How to really really lose a drug war?
By doing stupid stuff
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S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The US has been ratcheting up the pressure on Mexico. As Donald Trump put it to his fan boy Sean Hannity on Fox a week after U.S. forces snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, “we’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water. And we are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels.”
The Mexican government has been frantically pushing back against Trump’s apparent eagerness to strike something–anything–on Mexican soil, hoping to convince him that Mexico is already getting a lot done in terms of reducing the flow of fentanyl to the United States.
But Washington doesn’t want to take the win. Its National Defense Strategy document warned that while the U.S. will “help to develop partners’ ability to degrade narco-terrorist organizations across the Americas and support them as they do,” it also “will be prepared to act decisively on our own, as the Joint Force demonstrated”when they took down Maduro.
The bang-bang approach will lose. It will lose because it is remarkably stupid.
I won’t dwell much on the stupidity of believing Washington can win its drug war without curbing demand for the stuff. As long as gringos are willing to pay good money for their favorite high, Mexicans, Colombians, Russians, Chinese, Afghans, Venezuelans and even other gringos will supply it.
The stupidity of Trump’s approach is stupider. Let’s start with his command of the geography of the thing. Knocking out “97% of the drugs coming in by water” means bringing something very near zero closer to zero. Drugs don’t arrive in the U.S. by water. Maritime routes from Colombia and Ecuador land in Central America or Mexico and continue to the U.S. border over land.
Since Trump and his mascot Pete Hegseth have been bombing speedboats in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean (bombing boats in the Caribbean displays an additional layer of stupidity which we can discuss at another time), cocaine seizures at the southern border (cocaine is the main drug transported from South America by sea) have increased , not declined.
Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution does a good job at laying out the rest of the stupid stuff. The kind of military strikes Trump dreams of against fentanyl labs and narco strongholds have been tried by the Mexicans for years, to little effect. Beheading cartels usually just unleashes new turf wars, leading to more violence. Labs move and the drugs keep flowing.
For the U.S. to do this against the Mexican government’s wishes would create additional trouble, putting at risk bilateral cooperation. Even if American armed intervention was particularly effective at weakening Mexico’s drug cartels, it is shortsighted, to say the least, not to consider that they would retaliate. The easiest, and perhaps most lethal tactic at their disposal would be to ratchet up the deadliness of the fentanyl they sell in the United States.
Let’s stop here to assess the situation. Fentanyl overdoses have been falling for many months. They are back to where they were before the surge during the Covid pandemic. There are surely more than one reasons for this. One of them, though, is probably the sudden decline, starting in 2023, in fentanyl purity .
What drove this is hard to tell. One story–plausible, though pooh-poohed by America’s drug warriors at the Drug Enforcement Administration–is that the cartel bosses in Sinaloa and Jalisco imposed discipline, eliminating free-lancers and taking absolute control over the supply of fentanyl.
Who knows? maybe they figured it was bad business to kill their customers. Maybe they got cold feet at the prospect of a more intense reaction from the United States. In any event, it seems risky for the U.S. just to go in there and bomb them without first considering how this might boomerang against Americans.
As Felbab-Brown pointed out “fentanyl could, for example, be swapped with carfentanil or nitazenes and introduced—perhaps temporarily—into the U.S. drug supply, rapidly causing thousands of overdose deaths.”
It would be hard for the Trump administration to call that a success.
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Duh.
But arresting Americans - more particularly the wealthy White Americans who pay top dollar for their dose - would be politically unpopular. It's easier to kill some Mexicans. They're not White , so no one cares.