What Would Bombing Mexico Accomplish?

Editor’s Note: Some of President Trump’s most aggressive rhetoric concerns the U.S. neighbor to the south, with the drug trade one of his top concerns. Trump has even suggested that he would use the military to attack Mexican drug cartels. Daniel DePetris of Defense Priorities argues that this is a (very) bad idea, explaining how military force in the past has failed to subdue drug cartels and why U.S. military intervention in particular would backfire.

Daniel Byman

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On Nov. 27, President-elect Donald Trump had his first phone call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. While the call between Trump and Sheinbaum was amicable enough—Trump claimed the discussion was “wonderful”—no one should have any illusions about just how turbulent U.S.-Mexico relations will be over the next four years. In the first few weeks of Trump’s second term, the bilateral relationship has already been characterized by harsh words and threats from the White House, exemplified most clearly by the tariffs that Trump decided to pause on Feb. 3 after the Mexican government agreed to dispatch another 10,000 Mexican troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. U.S. and Mexican officials are in the process of launching a bilateral dialogue on issues ranging from migration and trade to drug trafficking. Given their competing priorities—Mexico is more interested in containing violence inside its borders, whereas the United States is focused first and foremost on destroying the cartels—it is difficult to envision those talks going smoothly. The personalities of their respective leaders don’t help; Sheinbaum is a nationalist who does not appreciate foreign pressure, particularly if it is coming from the United States. Trump, a proud nationalist himself, has long viewed pressure tactics like tariffs and economic sanctions as critical tools to getting deals on his terms. The question isn’t whether policy spats between the two leaders will occur but rather how those spats are managed over the duration of Trump’s administration.

While much of the attention thus far has focused on migration and trade, Mexico’s increasingly powerful drug cartels have the potential to severely strain the bilateral relationship. The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartels, Mexico’s largest, not only control “the vast majority” of the fentanyl entering the United States, but are deepening their involvement in the human trafficking business, worsening the illegal migration wave Trump seeks to end. “The Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels pose the greatest criminal drug threat the United States has ever faced,” Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) head Anne Milgram testified to Congress in 2023. “These ruthless, violent, criminal organizations have associates, facilitators, and brokers in all 50 states in the United States, as well as in more than 100 countries around the world.” 

U.S. military action against the cartels inside Mexico, once a taboo idea, is now becoming a mainstream policy option. Much of the chatter is born out of frustration and a belief among some U.S. policymakers that nothing else has worked to limit the flow of drugs into the United States and degrade the capacity of the cartels. Trump reportedly inquired about bombing fentanyl labs inside Mexico during his first term, an option the U.S. secretary of defense at the time, Mark Esper, was able to kill. But Trump’s penchant for the military option has not lessened with time: In July, he threatened U.S. strikes if the Mexican government was unable or unwilling to address the problem quickly, and in January, he signed an executive order that designated five Mexican cartels and organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations, a decision he put off during his first term due to resistance from the Mexican government.

This time around, Trump has surrounded himself with officials who have also promoted the military option. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, is one of them. Vice President Vance, who floated the prospect of sending the U.S. Marines into Mexico during a campaign rally in October, is another. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for precision strikes against the cartels in Mexico, similar to the missions U.S. special operations forces conducted against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on Feb. 1 stated that “all options will be on the table.” Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, even co-sponsored a resolution when he was a congressman that would authorize the U.S. military to use force against a list of Mexican drug cartels for the purposes of combating the drug trade.

Whether or not Trump is serious about launching a military operation against Mexican cartels or is merely using the rhetoric to spur Mexican authorities to get more aggressive themselves is difficult to say. But given his past comments, it is worth examining whether such an option would actually stem the flow of fentanyl into the United States or hamper the cartels’ capacity to inflict violence. The answer is straightforward: no. In fact, U.S. military operations inside Mexico are likely to make all the problems Trump supposedly wants to solve exponentially worse.  

