The early stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign is underway—and with it a boatload of bad ideas and policy initiatives. One of the worst but increasingly popular proposals, uttered by several politicians aspiring for the highest office in the land, is to use the military to combat the drug cartels that have smuggled gargantuan amounts of fentanyl into the United States and turned swaths of neighboring Mexico into a war zone.
Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has vowed to unleash the full weight and power of the U.S. military to hit criminal organizations such as the Sinaloa and New Jalisco New Generation cartels hard. This would entail deploying U.S. military assets in full cooperation with the Mexican government to take out the infrastructure those cartels rely on to manufacture, transport and smuggle the drug across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump is apparently so serious about his hard-line approach that his advisers briefed him on possible military options, including airstrikes against cartel locations and the deployment of U.S. special operations forces—without the consent of the Mexican government if necessary. This wouldn’t be a new idea for Trump; according to his former defense secretary, Mark Esper, Trump mused about sending missiles into Mexico-based drug labs.
Trump isn’t the only one advocating for a hard-nosed approach to the problem. In the first policy blueprint of his campaign, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote that “if the Mexican Government doesn’t do something about stopping the precursor chemicals for drugs going through Mexican ports into cartel hands, we’ll send in the Coast Guard and the Navy.” U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, another presidential candidate, told supporters that he would “let the world’s greatest military fight these terrorists,” referring to the cartels, “because that’s exactly what they are.”
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