The Limits of Friendship

Donald Trump is proving time and again to foreign leaders that counting on friendly relations is senseless. Most recently, India, Canada, Ukraine, and Brazil discovered that, contrary to expectations, Trump is not influenced by historical ties or long-term common interests. He will treat them like adversaries if there is immediate advantage to doing so. Now Mexico joins the list.

Trump has long had the idea of pursuing drug dealers into Mexico. The New York Times reports that he has signed a secret directive to the Pentagon that could lead to the dispatch of US air and ground forces into Mexico, or other countries, on the pretext of fighting terrorism, a designation the State Department began using once Trump took office. To say the least, Trump’s order raises numerous legal, practical, and foreign policy questions, such as armed intervention in another country, the lack of Congressional authorization or even consultation, the killing of civilians abroad, and the use of the armed forces instead of law enforcement agencies to fight drug trafficking.

Most relevant is the opposition of the target country, Mexico in this case. Its president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is adamant on the subject. “The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military. We cooperate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out,” she said. Nor is a US invasion “part of any agreement, far from it,” she added. “When it has been brought up, we have always said no.” In April she rejected Trump’s request to allow US forces into Mexico to attack drug cartels. Clearly, Trump isn’t taking no for an answer.

An Aggressive Latin America Policy

The precedent of US troops dispatched in 1989 to arrest Panama’s leader, Manuel Noriega, on drug trafficking charges is instructive. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion as a “flagrant violation of international law.” Yet the US military has been involved in anti-drug operations for years, though usually in cooperation with Latin American governments, including Mexico’s. Now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is claiming the administration’s right “to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it.” No suggestion here of a role for Congress or the need of the target country’s consent. The administration might act unilaterally in the same way it assassinated Iran’s military commander, Major General Qassem Soleimani, in a U.S. drone strike in January 2020.

It is highly unlikely that the legal offices within the Pentagon will seek to restrain such unilateral actions. The offices of legal counsel and judge advocates have been so weakened under Trump that legal guidelines are likely to be ignored by defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who insists on a more muscular armed services.

The highly questionable designation of Mexican and Venezuelan gangs as terrorist groups is in keeping with a Latin America policy that portrays every undesirable situation as a threat to national security, thus justifying illegal US actions. Those actions include the demand that Brazil abort its trial of coup leader Jair Bolsonaro or face 50% tariff rates, the deportations of alleged gang members without due process of law to El Salvador, the ongoing embargo against Cuba, and the $50-million bounty for the arrest of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. These latest threats of invasion reveal a purely negative and aggressive Latin America policy that will provoke angry receptions in much of the region, where fears of the Colossus of the North remain very much alive.

Is Trump Bluffing?

Trump may be bluffing here, but with his economic policies in deep trouble and the Epstein affair not going away, I think it’s entirely possible that he will act impulsively in Mexico. The politics of distraction is already well underway, never mind that Mexico’s cooperation on migration and the drug cartels has been effective. Until Trump’s directive, its officials reportedly believed that relations with the US were on the upswing. The US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, said in July that the greatly reduced drug flow and border crossings were “due to a secure border” and “increased collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico.”

That collaboration will vanish with an invasion. “If the U.S. does this without Mexico’s consent, it will set the relationship back a hundred years,” said Todd Robinson, who was the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs in the Biden administration. Mexicans should know better than to count on a US president who is oblivious to facts and has no problem reversing policy on a dime.

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