Republicans' plan to bomb Mexico is bad. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

14 - 18 minutes

During the Trump administration, Brett Giroir served as Assistant Secretary for Health, a position that entailed a commission as an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service and, therefore, required that Giroir sometimes wear a military-style dress uniform.

This is the source of an amusing anecdote reported by Maggie Haberman: Giroir supposedly came to the Oval Office to talk about opioids, and Trump — mistaking him for a military officer — asked about bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. “The response from White House aides,” Haberman dryly reports, “was not to try to change Trump’s view, but to consider asking Giroir not to wear his uniform to the Oval Office anymore.” Haberman also reports in her book that Trump’s interest in the subject led to him “eventually asking a stunned Defense Secretary Mark Esper whether the United States could indeed bomb the labs,” which suggests the whole thing was not purely a mixup about Giroir’s role.

During the initial news cycle, the contrarian in me was inclined to come to Trump’s defense.

Politicians are very image-conscious, which often leads to management errors. One of the worst things a boss can do is decline to ask questions of subordinates because they’re afraid the question will make them look dumb. The fact is, nobody who runs a company or public sector entity has intimate personal familiarity with every single aspect of the operation. You are mostly trusting that your subordinates know what they are doing, but it is correct and reasonable to sometimes ask them to consider outside-the-box ideas and explain from first principles why they are doing things the way they are doing them. This is a particularly serious issue when it comes to the job of president of the United States, which involves an incredible range of topics — it is good to boldly ask questions, even “dumb” questions like “why don’t we just bomb the labs?” because you really do want to make sure you’re getting a whole range of views.

I didn’t think much more about it. Obviously Trump did not bomb Mexico, and the mere fact that he asked about it didn’t seem damning to me.

But flash forward to April 2023 and I’m reading David Weigel on how Republicans are proposing military action in Mexico as their new solution to the drug problem. Politico’s Alex Ward has reported the same. In keeping with his determination to position himself on the right wing of every policy dispute, Ron DeSantis has gone further and been more explicit than other contenders, but everyone is doing it. And nobody has answered the most basic questions about how this is supposed to work or why they think it’s a good idea.

I worry that some elements of the conservative movement are so busy marinating in trad-inflected propaganda from Russia and China that they’ve totally blinded themselves to how much America’s enemies would love to see us bogged down in a highly ambiguous military mission south of the border.

One of the biggest lessons of the past several generations is that launching a discretionary military offensive is a very risky undertaking. A modern military can’t “live off the land,” and advanced industrial societies can’t actually wage war for conquest. Even when you “win,” as the United States did initially in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you end up saddled with a lot of thorny governance problems that you have limited ability to solve. And those were relatively good outcomes compared to say, Russia expending tremendous amounts of blood and treasure to conquer a relatively small amount of Ukrainian terrain of questionable value that they may or may not be able to hold.

Meanwhile, you run massive risks of strategic distraction.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr, one of the leading proponents of a more militarized approach to Mexico, specifically blames those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for having distracted us from engaging more fully with Mexico 15 years ago. His argument about that strikes me as somewhat reasonable. But when he turns to the present day, it’s all wishful thinking. In his March op-ed that helped kick this all into high gear, Barr says “We can’t get caught in the trap of ‘nation building’” and also that “optimally, the Mexican government will support and participate in this effort, and it is likely to do so once they understand that the U.S. is committed to do whatever is necessary to cripple the cartels, whether or not the Mexican government participates.”

His vision is basically:

    America announces we’re sending in the troops whether Mexico cooperates or not.

    Mexico decides to cooperate.

    U.S. forces, in cooperation with the Mexican government, make a brief-but-intense “big push” to fight the cartels.

    U.S. forces depart, leaving behind Mexican forces that now have a decisive upper hand against the cartels.

That would be lovely. But what if the Mexican government doesn’t cooperate, state authority collapses in the areas of American military action, cooperation on drugs and migration and all the rest collapses everywhere, and while cartels are largely forced underground, the United States now occupies a broad swathe of Northern Mexico to prevent them from taking total control? Now we’re in an open-ended, low-intensity war against cartel elements that are also patriotic resistance fighters and maybe also enjoy the patronage of the People’s Republic of China, while political systems across Latin America gravitate away from the U.S.

