Only Weirdos Like Trump Want To Start a War With Mexico
The supposedly antiwar GOP presidential candidate is intent on violating our neighbor's sovereignty with reckless air strikes and covert ops.
Of all the weird and reckless things Donald Trump has signaled he would do in his restored presidency, a dark-horse contender for the weirdest and most reckless is his proposal to launch a war of aggression against Mexico.
For years, in speeches, interviews, and a self-narrated video on his campaign website, the former and perhaps future president has threatened to send military assets, including "Special Forces, cyber warfare and other overt or covert actions" into Mexico to "inflict maximum damage" on the drug cartels for their importation of lethal fentanyl and other drugs. This oft-repeated pledge comes from the same man who calls himself the only president in recent memory not to have started any new wars.
Mexico naturally rejects and condemns this unambiguous military threat against its sovereignty. Outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO as the leftist leader is known, last year lambasted this "offense against the people of Mexico." Xóchitl Gálvez, the conservative opposition presidential candidate who recently lost, implored her fellow conservatives in the US: "Rather than threats, we should work in a smart way." AMLO even issued a noteworthy warning to the Republican Party that the popular politician could make it known to the Mexican diaspora in the US to vote against the GOP.
Trump's attempt to manufacture a war with Mexico pushes on the wide-open door of traditional Republican preferences for treating Latin America as a place to destabilize, plunder, and wall off. The New York Times observed last year that "Mr. 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." That symbiosis reveals a lot about MAGA's true relationship to militarism. A contingent that embraces violence against out-groups at home will never produce peace abroad.
Unhinged MAGA conspiracies
Fentanyl is a public health crisis, which is well beyond my expertise, so I won't pretend I know how to solve it. But like a normal person, I understand that nothing resembling a response to the actual problem involves bombing, invading, sanctioning, or digitally sabotaging the US' southern neighbor and major trade partner. Fentanyl smuggling, data compiled by the libertarian Cato Institute show, is primarily the work of US citizens, not the cartels. A normal politician would have no difficulty expressing this. But that wouldn't describe, say, Trump vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance.
Vance won his Senate seat in Ohio in part thanks to an unhinged position that the Biden administration was weakening border enforcement for fentanyl to "kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland." Fentanyl, in this telling, is a weapon of mass destruction wielded in treasonous collaboration with a foreign criminal element against an American herrenvolk. Doing so provides an additional pretext and urgency for all measures of draconian border militarization that is central to MAGA's agenda and appeal. We're so far from normal that it's hard to remember what normal is from here.
Calling the Mexican assault a plan is generous. As my former Daily Beast colleagues Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley have reported for Rolling Stone, Trump mused about sending "assassination squads" to decapitate cartel leadership. It's an iteration of an earlier idea from Trump's presidency, revealed and rejected by his Defense Secretary Mark Esper, to bomb cartel drug labs and deny responsibility. Trump, Suebsaeng and Rawnsley reported, also asked his advisers for "scenarios for potential airstrikes, drone attacks, US troop deployments." Trump also proposes a "full naval embargo on the cartels." By February, the US Navy could be blockading the ports of an indispensable US trading partner.