It was about six months ago when House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said the Trump administration made “a mistake” by not launching a military offensive in Mexico. In the months that followed, a variety of GOP senators — including Arkansas’ Tom Cotton, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Louisiana’s John Kennedy, and Ohio’s J.D. Vance — voiced support for U.S. military operations in our neighbor to the south.
As is often the case, Republican presidential candidates, hoping to one-up rivals and impress a rabid voter base, started incorporating the idea into their platforms. At the first Republican presidential primary debate, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed to send U.S. special forces into Mexico on his first day in office. Soon after, former Ambassador Nikki Haley pushed effectively the same line. Similarly, GOP entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has voiced support for a “shock-and-awe” military campaign against drug cartels.
This week, as Politico reported, the Florida governor appeared to go a little further.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wouldn’t rule out launching missiles into Mexico to combat drug cartels if he’s elected president, saying that it’s “dependent on the situation.” In a tense exchange with CBS Evening News’ Norah O’Donnell, the presidential hopeful was directly asked whether he would authorize an aerial attack inside the neighboring country.
“We would use all available — the tactics, I think, can be debated. If you have something you want to accomplish, people would brief you on the different ways you’d be able to do it,” the GOP presidential hopeful said. “So, that would be dependent on the situation.”
To be sure, DeSantis didn’t commit to missile strikes, but he didn’t rule out the possibility, either.
To be sure, this isn’t an entirely new idea in Republican circles. Describing his tenure as Defense secretary, Mark Esper has publicly conceded that, as recently as 2020, Donald Trump expressed an interest in launching Patriot missiles into Mexico. Esper initially assumed the then-president was kidding, but the Pentagon chief came to understand that the Republican was quite serious, and he brought it up more than once.
Esper talked Trump out of the idea. Three years later, the Trumpified party has nevertheless embraced the idea with a little too much enthusiasm.
As The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie recently summarized, it’s “genuinely bonkers that ‘invade Mexico’ is a mainstream Republican position.”
The Washington Post reported this week that the talk hasn’t been well received south of the border — “We’re not going to be anybody’s piñata,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last month — and even if GOP officials were to implement such a plan, it’s unlikely to be the basis for an effective policy.
“Mexican officials and independent security analysts have cautioned that military force by the United States would fail to quickly stop drug trafficking while torching relations with its southern neighbor and risking significant casualties,” the report explained.
This is a dangerously bad idea, that’s quickly taking root in Republican politics. No good can come of this.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
