Donald Trump wanted to fire missiles at Mexico. Now the GOP wants to send troops
The first time Donald Trump talked privately about shooting missiles into Mexico to take out drug labs, as far as his former aides can recall, was in early 2020.
And the first time those comments became public was when his second defense secretary, Mark Esper, wrote in his memoir that Trump had raised it with him and asked if the United States could make it look as if some other country was responsible. Esper portrayed the idea as ludicrous.
Yet instead of condemning the idea, some Republicans publicly welcomed word that Trump had wanted to use military force against the drug cartels on Mexican soil — and without the consent of Mexico’s government. Trump’s notion of a military intervention south of the border has swiftly evolved from an Oval Office fantasy to something approaching Republican Party doctrine.
On the presidential campaign trail and on the GOP debate stage in California last week, nearly every Republican candidate has been advocating versions of a plan to send U.S. Special Operations troops into Mexican territory to kill or capture drug cartel members and destroy their labs and distribution centers.
On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers have drafted a broad authorization for the use of military force against cartels — echoing the war powers Congress gave former President George W. Bush before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They have also pushed for designating Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations — a related idea Trump flirted with as president but backed off after Mexico hotly objected. Now, if Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he has vowed to push for the designations and to deploy Special Operations troops and naval forces to, as he put it, declare war on the cartels.
The Republican Party’s attraction to seeking a military solution to the drug problem is a reminder that the GOP — despite its populist shift toward anti-interventionism in the Trump years and the growth of a faction that opposes arming Ukraine against Russia’s invasion — still reaches for armed force to address some complex and intractable problems. Trump himself has been something of a walking contradiction when it comes to the use of force abroad, alternately wanting to pull back U.S. involvement overseas and threatening to drop bombs on enemies such as Iran.
The plans have angered officials in Mexico. Its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has denounced the proposals as outrageous and unacceptable. It has been more than a century since the United States sent military personnel into Mexico without the Mexican government’s assent.
Mexico has a bitter history with U.S. interference: Much of the southwestern United States was part of Mexico before the United States took it by force in the middle of the 19th century. To this day, Mexico generally does not allow U.S. agents with guns to carry out operations on its soil, in contrast to other Latin American countries that have agreed to joint operations with the Drug Enforcement Administration and invited the U.S. government to help train, equip and assist their own security forces.
Analysts have also warned about the potential for military action to cause significant economic damage. The plans could rupture the United States’ relationship with Mexico, its largest trading partner, and curtail other types of cooperation, including the arrest and extradition of criminals and Mexico’s efforts to deter migrants from trying to cross illegally into the United States. Some Republicans view the threat of sending the military into Mexico as a negotiating tool to force Mexican officials to get aggressive with the cartels.
Generally, international law forbids a country from using military force on the sovereign soil of another nation without its consent, except with the permission of the U.N. Security Council or in cases of self-defense. But the United States has taken the position that it can lawfully use force unilaterally on another nation’s territory if its government is unable or unwilling to suppress a nonstate threat emanating from it, such as a threat from a terrorist group.
Republicans have described the Mexican criminal drug-trafficking networks as a national security threat, with some calling fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.
Americans spend many billions of dollars a year on cocaine, heroin and other illegal drugs. For decades, the black market created by that demand has been heavily supplied by criminal smuggling operations across the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. But the rise of fentanyl — a powerful and fast-acting synthetic opioid that can be made cheaply from chemicals — has created a crisis. Fentanyl has been linked to more than two-thirds of the nearly 110,000 American overdose deaths last year, and lawmakers from both parties have been desperately searching for solutions.
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