Can I guarantee that will happen? Of course not. These things are unpredictable. But that’s precisely why the onus is on the proponents of this kind of escalation to show they have worked out some kind of realistic plan and aren’t engaged in wishful thinking.

For all that Barr’s take on this is glib, he at least defines the problem in plausible terms as related to governance in Mexico and the lack of state control there.

Trump’s plan to just fire missiles at fentanyl factories and DeSantis’ plan to use “drone strikes” against unspecified cartel targets are both even stupider. These guys clearly don’t want boots on the ground in Mexico, which is smart — they recognize that we are a somewhat war-weary country at this point with concerns even about the Biden administration’s completely offshore engagement with Ukraine. So fling some explosives over the border and forget about it!

But facilities for producing and distributing fentanyl aren’t unique targets like Osama bin Laden, where you can do the strike, take the hit (which in that case included a lot of kids getting polio), and pocket your gains.

As long as there’s a big market for fentanyl in the United States, the relevant infrastructure will be rebuilt. That’s not to say an interdiction strategy is doomed to failure, but it would need to be sustained to significantly increase the price and reduce the availability of the stuff in the United States. You’d need an ongoing flow of intelligence and a strategy for responding to retaliatory murders that happen on American territory. We don’t have to like the outcome, but there’s a reason the Mexican government eventually backed away from fighting the drug cartels — they enjoy making their money and fight back when hurt.

Ken Cuccinelli, in his policy brief “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels,” concedes that there is a major risk here, writing that one of the downsides of his proposal is the “potential for criminal illegal alien gangs operating in major US cities to carry out attacks at the behest of cartels designated as cartel networks and affiliated factions.” That’s not, on its own, a decisive objection. But a policymaker who wants to go down this road needs to be ready for the blowback with a realistic plan.

Meanwhile, none of the people involved in this discourse — not Cuccinelli, not Barr, not Trump, not DeSantis — acknowledge that they themselves have elevated migration over drugs in the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship and that if we start humiliating the Mexican government, they will reduce cooperation and our problems on that score will get worse.

Barr cites Plan Colombia, inaugurated under Bill Clinton but mostly implemented by George W. Bush, as the positive example here.

My read of the literature is that there’s a lot of disagreement as to how effective this military cooperation deal really was in reducing the flow of cocaine to the United States. It’s a bit overshadowed by the huge number of opioid overdoses, but cocaine overdose deaths have also been on the rise — admittedly mostly due to blending with fentanyl, but people are still getting cocaine.

That said, Plan Colombia clearly did contribute to degrading the military capability of FARC, which set the stage for a peace deal that came together during Obama’s second term. So there’s definitely a success story here, but this is what the Colombian government wanted. The concerns from the U.S. side were about whether we were wasting money on something doomed, or whether we were empowering the most reactionary elements in Colombia who would do lots of bad things with our help. Ultimately it worked out pretty well. But this is exactly what is not happening in Mexico.

Fifteen years ago it was a different story.

Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006 as Mexico’s second-ever president from the center-right PAN party and inaugurated high-intensity military action against the Mexican cartels. The United States stepped up to the plate with the Mérida Initiative, which was supposed to be the Mexican version of Plan Colombia. Barr nods at this history, writing that “Mexican cartels have flourished because Mexican administrations haven’t been willing to take them on. The exception was President Felipe Calderón (2006-12) who wanted to go full bore against the cartels, but American priorities were elsewhere at the time.”

It’s not like we did nothing during Calderón’s time — there was a $1.6 billion military aid package for Mexico spread out across 2007–2010 with other money directed at Central American governments. Congress also cut the Dominican Republic and Haiti in on the action.

But Barr suggests an interesting hypothetical. During this period, the United States was spending upwards of $100 billion per year in Iraq. Maybe Mérida and the Calderón-era drug war could have been a big success if the U.S. had spent $16 billion per year for a decade on it while quietly making U.S. special forces available to help on select missions.

