An Actual War on Drugs?

By John Noonan

Thursday, December 21, 2023

 

Nearly every Republican presidential candidate is now calling for direct military action against Mexican-based drug traffickers.

 

For a long time, Americans have seen drugs as a law-enforcement, not a military, problem. And even with military problems such as terrorism, America’s general preference is to enlist the help of local governments, militias, or political factions to do the fighting. This has been our tack with the Mexican government for years now.

 

But it hasn’t worked. That’s why Republican presidential candidates are scrimmaging for the crown of toughest on the cartels, toughest on immigration. Some have proposed Special Forces raids, others drone strikes, others naval blockades. All candidates seem in agreement that we need to inflict pain on the drug cartels.

 

The campaign rhetoric ignores the practical questions these calls raise — starting with the weird legislative and military twilight zone that armed conflict with cartels would occupy.

 

Our founding fathers were careful with war-making powers. They split the authority to declare and wage war between Congress and the president. Article I of the Constitution vests Congress with the authority to declare war, raise an army and a navy, and both fund and regulate the use of those forces. Article II of the Constitution anoints the president as commander in chief of the military, allowing him to employ those forces in the way he deems most effective.

 

A simple way to understand that dichotomy is that the Congress can declare war but it cannot issue direct military orders such as those for an offensive, a retreat, or a deployment of specific units. It may be for the best that Congress cannot send SEAL teams out on missions or order strategic bomber wings to distant lands. The swiftest way to lose a war is to have a committee run it, and therefore direct command of forces was made a privilege of the president.

 

Since the 1940s, formal declarations of war have fallen out of fashion. America has been in plenty of fights over the past half century, but Congress hasn’t declared an official war against an enemy country since World War II. Times changed, and so did the tools in Congress’s kit. The Cold War was a soft scrimmage against Soviet creep, technological advances such as long-range nuclear missiles gave the president only minutes to respond to a surprise attack, and those atomic weapons were seen as a contraindication and deterrent against the traditional way of using force to resolve disputes. Starting fights with the traditional glove slap across the cheek became as outdated as attacking with horse cavalry.

 

Further, a declaration of war triggers extensive mechanisms under both U.S. and international law. It is an all-in measure, resulting in irrevocable actions such as the automatic severance of diplomatic and commercial relations, approval to kill enemy soldiers, and full empowerment for commanders to capture enemy territory and property. On the home front, a war declaration imbues the president with vast emergency authority over the economy, transportation, production, and legal foreign residents, authority that can make Americans nervous or give them postbellum regret. Think of the extradition of Japanese Americans to internment camps or President Truman’s use of the undeclared Korean War as a pretext to seize American steel mills in 1952.

 

Rather than declaring war, Congress tends to pass authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs). These are diet declarations of war, a low-fat way of granting the White House approval and monies to fight without triggering all the legal implications of war. Two AUMFs were passed two decades ago, one for al-Qaeda and affiliated groups and one for Iraq. While both long-standing authorizations have led to skirmishes in Congress, most members seem to find such a compromise tolerable. Many changes to the AUMF structure, including repeal of current authorities, have been proposed, but few have passed.

 

Unaddressed in this war-making framework are the cartels. Some members of Congress claim that the president’s authority to hit drug-runners already exists under the 2001 AUMF, a joint decree from Congress that was written for al-Qaeda and its subsidiaries. All the White House needs to do, the argument goes, is declare drug cartels narco-terrorists and get them on the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. Then the president would have all the legal power necessary to take the fight to Mexico.

 

Congressmen Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) and Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) have a more direct approach. The normal legal framework, better suited to traditional criminal groups, has little relevance to drug lords who are armed to the teeth and unafraid of their own government. Or ours, for that matter. Cartels are paramilitary forces. Crenshaw and Waltz have therefore drafted a bespoke AUMF tailored to narco-threats. Their legislation is more nuanced than what Republican presidential candidates have offered, providing crystal-clear legal authorities for the president to employ against drug lords. Even if President Biden did not wish to use these powers, he would not be able to hide behind a legal argument for inaction.

