The Cartel War Is About to Start

The U.S. should not be using its military against drug cartels and gangs in Venezuela or anywhere else.

Trump’s illegal cartel war appears to be starting in the southern Caribbean:

Three U.S. Aegis guided-missile destroyers will arrive off the coast of Venezuela in the next 36 hours as part of an effort to address threats from Latin American drug cartels, two sources briefed on the matter said on Monday.

The U.S. should not be using its military against drug cartels and gangs in Venezuela or anywhere else. Our government already relies too much on military options in response to international problems. Combating drug cartels is a job for law enforcement, not the military. Militarizing the drug war will achieve nothing except to produce more violence and upheaval in the affected countries.

According to the same Reuters report, the U.S. will be deploying 4,000 sailors and Marines in the region, and that includes an attack submarine. This is at best a waste of resources and a misuse of military assets. If it is not stopped, it could easily turn into an endless mission with increasing costs.

There is an excellent article from Washington Office on Latin America that explains at length why Trump’s cartel war policy makes no sense. There is no military solution to the problem:

The forceful approach does not work. It will defeat specific kingpins and organized crime groups, but it will leave intact “organized crime” because soldiers don’t exist to fight webs of corruption and illicit finance.

A cartel war is guaranteed to fail because the illicit drug trade is not something that can be fixed by military means. It is setting the U.S. military up for another mission that is doomed from the start.

Most of the discussion of a possible cartel war has focused on Mexico, but it seems that Venezuela is more likely to be the first target. Perhaps the Trump administration thinks that it would be easier to sell launching attacks in Venezuela because the country is under severe U.S. sanctions and its government has been a target of Trump’s earlier regime change policy. Venezuela hawks in the administration, including Marco Rubio, probably see a cartel war as a way to get Trump on board with some form of military intervention in the country.

The destroyers are currently in international waters, but presumably they have been sent there to launch missile strikes on Venezuelan territory. If Trump were to order these destroyers to launch attacks on targets inside Venezuela, he would be violating international and U.S. law. The president has no authority to launch attacks inside another country without Congressional approval. Firing missiles into Venezuela would be an act of aggression against a country that poses no threat to the United States.

The president’s cartel war needs to be shut down now before it gets going. Congress needs to vote to block funding for these operations, and it needs to reclaim its proper role in matters of war. The military is not the president’s plaything to be used however he wishes, and he must not be allowed to start any more wars.