Will Donald Trump’s presidency bring a United States war on Mexico? There are indications that it may.
In November of 2019, nearly three years into his first term as US president, Trump was declaring his desire for the US military to attack in Mexico. Trump expressed his desire to, with the approval of Mexico’s president, “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.” But, this action did not materialize as Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was not accommodating to the idea and Trump became focused on his own reelection campaign.
When then out of office for four years, Trump appeared not to relent on his desire for war on cartels in Mexico. Indeed, the expression of this desire made it into his hour-long November 15, 2022 speech at Mar-a-Lago in Florida in which Trump revealed his presidential agenda for a return to the White House. “We will wage war upon the cartels and stop the fentanyl and deadly drugs from killing 200,000 Americans per year,” declared Trump. On this issue, Trump was not an outlier in the Republican presidential primary. Most other prominent candidates in the primary were also beating the drum for a US war on Mexico.
In the first few weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump and his administration have been taking steps that appear to be on course toward a US war on Mexio.
Upon being sworn into office on January 20 with Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate, Trump wasted no time in setting up prerequisites for a US war on Mexico. That day, he signed his “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” executive order.
Cartels, along with “criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans” were identified in the executive order as having overrun the US-Mexico border and contributed to the situation where “America’s sovereignty is under attack.”
In the executive order, Trump called for literal militarization of the US-Mexico border, stating that “it is necessary for the Armed Forces to take all appropriate action to assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining full operational control of the southern border.” (The border was already “militarized” in a more general sense given that, working with the border-industrial complex, the US government has been long operating heavy-handed control at the border and for many miles with the border largely immune from liberty-protecting restraints applicable elsewhere in America.)
Trump proceeded to declare in the executive order that “a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States” that “requires use of the Armed Forces.” Moving into the particulars, Trump declared: “The Secretary of Defense, or the Secretary of each relevant military department, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall order as many units or members of the Armed Forces, including the Ready Reserve and the National Guard, as the Secretary of Defense determines to be appropriate to support the activities of the Secretary of Homeland Security in obtaining complete operational control of the southern border of the United States.”
Pursuant to Trump’s executive order, Lolita C. Baldor reported Friday at the Associated Press that 1,600 active duty troops have already been deployed to the border, with that number so far set to rise to about 3,600.
Also on his first day back in the presidency, Trump issued another executive order related to potential US war on Mexico. That executive order titled “Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists” appears to lay the foundation for Trump to take military action in Mexico as part of the US government’s ongoing global war on terror. (For people who thought the global war on terror was a thing of the past, Trump demonstrated otherwise on February 1 when he announced the conducting, at his direction, of “precision Military air strikes on the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia.”)
The stated purpose of this second executive order is to create a process to designate certain international cartels and other organizations as terrorists and terrorist organizations — designations that the executive branch can then use to justify the US attacking them. “International cartels constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime,” asserts the executive order, pointing to reasons, among others, that international cartels have “destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.” Other offered reasons make reference to Mexico in relation to the cartels, stating, “[i]n certain portions of Mexico, they function as quasi-governmental entities, controlling nearly all aspects of society” and “[t]heir activities, proximity to, and incursions into the physical territory of the United States pose an unacceptable national security risk to the United States.” Looking at these reasons, it seems the executive order is angling to support US military action in Mexico irrespective of any opposition from the governments of Mexico or any parts of the nation.
Making clear that the terrorist designation is intended to set the course for major action by the US government abroad, the executive order further states the following: “It is the policy of the United States to ensure the total elimination of these organizations’ presence in the United States and their ability to threaten the territory, safety, and security of the United States through their extraterritorial command-and-control structures, thereby protecting the American people and the territorial integrity of the United States.”
That a US war on Mexico, and maybe other countries where cartels are present, is on the horizon is also suggested by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth repeatedly stating that “all options are on the table” in regard to countering cartels that he, echoing the language of Trump’s executive orders, labels as both terrorist and threats to America. “All options on the table” is the long-used DC talk for the US is preparing to sic the military on or otherwise take violent action against a referenced country, group, or individual. “And as I mentioned to the cartels, all options are on the table,” stated Hegseth at a Monday press conference in El Paso, Texas. He later in the press conference repeated his “all options are on the table” phrasing in answer to a question of if there are “current plans for any of the troops stationed along the US border to enter Mexico.” This is not a one-off comment. The week before, Hegseth said “all options will be on the table” in a Fox News interview when asked if the US military may “go after” cartels “in Mexico or wherever they are.”
Mexican-American War II may be around the corner.
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