Mexico’s Failed Military Campaign

Trump is apparently under the illusion that the U.S. military can solve the threat the cartels pose to the United States. Successive Mexican governments shared similar confidence with respect to their own military, ultimately authorizing the Mexican army to use force on a scale much larger than what Trump is currently contemplating. In December 2006, immediately upon his inauguration, Mexican President Felipe Calderón effectively declared war on narcotraffickers and gave the Mexican security forces the authority to engage in offensive operations. Tens of thousands of Mexican troops, in addition to federal and state police officers, were deployed across the country to take the fight to the criminal groups in the most troubled states. Local police officers suspected of being in league with criminal organizations were stripped of their responsibilities. Marijuana and poppy fields were burned. Thousands of low-level cartel gunmen were either killed or arrested in security sweeps. The strategy aimed to put so much military pressure on the cartels that their structures would either collapse or weaken to the point of irrelevancy. By the time Calderón left the presidency, 100,000 people had been killed on his watch.

Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, came into office in 2012 decrying this military-centric strategy as futile and counterproductive. Peña Nieto’s argument was compelling: Waging war on the cartels exacerbated Mexico’s insecurity by shattering big criminal structures into smaller ones that were increasingly difficult for Mexico’s security forces to combat. Even so, out of inertia, frustration, or institutional preference, Peña Nieto’s anti-drug policy turned out to be remarkably similar to Calderón’s. Mexican military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel were ordered to prioritize the capture or killing of senior cartel leaders. Tactical victories were seen as the most effective way to persuade the Mexican public that the government was making progress against the criminal organizations threatening their lives. Despite the fanfare, the results were grossly disappointing. While a lot of cartel gunmen were killed, plenty of ordinary civilians also died along the way. Much as Peña Nieto predicted earlier in his six-year term, the cartels, loose structures to begin with, broke into smaller factions as it battled the army, making it more difficult for the Mexican security forces to curtail the spreading violence. As high-profile narcotraffickers were taken out of the picture, would-be replacements seeking to fill the vacuum battled amongst themselves for leadership positions. Rival groups that were not a priority for the Mexican government sought to take advantage by sweeping into terrain that their adversaries were no longer able to control. Meanwhile, the cartels overall became far more aggressive against the Mexican state; politicians, prosecutors, and other officials were all targeted in attempts to frighten local and state governments into submission.  

The trend lines did not get any better during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Like Peña Nieto, AMLO came into power in 2018 skeptical, if not outright hostile, to a military-first strategy against the cartels. His so-called “Hugs, not Bullets” framework sought to change how the Mexican government managed the security crisis by deprioritizing the military in favor of addressing the root socioeconomic causes driving young men into the criminal underworld. Military force, however, remained a cornerstone of his policy. Like in previous administrations, the AMLO presidency treated Mexican troops as de-facto firefighters, deploying to areas of the country—Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Michoacan, and Zacatecas to name a few—to demonstrate the government’s presence during periods of instability. The Mexican army was increasingly used as local police officers and ordered to patrol streets in Mexico City and vacation spots in Cancún. None of it worked to stem the crime. Today, violence in Mexico is off the charts. Of the world’s 10 deadliest cities, five are in Mexico. The Mexican government has registered more than 30,000 murders every year since 2017, and the cartels are now reportedly the fifth-largest employer in the entire country.

Destroying U.S.-Mexico Relations, Not Cartels

If the U.S. objective is to neuter the cartels or stop the flow of drugs coming across the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. military strikes would fail to achieve it. Yes, cartel foot soldiers would be killed and some commanders would be taken out in the process. Yet others would adapt by quickly dismantling their labs, going to ground, and pausing their operations until Washington ends its military campaign. Some might simply shift production to other countries, perhaps leading the Trump administration to widen attacks beyond Mexico. Still others would carry on with their work regardless and continue sending drugs farther north because demand remains high inside the United States and the profit margins are so significant. As the United States learned firsthand in Afghanistan, bombing raids against drug facilities will only have a short-term impact if the people doing the manufacturing have a financial incentive to keep producing. The Taliban did in Afghanistan, and the cartels do in Mexico. There are other macro-level considerations the Trump administration must consider. Diplomatically, U.S. military action in Mexico inevitably risks a huge crisis between Washington and Mexico City. For starters, it’s highly unlikely that any Mexican president, political party notwithstanding, would accede to, let alone approve, unilateral U.S. military operations on Mexican soil. No Mexican politician wants to be seen as carrying Washington’s weight or outsourcing Mexico’s security policy to the Americans. Sheinbaum is no exception and rejected the notion herself during a Jan. 21 news conference, reminding everyone in the room that Mexico will defend its sovereignty and fight drug trafficking in its territory on its own, without U.S. military participation. Those comments track well with Mexican public opinion; a December 2024 poll conducted for El País found that nearly 60 percent of Mexicans surveyed oppose U.S. troops fighting crime on Mexican soil.