But that’s not what happened. We poured money down the drain in Iraq, and then when Obama took over, he implemented an expensive surge in Afghanistan. And daily life in Mexico got much worse under Calderón’s war footing. The cartels fought back, tons of people died, and the Calderón-era head of Mexico’s federal police was convicted earlier this year in federal court in the United States. One of the main U.S. government witnesses in that case, a former Mexican state attorney general, says Calderón himself was working with the Sinaloa Cartel the whole time. My awareness of how badly this worked out is one reason I’ve been surprised by the apparent success of Bukele’s gang crackdown in El Salvador — “getting tough” in the context of weak state structures is a non-trivial problem, and I still wish I was seeing clearer reporting on how El Salvador avoided the massive corruption that plagues Mexican security services.

Either way, Calderón left office unpopular, and both of his successors from two different political parties have deliberately abandoned this approach. The current president, AMLO, is wildly popular at home. The idea that you can just conjure up Calderón-like policies but with stepped-up American involvement is a fantasy. You’d be moving very much against the grain of contemporary Mexican opinion, which does not want to see its country torn up in order to solve an American drug problem.

Fentanyl is a genuinely grave and objectively hard problem to solve.

And discourse participants keep wanting to make the fentanyl problem about something other than fentanyl itself. People sometimes look at life expectancy falling in the U.S. as it rises in Europe and say “well, this shows we need a European-style health insurance system.” There are some very serious problems with American health care, but it’s not like those problems suddenly arose in 2014 when life expectancy stopped improving. Instead, we are seeing the unpleasant consequences of specific policy errors that were made years earlier with regard to prescription opioids.

There’s also been this incredibly damaging “deaths of despair” narrative that lumped a bunch of problems together under the heading of “despair,” even though the increase was really driven by just one thing — opioids — that happened specifically in the United States because of specific prescription drug policy errors.

The new version of this that’s entered the “bomb Mexico” narrative is to try to make fentanyl about immigration policy. Immigration is one of the GOP’s best issues to use against Biden, and fentanyl overdoses are a genuinely serious problem, so linking the two rhetorically makes sense.

But fentanyl is being smuggled by U.S. citizens who are crossing at legal ports of entry. It’s a separate issue. Honest immigration hawks should admit that America’s drug problem kept getting worse all throughout Trump’s immigration crackdown because the drugs are not an immigration issue.

By far the most straightforward interdiction strategy would be to do more (and more rigorous) searches of cross-border vehicle traffic. That would be annoying to people engaged in legitimate commerce and tourism, and it would cost money because it’s labor-intensive. I think reasonable people can disagree on the cost-benefit. I haven’t seen anyone attempt a rigorous quantitative analysis so I don’t really have an opinion. I’m not someone who personally crosses the U.S.-Mexico land border, so it’s easy for me to say it would be worth the hassle, but people who live in south Texas may disagree. That’s something we should talk about, though. There’s also a lot of fentanyl that comes in the mail directly from China. Australia invests a lot of money in searching mail, which has proven pretty effective.

Of course, Australia doesn’t have a land border. And one reason for the rise of the Mexican fentanyl trade is that we have gotten better at intercepting direct-from-China fentanyl. That in turn is a reminder that all interdiction is a bit of a whack-a-mole: if we squeeze harder in Mexico, other routes will be found. That doesn’t mean it’s pointless — increasing the cost and logistical difficulty has value — just that the cost-benefit of any specific interdiction is a bit smaller than a naive look might suggest. There’s just no getting around the need to get opioid users into treatment. The reason Mexico doesn’t take this problem as seriously as we’d like is that it’s Americans who are using the fentanyl — that’s not a law of nature, it’s something we could fix.

The good news, such as it is, is that drug overdose deaths seem to be leveling off and are even falling in the hardest-hit states. Even without policy interventions, these drug epidemics tend to be self-limiting and burn themselves out. We should try to do things to make the situation better, but invading Mexico has tremendous downside risks and limited upside.