 

Debate over this proposal has so far been scant and ignored the casus belli. America loses the rough equivalent of the population of Green Bay, Wis., every year to overdoses. Yet consider this Reuters headline about the proposal: “Republican proposed attacks on Mexican cartels could lead to American casualties.”

 

Legal authorization is the prerequisite for implementing a strategy, but it is not a strategy in itself. We will have to begin with the key villains in this story: the Jalisco and Sinaloa Cartels. Both operate like irregular military forces. They are well trained, funded, and armed, and are not shackled by international law.

 

Cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines were long their staple products. Opium, heroin, fentanyl, and other members of the opioid family were thought to be vices of the Orient, grown in vast fields at the convergence of the Ruak and Mekong Rivers or in the arcane valleys of the Hindu Kush, or produced in dirty industrial laboratories in China’s Hubei Province. But while Mexico produces only a fraction of the world’s heroin, its cartels are the world’s foremost narco-logisticians — the UPS drivers of America’s overdose epidemic.

 

The recent popularity of fentanyl has made the cartels stronger than ever. They import chemicals from China to Mexico or Central America, where labs manufacture, package, and then smuggle the product over the porous U.S. border. Their supply operations rival those of most NATO armies, and the larger cartels have the weaponry, the manpower, the money, and the will to defend what’s theirs. In 2015, the Jalisco cartel downed a Mexican military helicopter using a squad-operated automatic weapon. This is a tactic much more characteristic of the Viet Cong or Hamas than of your typical American street gang.

 

The Crenshaw-Waltz AUMF is fitted to meet this threat. Both its sponsors served in combat, and both have intimate familiarity with irregular forces and banditry.

 

Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, hails from a Houston energy family. The oil business shipped his family all over Latin America. He went to high school in Bogotá and still speaks pristine Spanish from his time overseas. As a teenager, he watched U.S. military assistance flood into Colombia to help the government fight the FARC, a Marxist guerrilla group financed by cocaine cultivation and trafficking. This “Plan Colombia” transformed that country’s conscription military, 70 percent of whom were draftees on one-year orders, into a professional, lethal counterinsurgency force.

 

And who took on the lion’s share of training and equipping these muscular new Colombian security forces? The Army’s 7th Special Forces Group, an elite unit responsible for Latin America that Representative Waltz once served under as a Green Beret. Just this past summer, Waltz retired after 27 years in the Army, most of it in the Special Forces. The decades-long campaign spearheaded by the 7th Group, started under President Clinton and continued under successive U.S. presidents, brought the FARC to its knees and is still discussed today as a model of military-to-military partnership.

 

This is the model that forms the backbone of the proposed AUMF against drug cartels. Neither congressman has called for division-sized maneuver formations to cross the border into Mexico, like American cavalry and aircraft pursuing Pancho Villa over Chihuahua’s steppe highlands. Nor have they issued a call for an invasion of Mexico (even though their AUMF is described as such), or an unrestricted bombing campaign, or indiscriminate barrages from the Navy. Rather they have emphasized direct partnership with the host nation — as in Colombia — and a president free to act with the full backing and approval of Congress.

 

The strategy is not perfect. Mexico City has resisted overtures for a closer working relationship with the U.S., responding with the usual puffed-chest nationalism so common among Spain’s former imperial holdings. But their stubbornness has only amplified calls for unilateral action. Few would disagree that targeted strikes against cartels would best be carried out in full concert with the Mexican government. It is a nice sentiment, and a description of something easier said than done. Mexico City is so inept, so compromised by the cartels, and so truculent that joint military action seems a pipe dream. This is the context in which the AUMF bill is best understood. It is not just a wake-up call to an administration asleep at the wheel and unconcerned with the southern border. It is a warning bell to the cartels and government bureaucrats in both capitals that American patience is wearing thin. In this sense, the proposal has value just in being introduced.

 

And it appears to have hit its mark. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took little time to react, with outrage at that, to the legislative proposal. “In addition to being irresponsible,” he said, “it is an offense to the people of Mexico.”

 

Perhaps the good citizens of Mexico are offended. But they have proven unable to liberate themselves, or us, from the cartels. What would really be irresponsible is to accept that failure indefinitely.