When conservative commentators began suggesting earlier this year that then-candidate Donald Trump would use the U.S. military to attack Mexico’s drug cartels if he won the presidential election, the most common response was disbelief. Dropping bombs on fentanyl labs and sending special operations forces to assassinate cartel leaders seemed too far-fetched to debate. This was especially true given Trump’s stances on U.S. military support for Ukraine and other hot spots in the world, which seemed to indicate a reduced global security role for the United States.
Yet, the fact that many reasonable analysts think military attacks on cartels are a bad idea and contradictory to Trump’s foreign policy positions elsewhere does not mean that he won’t launch them. In fact, when asked about it by Fox News in July, Trump replied, “Mexico is gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely.” One of Trump’s defense secretaries during his first term, Mark Esper, says Trump asked for lists of military options for countering the Mexican drug cartels back then and was barely dissuaded from going that route.
Having now won re-election, Trump appears to be moving toward a more aggressive use of the U.S. military at the border to combat migration, and his advisers are also building a case for cross-border military operations into Mexico. In other words, the signs are that the incoming Trump administration is preparing for an actual war against the drug cartels in 2025 that goes well beyond the “War on Drugs” of the past. That means that whether or not we think this is a debate worth having, it is a debate we must now have.
The first challenge for the militarized approach under consideration is diplomatic. Mexican President Sheinbaum has so far rejected U.S. security assistance and reduced already limited intelligence-sharing and other cooperation since taking office in October. At the same time, Sheinbaum appears to have taken a more aggressive approach herself toward the cartels, using Mexico’s military to do so. As a product of Mexico’s political left, Sheinbaum was shaped by an ideological environment that harbors longstanding concerns about U.S. meddling and even intervention in Mexico; given that the U.S. invaded Mexico multiple times and annexed half of its territory in the 19th century, the skepticism about U.S. intentions is far from unfounded. Sheinbaum’s leftist predecessor and mentor, former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also reduced security cooperation with the U.S. in his first year in office for similar reasons. But so too did AMLO’s centrist predecessor and ideological foe, former President Enrique Pena Nieto, underscoring the deeply rooted nature of these concerns in Mexico.
To the extent there is a division within the incoming Trump administration on the issue of using the military against the cartels, it is not between those who are for and against the idea. Every top adviser seems to be on board with greater use of the military to combat cartels in some way. Instead, the big question internally is whether the Mexican government should be asked to be a partner in these offensive operations or if the U.S. should launch them unilaterally without consulting Mexico first. It is not clear if Sheinbaum would be willing to negotiate some sort of agreement for a limited operation if she gets something in return, but if the U.S. launches attacks without coordination, the diplomatic fallout will be intense.
Second, whether coordinated or not, there are strategic and tactical challenges to targeting the cartel operations. The U.S. needs to locate the cartel leaders and the fentanyl labs if they want to hit them. On one hand, a military operation in a neighboring country should be relatively easy, given how close all the U.S. assets are. On the other hand, every military operation comes with the risk of failure; the potential for a Blackhawk Down scenario—in which U.S. troops end up pinned down in a violent standoff with criminal forces or even Mexican troops defending the country’s sovereignty from U.S. intervention—is real. A “simple” operation could rapidly escalate into something more complex and deadly.
The big question among Trump’s advisers is whether the Mexican government should be asked to be a partner in military operations against cartels or if the U.S. should launch them unilaterally.
The U.S. must also consider potential responses by the cartels, which are businesses that want to make money, not terrorist groups interested in creating fear for the sake of a political or ideological goal. They would prefer to not be targeted by U.S. military strikes, and some may simply lie low in an attempt to get back to business-as-usual as quickly as possible. But some Mexican criminal groups may decide to fight back and even escalate violence by targeting U.S. interests, businesses and citizens. They can do plenty of damage to U.S. forces operating in Mexico, and they have the capabilities, weapons and personnel to take the fight into U.S. territory in a way that al-Qaida and the Islamic State could only dream of. So if Trump and his team are seriously considering contingency plans, they should be giving some thought to what happens if the cartels choose to fight back.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, tactical military strikes mean nothing is if there is no overarching political strategy to defeat the cartels. Assume for the sake of argument that all the concerns listed above—and there are plenty more I haven’t listed—end up being manageable or don’t come to pass. So the U.S. successfully kills all the cartel leaders it has identified for targeting and bombs all the fentanyl labs it has located, while facing no diplomatic or security problems in doing so. What will it accomplish? What does victory look like? In fact, the drugs will continue to be produced by new or reconstituted cartels that will traffic them into the U.S. using new routes, because the market forces driving the drug cartels are too profitable to defeat with military might.
We know this because Mexico has already tried. When Pena Nieto entered office in 2012, Mexican security forces had a list of 122 top cartel leaders they wanted to target. They managed to capture or kill over 100 of the people on that list. The result was more homicides and more violence, as the bigger cartels split apart into smaller and more violent organizations. More recently, the arrests by U.S. law enforcement agencies of key Sinaloa Cartel leaders—one of whom alleges he was abducted and forcibly brought to the U.S. by the other as part of a deal with those U.S. agencies—has led to a surge of violence in Sinaloa, with various factions now fighting over succession and revenge.
Finally, even if the U.S. successfully dismantles one or two top criminal groups and slows the flow of drugs—and migrants, which the cartels also traffic—what will that “victory” cost? The answer is a politically divided North America, where the U.S.-Mexico border is closed, U.S. supply chains have broken down and the U.S. must manage renewed tensions with a neighboring country with which it should instead be forming an alliance to counter China.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration appears on course to launch a military operation into Mexico next year. Diplomatic, tactical and strategic concerns do not appear likely to dissuade it. Businesses and analysts wondering how U.S.-Mexico relations will fare under the second Trump administration are currently focused on tariff and trade issues. They need to start factoring these military scenarios into their equations.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets, as well as a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.