When you don’t learn from the past, you’re doomed not only to repeat it but also to rationalize those future failing outcomes. While we could be acknowledging our mistakes to implement a better political strategy in the future, instead, I’m witnessing a rehashing of foreign policy theory that has failed us time and time again in recent years.
With the crisis of fentanyl drug abuse spreading throughout our country, taking the lives of people of all ages and economic classes, we have a vested interest in ending the epidemic of preventable deaths.
This great concern for the trafficking of this potent drug across our borders has inevitably made it onto the campaign promise lists of many Republican politicians, including those who are running for president in 2024.
However, what has concerned me is the lack of foresight regarding the potential ramifications of some of their solutions for saving the lives of Americans. Their new trendy solution? Invade Mexico to engage in a war with Mexican cartels.
I can’t help but feel that, if this were to happen, it would be Afghanistan all over again, but with even more dire consequences from engaging with well-armed and well-funded militarized cartels.
Not only would we not be learning from our past decades-long conflicts abroad, but we would also be ignoring recent Mexican history in which it has had its own internal war with the cartels and similarly failed to make real headway.
In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón began his anti-drug campaign, which specifically targeted cartel members across the country by deploying the Mexican military with assistance from the U.S. government.
While the purpose of Mr. Calderón’s actions was to decrease drug-related violence, his actions seemed to inflame the violence. After his six-year term was over, his administration claimed that there were more than 50,000 drug-related homicides that occurred, while other analyses have stated that the true number is more than 120,000 homicides.
It’s very clear: The cartels have war experience plus economic wealth in the billions to easily militarize themselves and withstand the force of the strongest of militaries.
However, the part that I don’t believe many politicians are considering is that unlike Afghanistan’s woes not directly affecting American civilians’ daily lives thousands of miles away, choosing to engage in boots-on-the-ground warfare with a military that borders our nation makes us extremely vulnerable to encouraging carnage to occur within our borders.
We understand the brutality the cartels are willing to engage in to instill fear among their own citizens, such as hanging the bodies of adversaries on lamposts or leaving decapitated bodies for the public to find, so what makes us so confident that these types of events wouldn’t happen here?
Whether people want to realize it or not, hundreds of members of these cartels are here in the United States permanently and have been for a long time. Especially with our weakened Southern border, the cartels can easily move between the nations, and, theoretically, there’s nothing we can do about preventing cartel terrorism within the United States.
Our Southern border is 1,954 miles long, and we don’t have the capability to militarize the entire length of it, especially the uninhabited desert regions.
We would be introducing the potential for carnage against innocent people within our country, with frequent soft terror attacks by cartel soldiers and bombings at landmarks meant to weaken our government’s resolve to continue its war-on-drugs conflict with them.
If the impetus of this entire endeavor is to save the lives of Americans, sacrificing the lives of U.S. soldiers and risking the safety of millions of Americans who could be caught in the crossfire of a foreign conflict achieves the complete opposite.