If the Trump administration opted for a military operation inside Mexico, it would need to execute it alone, without the Mexican government’s approval. In such a contingency, U.S. requests for intelligence support would likely be denied by Mexico City on principle, undermining the tactical success of any U.S. military campaign and increasing the likelihood of faulty targeting that could result in civilian casualties. Outside of the operational concerns, U.S. officials could expect significant pushback and even some efforts to diplomatically isolate Washington in the Western Hemisphere, jeopardizing the administration’s broader agenda in the region. Latin American heavyweights like Brazil and traditional U.S. security partners like Colombia would reprimand Washington in multilateral fora, from the Organization of American States to the United Nations, for what would be described as a clear-cut case of aggression. China, always eager to delegitimize the United States in the so-called Global South, would cite U.S. military operations in Mexico as further proof of America’s domineering, hegemonic attitude—a belief that already has widespread resonance throughout Latin America courtesy of Washington’s Cold War-era history in the region.

Aside from the diplomatic consequences, the practical repercussions would be immense as well. A unilateral U.S. military strike in Mexico would risk rupturing whatever security and counternarcotics cooperation Washington currently enjoys with the Mexican authorities. That cooperation is often insufficient to begin with; in March 2023, DEA officials testified that Mexican law enforcement frequently fails to hand over basic information and is slow to act on extradition requests from Washington. But information sharing, however imperfect, would get far worse if U.S. bombs are dropped on Mexican soil or U.S. troops launch even targeted raids on cartel locations. Both scenarios would be considered acts of war on Mexico itself, and Mexican officials up to the very top of the political system would view it as such. The Mexican government would likely retaliate not by giving the order to fight U.S. troops in the streets but rather by curtailing cooperation on the topics U.S. officials care most about: drugs and migration. DEA agents inside Mexico could be expelled from the country, which would be a boon to the very cartels Trump seeks to neutralize. There’s precedent for this type of action; months after U.S. law enforcement arrested former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos in Los Angeles for links to the H-2 drug cartel, the Mexican government responded by limiting the DEA’s freedom of operation and stripping DEA agents of their immunity. In April 2021, the DEA’s intelligence unit in Mexico City was shut down. If Mexico was willing to do all this for one individual, one can only imagine what the response would be if its territory was invaded.

Avoiding Emotion-Based Policy

Mexico’s drug cartels and the problems they present to the United States are not going away anytime soon. This is a consequence of many factors, including but not limited to the lack of state presence in wide swaths of Mexico (U.S. Northern Command reportedly assessed that 30 to 35 percent of the country was in the hands of criminal groups), the ease with which the cartels can access U.S.-manufactured firearms, and the financial rewards associated with the drug trafficking business. Trump’s passion on the subject is laudable, and some of his efforts could be constructive. Trump’s tariff threats seem to have prompted Mexican authorities to take more aggressive action; on Dec. 4, less than two weeks after he issued them, Mexico announced to much fanfare that it had seized the largest amount of fentanyl in its history. And on Feb. 3, Sheinbaum announced more military resources would be devoted to intercepting fentanyl shipments near the U.S.-Mexico border.

But passion should not drift into emotion-based policy. Adopting reflexive militarism, especially when the chances of success are so low, will do little to fight the flow of illegal drugs but may shatter U.S.-Mexico relations to the detriment of both.