from Wilson’s ill-fated interventions in Mexico itself and Nixon’s unilateral attack on the Mexican border is that, particularly today, the only sustainable way to tackle the drug problem is through cooperation with Mexico. Drug trafficking will always be a contentious issue between the two governments, with Mexico seeing it as a pretext for American interference in its internal affairs and America viewing Mexico City as uncaring and obstructionist. Threats and violence only escalate this dynamic when the real solution is to tamp it down and create the space for cooperation.
It’s true that Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or Amlo, as he is known), has been somewhat infuriating to Washington on this issue. He denies that fentanyl is even produced in Mexico and has cut back on cooperation with the United States. But Amlo’s attitude has to be understood for what it is: a product of Mexican nationalism, which is in turn a product of every previous unilateral American incursion into Mexico. More incursions will only harden that nationalism, not soften it.
I think that in tackling this problem, the Biden administration has basically the right approach. Just last week they announced a whole new raft of financial and criminal sanctions on key individuals involved in the fentanyl trade, and they’re working quietly with Mexican officials to restart and step up cooperation even amid the harsh rhetoric from Republicans. At the same time, they’re taking steps to address the drug problem at home, such as approving the anti-overdose medication Narcan for over-the-counter distribution. They’ve awarded $1.5bn in federal grants for battling the opioid crisis.
When you compare that to what Trump did, the contrast is particularly clear. The Trump administration failed to even come up with a national drug control strategy - something required by law - in 2017 and 2018. Another Republican policy goal which the Trump administration pursued was dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which funds about 40% of opioid addiction treatment.
Incremental steps like the Biden administration are taking aren’t quick or sexy, but they’re much more likely to get the job done in the long term. The fact is that neither Trump or his followers have the patience or understanding for such an approach, which is why they talk about bombing Mexico - something that will only make the problem immeasurably worse while also creating a host of new ones.