Brandan P. Buck
When is a nation or a people in a state of war? It is not merely an academic question but one that informs policy, shapes public perceptions, and facilitates the incremental commitments that precede military action. Since at least 2023, Republicans in Congress and President Trump have proposed designating drug cartels as terror organizations, thereby further blurring the divides between the two. President Trump recently followed through on his campaign promise to designate the drug cartels and other criminal organizations associated with narcotics trafficking as terrorist organizations. Despite the rhetoric, the designation will not afford the administration any new legal tools. It will, however, impede its diplomatic initiatives and create the cognitive space for the further militarization of the drug war.
On a recent appearance on Fox News, President Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, said of Mexico’s drug cartels, “We need to perhaps start thinking about these terrorists like what they are, which is terrorists.” He prefaced this rhetoric with a lament, recounting the early years of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and “the very high bar” of American due process that accompanied it.
The implication here is not only unsettling, but it distorts the reality of the US government’s existing legal powers regarding drug traffickers. As other scholars and veterans of the War on Drugs have noted, even before the president designated the cartels as terrorist groups, the federal government possessed the same legal tools as it did to prosecute terror suspects. Indeed, the Rand Corporation’s Brian Michael Jenkins notes that the legal authorities to prosecute the War on Terror were drawn from the War on Drugs. The US government already possessed the legal powers to seize assets, prevent the entry into the US of known cartel members, and sanction Americans who do business with these criminal networks.
This designation, and the rhetoric surrounding it, will further the incremental militarization of the War on Drugs and likely undermine what diplomatic successes the Trump administration has already achieved on this issue. Trump’s strong-arming of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum resulted in the Mexican government deploying additional national guard troops to its side of the shared US-Mexican border. Concurrently, and perhaps causally, according to the Customs and Border Protection’s statistics, drug seizures are the lowest that they have been in three years. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a 25 percent decline in overdose deaths.
The exact causal elements of these trends are still unknown. Still, they ought to be met with further examination and not more overheated rhetoric, especially as continued veiled threats of military intervention alienate a necessary, if imperfect, partner in the Mexican government.
What Waltz’s rhetoric does accomplish, however, is to create the cognitive space within the administration and the general public to envision not merely increased legal but military action against the cartels. Proponents of this conflation often cite the US campaign against ISIS as a model worth emulating. However, rarely if ever remarked upon, is what it took to achieve that goal, which was thousands of US troops, partnered forces like Kurdish militias, and thousands of air sorties that dropped tens of thousands of bombs.
The war on ISIS was not a mere Special Operations campaign that can be packaged and repurposed elsewhere; it was a low-scale war meant to solve a geostrategic issue. Seeking to operationalize and indeed fetishize it as a model for what is still a criminal problem will not win the War on Drugs. It will, however, wreck other lower-intensity solutions that can assuage the situation. Conflating the terrorism of the cartels with the terrorism of organizations like ISIS will create the permission structures to plunge this country into another forever war.
Furthermore, while the cartels indeed use terror tactics to achieve their economic ends, their conflation with ideologically motivated terrorist organizations like ISIS or Al Qaeda is an unfair one. As tragic as every drug overdose and cartel murder may be, conflating those acts of criminal terror with the ideological terrorism that resulted in 9/11 or the construction of a terror state strains credulity, as criminal brutality associated with drug prohibition has been a constant of the 20th, and now 21st centuries.
In the decades since 9/11, terrorism occupied a liminal space between a legal and a military threat, with an uneasy but relatively stable model that considered terrorism at home a legal problem and a military threat overseas. Creating an equivalency between cartels and terrorist organizations will erode those last weakened membranes separating the domestic and foreign spheres and plunge this country into another forever war. Alluding to this divide, Waltz remarked in his recent interview, “I think if you had some of those tattooed, shaved-head men labeled ISIS, then we wouldn’t even be having this debate.”
Waltz’s statement may be as much an admission as a suggestion.