Bad Idea

Republican candidate Nikki Haley has floated the idea that we should use our military against Mexico's drug cartels. Emotionally, that's an attractive proposal; rationally, it's not so clear. National Review's Jim Geraghty walks us through why:

I don’t think that it’s just because I’ve watched Clear and Present Danger a bunch of times that I hope we have exceptionally clear objectives, plans, and terms of engagement for this proposal — including how we define victory, and when we would declare the operation complete and over.

Because this proposal sounds like a messy, dirty war against transnational criminal organizations known for their exceptional ruthlessness and brutality, that also have exceptional practice at sneaking into our country.

You think we have hostage crises now? Roughly 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico, and tens of millions of U.S. tourists go there each year. If a cartel wants to make retaliatory attacks against American civilians, it will have a near-limitless supply of easy targets.

Cartels are indisputably evil and violent, a menace, an enemy of the United States and its people. But their primary objective is almost always to make a profit. They’re not “at war” with us in the way that a traditional terrorist group is.

The cartels aren’t out to topple our government or establish a theocracy. They’re more akin to the mafia.

Look, if someone can point to compelling evidence that sending a cruise missile into some cartel chief’s mansion really will make a serious and lasting dent in the drug trade, I’m all for it. This wouldn’t be the first time that U.S. military forces have played a role in the war on drugs.

But our experience in the drug war has been that taking out one kingpin creates a messy fight among the underlings and lieutenants to fill the power vacuum, followed by the gradual emergence of another kingpin.

This doesn’t mean we stop attempting to arrest, capture, prosecute, and incarcerate kingpins. But it’s a question of which tool is most effective for achieving our objective. Using the military to blow up drug labs or bases of operation isn’t quite like trying to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly, it’s more like using a flamethrower to kill mosquitos. I mean, you might get them, but you’re going to create a lot of new problems in the process.

Geraghty goes on to discuss a few more drawbacks, such as using our military in a sovereign country which hasn't requested it and doesn't want it.

Just how cooperative do you think these governments will be on anything — including migration and enforcement of borders — if we start bombing targets in their countries against their will? Are we willing to occupy any territory in the course of executing these operations?

Are you starting to see how this could get very complicated and difficult to end, very quickly?

There's more at the link, but he concludes with this:

How can so many voters in the current GOP electorate be convinced that interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophic failures that cost the country far too much in blood in treasure, and sending arms to Ukraine is a terrible waste with no moral dimension or geopolitical upside, but using U.S. military forces to launch a war against drug cartels in Mexico and Central America is going to be easy-peasy?

There's a political principle called the Law of Unintended Consequences that says that any novel action, unless thoroughly thought-through, is very likely to produce consequences that were completely unforeseen, unintended and often catastrophic.

Conservatives have raised this principle almost to the status of a totem, progressives almost completely disregard it. It seems to me that conservative reverence for it is much the wiser course, which is why we should be very careful about undertaking any military action in Mexico.