After Maduro, Trump signals his next target: Mexico’s drug cartels

ANALYSIS:

President Trump, fresh from capturing Venezuelan president and cartel kingpin Nicolas Maduro, is now focusing on how to defeat the powerful Mexican cartels that push deadly drugs and criminal migrants into the U.S.

The president’s bombing of Venezuela shows he is willing to unleash U.S. military force to win the long drug war. At his post-capture press conference Saturday, he said: “We will crash the cartels.”

Hours before, in an appearance on “Fox and Friends Weekend,” Mr. Trump was asked about Mexico. “So we have to do something because we lost, the real number is 300,000 people, in my opinion,” he said.

He asserted that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum does not control the country. The cartels do, led by the territorial Sinaloa Cartel, which is amply supplied with fentanyl chemicals by communist China.

What does Mr. Trump have in mind? One clue can be found in a 2022 memoir by former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, who was hired and subsequently fired from the post during Mr. Trump’s first term.

In “A Sacred Oath,” in which he generally derided Mr. Trump and his first-term team, Mr. Esper wrote that Mr. Trump wanted to launch missiles against cartel infrastructure. During two private conversations in the summer of 2020, Mr. Esper said, he persuaded the commander in chief to abandon the idea.

Here is how Mr. Esper described the face-to-face discussion.

“Slightly hunched over, with his hands motioning in front of him like a quarterback gesturing for a long snap, he asked me if the military could ‘shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs’ and take out the cartels. Standing close to me as he spoke, the president complained that the Mexican government ‘isn’t doing enough,’ getting irritated as he spoke and adding, ‘They don’t have control of their own country. If we could just knock [the drug labs] out,’ he said, ‘this would do the trick.’

‘What do you think?’ he asked.”

Mr. Esper mocked the idea. He wanted to continue the decades-long failed policy of trying to intercept the huge shipments of fentanyl, “meth” and other killers while helping train Mexican troops. Yet the U.S. learned when President Biden opened the southern border post-Trump that the cartels control the other side; Mexican authorities basically play spectator.

In his memoir, Mr. Esper wrote of his indignation with what he said was Mr. Trump’s idea to deny, post-strike, that the missiles came from the U.S.

“These conversations were quite troubling, to say the least,” he wrote. “On one hand, I shared his concern about illicit drugs being trafficked into our country and respected his passion for wanting to stop this dangerous trade, but asking the U.S. military to shoot missiles into a sovereign country and worse yet, our friend and neighbor, definitely wasn’t the way to go about it.”

Mr. Trump executed that plan, in part, on Saturday by bombing Venezuelan infrastructure and capturing a head-of-state cartel boss.

In his book, Mr. Esper remembered that he worked hard to conceal his shock.

“I said, ‘Mr. President, we could do that, and as much as I want to stop these drugs too, shooting missiles into Mexico would be illegal. It would also be an act of war.’ I recommended that we look for more ways to help the Mexican government deal with the problem, such as increasing the training, intelligence and equipment we are providing them. We should also take another look at ideas that were tabled in the past. But to simply launch air or missile strikes into Mexico ‘would not only violate international law, it would also destroy our relationship with Mexico and damage our global standing.’”

Mr. Trump fired him after losing reelection Nov. 3, 2020, to Mr. Biden.

Mr. Esper depicts himself as the savior.

“Fortunately, nothing further ever came of these conversations. … Still, I was troubled. This was not rational thinking. Moreover, it only underscored in my mind later how important it was for me to stay in my post. What if another secretary of defense, my replacement, went along with this? Lord knows there were plenty of people in the mix who thought the president’s outlandish ideas made sense.”

The “another secretary of defense” is now in place five years later.

Pete Hegseth’s precise views on bombing Mexican cartels are not public, but he is gung-ho. He has advocated striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and now Venezuela’s socialist-controlled drug trafficking and terrorism.

“President Trump is deadly serious about stopping the flow of gangs and violence to our country, deadly serious about stopping the flow of drugs and poison to our people,” Mr. Hegseth said Saturday while standing beside the president.

Mr. Trump, talking to Fox News on Saturday, seems ready to break free of the “Esper Doctrine.”

He downgraded Ms. Sheinbaum to a figurehead, saying the cartels actually run Mexico.

“We’re very friendly with her, she’s a good woman. But the cartels are running Mexico. She’s not running Mexico,” he said. “The cartels are running Mexico. And we could be politically correct and be nice and say, ‘Oh yes, she is.’ No, no. … She’s very frightened of the cartels. They’re running Mexico. And I’ve asked her numerous times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’”

“‘No, no, no, Mr. President. No, no, no, please,’” he quoted her as saying.

“So we have to do something,” he said, “because we lost, the real number is 300,000, people, in my opinion. You know, they like to say 100,000. 100,000 is a lot of people, but the real number is 300,000. … They come in through the southern border, and something’s going to have to be done with Mexico.”

Ms. Sheinbaum condemned the U.S. attack on Venezuela quickly after Mr. Maduro was handcuffed.