On his first day in office, President Donald Trump designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations. The executive order fuses the “war on drugs” with the “war on terror,” expanding the legal tools that the federal government can use to aggressively pursue and punish drug cartels and people financially connected to them. It also marks a step toward the possibility of U.S. military incursions into Mexico.
Trump’s claims to being a “peacemaker” who is focused on problems at home have always warranted skepticism. Now this new designation illustrates how he’s kicking off his second term with a policy regime that will likely infuriate the U.S.’s friendly neighbor and its biggest trading partner in the world — and could act as a forerunner to invasion.
Framing foreign drug cartels as a security threat — as opposed to a public health threat — lays the groundwork to see their existence as a sufficient basis for acts of war.
“The first time Trump left himself open to being called an isolationist, and his view was more insular and withdrawing from the world,” Nikhil Singh, a historian at New York University, said in an interview. “This time he has re-engaged the fantasy of American expansionism, but it’s about territorial expansionism in the Western Hemisphere, an old vision of American dominance over its neighbors.”
Adding cartels to the U.S.’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations has significant policy consequences. It entails framing foreign drug organizations as a national security threat to America — assigning them political motives these groups don’t really have. “The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs,” Trump’s executive order reads.
With that pretext, it gives the U.S. a broader and more aggressive repertoire of tools for confronting drug cartels that send drugs into the country. “A terrorist designation would expand the government’s ability to prosecute people who supply services, or 'material support,' to the groups,” The Washington Post reports. “The new listing would also expand the authority to collect 'military action intelligence' on the cartels, according to an analysis by María Calderón, from the Mexico Institute of the Wilson Center.”
More concerning is that the designation raises the question of whether Trump will authorize the use of U.S. military force against cartels in Mexico — without Mexico’s sign-off. In 2019, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson told Vox that “many in Mexico fear it’s a first step toward some kind of military intervention, which Trump keeps mentioning when he talks to Mexican presidents.” And ultimately the designation marks a public paradigm shift: framing foreign drug cartels as a security threat — as opposed to a public health threat — lays the groundwork to see their existence as a sufficient basis for acts of war.
The idea of using unilateral military force in Mexico has been floating around on the right for years. Top Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have called for the U.S. use of force against cartels. Mark Esper, defense secretary in Trump's first term, wrote in his memoir that Trump had inquired about the possibility of sending missiles into Mexico to wipe out the cartels and take out drug labs, to which Esper objected. (Trump has refused to comment on the matter.) When asked by a reporter on Monday whether the terror designation meant he’d send special operations in Mexico to take them out, Trump replied, “Could happen. Stranger things have happened."
Mexico is, unsurprisingly, opposed to all of this. Merely being characterized as a host of terrorist organizations does reputational damage to a country, affecting the way it is perceived by tourists and investors. Moreover, as the Post points out, the laws triggered by the terror designation are broad enough that Mexican businesses who have nothing to do with cartels but are forced to give them money to avoid violence could be targeted by U.S. sanctions.
At a press briefing Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico would “defend our sovereignty” and called for the U.S. and Mexico to continue to cooperate on fighting cartels. “We all want to fight the drug cartels,” Sheinbaum said. The U.S. “in their territory, us in our territory.”
Trump using unilateral military force in Mexico wouldn’t just be destructive for U.S.-Mexican relations, it’s unlikely to be effective. As the failed U.S. war on drugs revealed, brute force does little to quash the demand for drugs that fuels drug organizations. “The idea that the U.S. military would go into Mexico and bomb and raid these labs is quite the wild idea because it is the same militarized approach they did in Colombia with cocaine,” Zachary Siegel, a journalist and co-writer of the drug policy newsletter Substance, told me in an interview in 2023. “Not only did that not stop cocaine production, it sparked a wave of terror across the country as drug production became a high-stakes war.”
Trump remains unpredictable, and it’s unclear what actions he could take as a result of the new designation. But what we do know is that this move telegraphs an interest in extraterritorial militance, and misleadingly frames drug trafficking as something that can be easily solved through military action. That is hardly the way of a “peace president.”
