U.S. President Donald Trump’s interest in striking Mexican cartels, dismissed during his first term as idle speculation, is now a genuine policy option debated within the White House. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said in early May that he had proposed sending U.S. troops into Mexico to help fight drug trafficking. (Sheinbaum rejected the offer.) And amid growing pressure on Mexico to allow the United States a bigger role in combating drug cartels in the country, the Trump administration is considering unilateral drone strikes, as NBC reported, while the CIA reviews its authorities to use lethal force against cartels, per CNN. The U.S. State Department’s February designation of several Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, while providing no legal basis for military operations, was applauded by Trump ally Elon Musk as de facto authorization. Many in the White House share his eagerness. What can we expect if the “Mexico hawks” get their way?
To answer this question, I brought former senior officials from the United States and Mexico plus other regional experts to Capitol Hill in February for a tabletop exercise sponsored by the Win Without War Education Fund. Taking on the roles of the Trump administration, the Sheinbaum administration, Mexican cartels, U.S. industry and labor, and Mexican civil society, they played out a thinly fictionalized scenario where Trump launches drone strikes against Mexico’s infamous Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.
Tabletop exercises—or “wargames”—are a valuable tool for analysis, simulating anything from armed conflict to disaster responses to diplomatic crises. They are also a tool that is frequently abused. Too often, simulations of war ignore the effects of conflict on civilians, optimistically assume away pathways to dangerous escalation, and portray military conflict as costless, bloodless, and ostensibly winnable. To avoid those pitfalls, we used a scenario drawn directly from the news of the day; empowered civil society, labor, and business as their own teams; and closely tracked the impacts of conflict on people in Mexico and the United States alike. The outcome was as illuminating as it was frightening.
The exercise revealed that U.S. drone strikes precipitated a series of escalating crises. Though the exercise ended with Mexico City reestablishing ties with Washington, the bilateral relationship emerged as a shadow of its former self: reduced to transactional, trust-free deals that prioritized high-profile violence against cartels while failing to sustainably curb the drug trade. Though the Trump team announced a win, it came at the expense of U.S. industries reliant on cross-border trade and sparked runaway violence in Mexico. There was no assessed impact on the amount of fentanyl crossing the border, which in the real world already has been declining since last summer, before Trump or Sheinbaum took office.
The exercise began with an angry but relatively conciliatory response from the Sheinbaum administration, which froze security cooperation and expelled all U.S. military and law enforcement personnel but continued working to restore relations to the status quo ante. They did not succeed. Trump demanded that the Mexican government must target specific cartel kingpins, on command, or else face more drone strikes. When Sheinbaum refused, citing the slogan “Cooperación, sí, subordinación, no” (Yes to cooperation, no to subordination), Washington imposed 500 percent tariffs on Mexican imports, plunging Mexico into a recession and devastating the U.S. auto industry.
With Sheinbaum holding fast, Trump ordered new drone strikes in Sinaloa and Michoacán. Mexico City responded by expelling the U.S. ambassador but continued to seek reconciliation, proposing new security cooperation agreements it hoped would mollify Trump.
The cartels, however, were not in a conciliatory mood. After two rounds of U.S. drone strikes and ongoing security talks between the United States and Mexico, some cartels started to take Trump’s rhetoric seriously and worry that Mexico City might cooperate with Washington on a large-scale military campaign.
Hoping to deter both governments, cartels lashed out, escalating attacks on Mexican security services, assassinating Mexican officials and a U.S. executive in Mexico, stepping up extortion of U.S.-owned companies in Mexico, and employing improvised explosive devices and drones against northbound shipments from U.S. factories in Mexico.
Though the Trump team feared that cartels would expand their political violence into the United States, the cartel team concluded it was not worth the risk of exposing and disrupting their drug operations there, which remained lucrative despite pressure in Mexico.
Meanwhile, the Mexican economy entered a tailspin from tariffs, with anti-American sentiment reaching an all-time high. Laid-off workers vandalized U.S. factories, and Mexican civil society warned that more Mexicans in rural areas would turn to cartels for basic services if their government were unable to rapidly expand welfare. Escalating cartel violence added to Mexico’s internally displaced population, already in the hundreds of thousands. Between the violence and deepening economic crisis, migration to the United States surged.
U.S. corporations and labor unions lobbied Trump to restore trade with Mexico, but his priority was Sheinbaum’s submission. As auto workers demonstrated in industry hubs in border and Rust Belt states, the Trump administration sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the demonstrations, claiming that protesters were supporting terrorist-designated cartels. The exercise proved to be woefully prescient, as the real-world Trump administration began detaining protesters under similar pretenses just two weeks later.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-Mexico conflict did not go unnoticed overseas. The Chinese ambassador to Mexico suggested lowering Mexican tariffs on Chinese imports—which Mexico City originally raised in December as a gesture of goodwill to Washington—and establishing a refueling agreement for the Chinese navy. The Sheinbaum administration demurred but continued to explore options for hedging against its newly unreliable neighbor.
Frustrated with Sheinbaum, the Trump administration threatened to shut all border crossings, sending markets into a panic. Sheinbaum countered by hinting she would freeze cooperation on immigration enforcement.
The threat of Mexico abandoning its migration policies, which interdicted or detained more than 900,000 migrants last year, finally brought the Trump administration to the negotiating table in earnest. In the real-world White House, this risk is what made anti-immigration Trump advisor Stephen Miller argue against attacking cartels. In the exercise, the two sides reached a detente in the form of a new security cooperation agreement that promised to deliver more high-profile busts. However, the new equilibrium was fragile. Mexican officials kept their U.S. counterparts at arm’s length, precluding the substantive cooperation necessary to pursue long-term solutions to the cartel problem, which exploded in the intervening months.
Their ranks swelled by Mexico’s economic crisis, cartels battled to fill the voids left by U.S. strikes and Mexican raids. Cartels’ war footing against the Mexican government drove them to increase fentanyl sales and extortion, while operations against fentanyl labs encouraged dispersal and innovation. Cartels stepped up production within the United States, where chemical precursors are easy to acquire via small mail-order packages from Chinese or Indian companies. Demand—the ultimate determinant of the drug trade—was not curbed by airstrikes and raids. Ultimately, there was no reason to conclude that total cartel-produced fentanyl was any lower than it would have been if the Trump administration had not sparked the chaotic chain of events described above.
So, what can we conclude from this exercise? While not predictive, it painted a bleak picture of the costs if the Trump administration decides to attack cartels. While drone strikes and raids weakened some cartels, they empowered rivals and splintered other groups into more violent gangs. Further, this approach did little to stem the flow or profitability of fentanyl, which persisted as long as there was demand.
Ultimately, the greatest victims were the people of Mexico, who suffered elevated poverty, violence, and displacement. But working people across the border were not spared either, as broad tariffs pushed up unemployment and consumer prices, and the “war on cartels” was used to justify violations of civil liberties.
What happens if Trump bombs Mexico? Nothing you’ll like, no matter which side of the border you live on.
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