President-elect Donald Trump has declared war on the drug cartels in Mexico. “The drug cartels are waging war on America, and it’s now time for America to wage war on the cartels,” he said in one of his toughest videos ever.
Photos of fentanyl victims are displayed at The Faces of Fentanyl Memorial at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters in Arlington, Va., on Sept. 27, 2022. Alex Wong/Getty Images
And it wasn’t the first time. He strongly advocated for many of the same actions in his first term and got results.
Trump’s incoming appointees support that tough approach. The potential future “border czar,” Thomas Homan, said on Nov. 12 that Trump is committed to deploying the “full might of the United States Special Operations to take them out.” The appointed defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said in 2023 that military “precision strikes” on the cartels might be needed to deter them from operating “in the open with impunity.”
The United States has every ethical reason to launch a war on the cartels. They use chemical precursors from China to produce the vast majority of the illegal fentanyl that causes most of the 82,000 opioid overdose deaths in 2022 in the United States. That’s over 27 times more deaths every year than happened from the 9/11 attacks.
Fentanyl poisoning is deliberate and far worse in the number of deaths than anti-U.S. terrorism. Those who sell illegal fentanyl in the United States, when it results in death, are justly convicted of murder.
Yet China and Mexico get off scot-free. Beijing uses its supply of precursors as leverage against the United States on issues like Taiwan, which proves that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intends the deaths that result when Washington does not submit. If we want Beijing to stop the shipment of precursors, the CCP demands that we stop following the law to supply Taiwan with the weapons it needs for its self-defense. Some have called these CCP actions a form of blackmail, chemical warfare, or genocide. Arguably, they are all three.
Just as the mullahs in Iran used Hamas to attack Israel, the CCP is using Mexican cartels to attack the United States. The risk for Hamas and now the cartels is that they could be targeted in response. Trump published an “action plan to destroy the drug cartels” in December. He is threatening to designate them as terrorist organizations, cut them off from the international financial system, hit them with cyberattacks, deport or execute foreign drug dealers and gang members, finish the border wall, and eliminate cartel leaders. This could be done with cruise or drone-fired missiles.
If Mexico fails to help or take over these tasks themselves, Trump could unmask the Mexican politicians who cooperate with the cartels, entirely close the border, impose tariffs on Mexico, and impose a naval blockade to stop precursor shipments.