Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette via AP
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis delivers a speech covering his campaign platform and promises, August 10, 2023, in Iowa City, Iowa.
During the 2016 Republican primary campaign for president, Donald Trump got enormous mileage out of the fact that the Bush administration’s war of aggression against Iraq was an utter disaster. Even most Republican voters couldn’t deny it by that point, yet none of the candidates but Trump were willing to admit it forthrightly. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it … George Bush made a mistake,” he said during a debate. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”
Though Trump lied about opposing the war before it started, this led to widespread speculation that the Republican Party was turning against Bush-era militarism. “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk,” went the title of one Maureen Dowd column. In office, of course, Trump continued the Bush-Obama war on terror with even less regard for civilian casualties, but at least didn’t start any new wars. (He came close to an open fight with Iran, but ultimately blinked.)
But now Republicans are turning back to their warmonger roots. Ron DeSantis recently suggested that he would be open to ordering drone strikes on Mexican drug cartels and migrants, whom he accused of carrying drugs over the border. “We’re authorizing deadly force. They try to break into our country? They will end up stone-cold dead,” he said, and he’s not alone. Trump, Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Mike Walsh (R-FL), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Trump’s former deputy secretary of homeland security Ken Cuccinelli have all proposed various military actions in Mexico, up to and including sending in ground troops.
This is paint-blistering madness on several levels. First, sending drones or troops onto the sovereign territory of another country would constitute a war of aggression in violation of the U.N. Charter. The fact that Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, turned out to be horrifying blood-drenched nightmares underscores why the generation that fought the Second World War tried to make the prevention of war the foundation of international relations.
The Mexican government has also responded to these proposals with scalding outrage. As Zach Beauchamp points out at Vox, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a press conference that “We won’t allow it. And not only are we not going to allow it, we’re denouncing it.” Even a single drone attack would seem highly likely to end up in a direct confrontation with the Mexican military.
Second, Republicans often point to the fentanyl overdose epidemic as justification for war. But numerous investigations have shown that something like 90 percent of the fentanyl trafficked over the southern border comes through official ports of entry—perhaps half carried by U.S. citizens, and virtually none from refugees. This makes sense, because Mexico is America’s largest trading partner, with hundreds of thousands of vehicle crossings daily, and fentanyl is extremely potent and easy to hide in tires, gas tanks, engine compartments, or elsewhere. It is senseless to bother with refugees who are certain to be searched and struggle to even cross the border anyway.
This makes DeSantis’s accusations against refugees particularly disgusting. When asked in an interview how drone operators would know if the people being blown to smithereens were actually carrying drugs, he replied: “Same way a police officer would know … Same way somebody operating in Iraq would know. You know, these people in Iraq at the time, they all looked the same. You didn’t know who had a bomb strapped to them. So those guys have to make judgments.”
Anyone even slightly politically aware in this country knows the long history of police gunning down unarmed people, and the even more extensive history of drone strikes killing tens of thousands of civilians in mistaken attacks on homes, vehicles, wedding parties, or as collateral damage. To use “war on terror” style operations against refugees implies a complete indifference to any indiscriminate collateral damage.
Third and most importantly, it’s not like the Mexican government hasn’t been doing anything about the drug cartel problem. On the contrary, it has been deploying its military against them for nearly 20 years. As Elizabeth Dickinson reported for Washington Monthly a decade ago, this was done partly at the behest of the United States government during the Bush and Obama administrations, with the idea that it seemed to work in Colombia. Instead, destabilizing the previous tacit semi-truce between the cartels unleashed a gruesome conflict, almost approaching a civil war at times, that killed tens of thousands of people, seriously destabilized the Mexican government, and did not interrupt the flow of drugs in the slightest.
The violence of the drug war in Mexico, and the ongoing crisis of opioid overdoses in the U.S., are both fundamentally rooted in failures of American policy. We waged war on illegal drugs for decades, which did little for drug use here, but provided the cartels with millions in easy profits with which they fought the Mexican military (often with weapons sourced from American gun dealers, by the way). Then the government sat mute for another decade while the Sackler family created millions more opioid addicts with industrial-scale dope peddling. When we finally cut off that avalanche of legal opioids, a new generation of addicts turned to the black market for their fix, only to find it filled with fentanyl, which is far more dangerous than heroin.
The best approach for both Mexico and the U.S. would be to end the drug war and focus instead on addiction treatment, harm reduction, and regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. Instead, Republicans are blaming the victim, and proposing to take a problem caused by violent stupidity and turn it into a full-blown war. They’ve learned nothing from the failures of the Bush administration and will do worse if they get the chance.
