Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via AP
The Republican candidates for president, The New York Times reports, have united around a common solution for the scourge of fentanyl and other drugs coming across the border: invading Mexico. Almost to a person, they are calling for sending our armed forces—chiefly, special operations troops—into Mexico “to annihilate the Mexican drug cartels,” as Vivek Ramaswamy recently put it.
More than 20 Republican House members are co-sponsoring a bill that would authorize the deployment of U.S. forces against nine of those cartels. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll from September shows considerable public support for such action: By a 2-to-1 margin (52 percent to 26 percent), respondents favored sending troops there to take on the cartels. Even Democrats were narrowly divided: While 47 percent opposed such action, 44 percent backed it.
Given the polarization of our politics, that’s a pretty high level of support. I mean, who, other than the occasional Mexican, would really oppose it?
That objecting Mexican, of course, is the rub. When asked if we should send in the troops without the consent of the Mexican government, that 2-to-1 ratio stayed constant, but this time, it flipped into opposition to such action (59 percent opposed; 29 percent supported). Even 51 percent of Republicans came out against going in without Mexico’s consent.
Their lily-livered base notwithstanding, the Republican presidential candidates seem determined to plow ahead, come what may. The one dissident voice in the Republican field, former Arkansas governor and DEA chief Asa Hutchinson, has put his finger on what some may think a rather fine distinction: Unlike, say, Iraq 20 years ago, Mexico is actually our ally. Then again, Hutchinson’s level of GOP support is so low he didn’t make it into the party’s second presidential debate.
The Mexican government, of course, is furious at these threats, and President López Obrador has actually condemned our Republicans by name.
But I am writing this column because I believe I have a solution that will satisfy everyone.
For years, Mexico has complained that most of the thousands of assault weapons that their gangs routinely use against their fellow Mexicans are made in the USA. Last year, Mexico sued a number of our nation’s leading gun manufacturers (including Smith & Wesson, Beretta, and Colt) for $10 billion for the damages their products had inflicted on Mexico’s citizenry and civic life. Mexico argued that an average of 597,000 guns are trafficked into their country from ours every year, and that 68 percent of those guns were manufactured by the companies they were suing. Thirteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia joined Mexico’s suit, citing a study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that found that 70 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico from 2014 to 2018 had come from the U.S.
Despite that, a federal judge dismissed the case in September of last year. Mexico is appealing that ruling, but it’s hard to imagine that our current Supreme Court, should the appeal eventually reach them, will overturn the judge’s ruling.
So: We can’t get the Mexican government to allow us to go after their gangs, and they can’t get our courts to allow them to go after our guns. What’s a civic-minded North American to do?
Here’s my solution: If we send our soldiers into Mexico to destroy their gangs, we must allow Mexico to send its soldiers into the U.S. to blow up our gun factories (calling ahead, of course, so no workers are injured). Both policies will have supporters and opponents on each side of the border, but that’s just part of the symmetry that makes this, if I say so myself, a much-needed breakthrough in cross-border relations.
I’d call it Mutual Assured Destruction if the name weren’t already taken.
