Bombing Mexico Is Foolish
How to combat the flood of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into the United States has become a top policy question in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sept. 17, former President Donald Trump suggested that U.S. military action inside Mexico against the drug cartels could very well be an option. Such a recommendation wouldn’t be surprising; Trump purportedly asked his defense secretary about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexican drug labs during his first term, and he’s reportedly mulling a plan that would designate the drug cartels as “unlawful enemy combatants,” akin to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Trump isn’t the only candidate seeking to further militarize the war on drugs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed during the first GOP presidential debate that he would authorize force against the cartels “on day one.” Not to be outdone, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley reiterated her own hawkish bona-fides: “I would send special operations in there and eliminate them [the cartels] just like we eliminated ISIS and make sure that they know there’s no place for them.”
There’s only one problem: strip the tough-guy rhetoric aside and the idea of employing U.S. military force on Mexican soil to staunch the flow of fentanyl and other drugs is so ineffective and potentially disastrous that it doesn’t even deserve serious consideration.
One must first ask whether such a proposal is even legal under domestic and international law. Unless the Mexican government approves U.S. military operations in Mexico, something no Mexican president would likely do, sending U.S. special operations forces into the country, bombing cartel positions from the air, or deploying the U.S. Navy to seal off Mexico’s ports to block precursor material from coming in would be a violation of Mexican sovereignty. And unless Congress specifically authorized the use of military force through legislation, the domestic law justification would be flimsy to nonexistent as well. While the U.S., like every other country, reserves a right to defend itself, the only plausible way the White House could claim self-defense is if there was a violent, coordinated cartel attack on American citizens. Yet that ship has already sailed; U.S. military force wasn’t against a splinter group of the Gulf Cartel after its fighters killed two Americans last March in the Mexican city of Matamoros suggests executive branch lawyers don’t buy into the argument.
The practicalities should be accounted for as well. Would military strikes be effective at degrading the cartel’s strength and wealth, or limit its capacity to produce and ship narcotics? While some candidates certainly think so, the evidence says otherwise. The U.S. spent years assisting the Colombian security forces across multiple U.S. administrations with intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance as it combatted the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)’s cocaine enterprise. Those efforts had short-term effects at best; according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, coca cultivation last year reached the highest levels since the agency began keeping records two decades ago. In Afghanistan, the U.S. military spent nearly $9 billion on counternarcotics programs, including a multi-year bombing campaign against Taliban-affiliated opium labs. The result of the operation was dismal. “There are a number of things we did in Afghanistan which were too difficult, so we just kicked the can,” U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko said in July 2021. “Narcotics, that was one. We just basically kicked the can down, just gave up.”
What didn’t work in Afghanistan is highly unlikely to work in Mexico. For one, you don’t need plantations or large-scale labs to produce synthetic opioids like fentanyl. The drug is cheap to manufacture, and the profit margins for the cartels are gigantic, which means the financial incentive to produce the narcotic will continue regardless of U.S. military countermeasures. The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartels, two of Mexico’s most powerful criminal enterprises, make billions of dollars every year in the fentanyl trade, and most of the pills come into the U.S. through legal ports of entry since they are so easy to conceal. The cartels don’t need scientists or technically-gifted engineers to work in these small, makeshift manufacturing facilities either. The poor economic situation in many parts of Mexico assures the cartels of a steady labor supply. Bomb the facilities, and these organizations will simply set up shop elsewhere.
U.S.-Mexico relations will also suffer mightily after a hypothetical U.S. military operation. If U.S. policymakers are frustrated about the lack of cooperation from their Mexican counterparts today, they will be in for a rude awakening after U.S. bombs or troops are dropped on Mexican soil. Opposition to the unilateral use of U.S. military force is not simply a partisan issue in Mexican politics; it’s a matter of principle. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) successor will recoil just as strongly to such a scenario as AMLO does today, and Mexican authorities would likely retaliate for what they consider a flagrant insult. Retaliation could include more restrictions on, or even the expulsion of, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents inside Mexico. Extraditions of Mexican kingpin like Ovidio Guzman Lopez, which took place on Sept. 15, could be significantly curtailed or shut down entirely.
More than 109,000 Americans have died from overdoses between February 2022 and February 2023, the most on record. Tackling the surge of fentanyl into the United States is tricky business, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem. Bad policy will only create more issues.
