OPINION:
At the end of his first term, President Trump reportedly suggested that the U.S. military “quietly” launch missiles into Mexico to blow up drug labs.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who wrote about the incident in his 2022 memoir, “A Scared Oath,” said Mr. Trump asked him at least twice during the summer of 2020 whether the military could blow up drug dens and wipe out cartels in Mexico’s interior.
Mr. Trump said that “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” and “no one would know it was us,” Mr. Esper recalls in his memoir. He said he initially thought it was a joke and later started researching the 25th Amendment to remove the president when he realized it was not.
Mr. Esper vowed to stay on the job to prevent Mr. Trump from actualizing what Mr. Esper believed were the president’s worst instincts.
At the time, the legacy media reported the musing as an example of Mr. Trump acting “erratically,” surrounded by “yes-men.” Mr. Esper, worried that he would be replaced by a Trump “loyalist” if he resigned, decided “the real act of service” would be to maintain his post as long as possible. Mr. Trump fired him in November 2020.
Where Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 differ is in personal choices. Mr. Trump is now actualizing policy he was inhibited from doing in his first term by staff who thought they knew better than the commander in chief. Call them yes-men, but Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is not bucking the chain of command; he is carrying out his orders.
Yes, those orders include a 6-week-old military campaign against South American drug gangs and traffickers, which have included six sea strikes against cartel vessels, with at least 27 deaths.
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said the U.S. will stop aid payments to Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine. Last week, Mr. Trump seemed to confirm reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is conducting covert actions in Venezuela. Earlier in his second term, he designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and ordered the Pentagon to draw up military options against them. In May, Mr. Trump told Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum that the U.S. would be “honored” to send troops to Mexico to help fight the cartels. Ms. Sheinbaum refused the offer as an act of aggression.
Cocaine flows from Colombia into the U.S. largely through Venezuela, which serves as a transit hub. U.S. officials estimated that as much as 250 metric tons of cocaine flowed through Venezuela in 2020. Mexican cartels are the chief traffickers of fentanyl and methamphetamine, and the drugs are manufactured in Mexico using chemicals sent from China. Mexican cartels also have a monopoly on heroin, with about 94% of the drug consumed in the U.S. originating there. All of it is poisoning Americans in their homeland.
Under President Biden’s open border policies, these transnational criminal organizations thrived. Profits from human trafficking and drug smuggling skyrocketed from $500 million in 2019 to more than $13 billion in 2022. Fentanyl overdose became the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45, claiming nearly twice as many lives as COVID-19, cancer, car accidents and suicide.
During the Trump administration, cartel members are growing desperate. The Department of Homeland Security reported last week that Mexican criminals, in coordination with domestic extremist groups such as antifa, have placed bounties on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel.
“These criminal networks have issued explicit instructions to U.S.-based sympathetics, including street gangs in Chicago, to monitor, harass, and assassinate federal agents,” the Homeland Security Department said. It noted that the bounties could bring up to $50,000 for the assassination of high-ranking U.S. officials.
Critics of Mr. Trump say his targeting of narco-terrorists in international waters is illegal. However, President Obama oversaw more covert drone strikes during his first year in office than his predecessor, George W. Bush, did in his entire term. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that during his two terms, Mr. Obama launched 563 strikes, primarily by drone, targeting Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Compare that with 57 strikes, which killed as many as 807 civilians, under Mr. Bush.
One of those civilians was U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was accused of being an al Qaeda leader, and included a 2013 strike in Yemen, where missiles hit a wedding procession, reportedly killing more than a dozen civilians.
So spare me the pearl clutching when it comes to Mr. Trump’s targets in Latin America.
“What we have declared — and we are [currently] declaring — is that, in international waters, we are not going to tolerate narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people,” Mr. Hegseth told a gathering of Air National Guard members at Muniz Air National Guard Base, just outside San Juan, Puerto Rico, in September.
He said his department knows precisely who the traffickers are, what substances they are trafficking, the routes they take and who their leaders are.
“What you’re doing here is critically important to American citizens, to American families [and] to communities that have been ravaged by violence … ravaged by drugs, and ravaged by violent gangs and criminality [because of] a porous southwest border and drugs pouring into our country,” Mr. Hegseth told the service members in Puerto Rico to loud applause.
To which I say: Go get ’em, boys.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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