There is a great deal of agonizing handwringing over the crisis that the United States faces at our southern border. Legislators from both ends of the political spectrum talk about comprehensive political reform, increasing border patrol at the U.S./Mexico border, and granting a pathway to citizenship to DACA residents living in America.
Few dare to diagnose and declare the nature of our real problem and proffer viable solutions: that Mexico is a hostile foreign power located at our border, that we are actually at war with Mexico, and that the only solution might be air strikes, military invasion, placing the country into political receivership or, more—outright annexation.
We are at war with the forces that rule, govern and puppeteer the hands of the Mexican government: the drug cartels that are actually cartel terrorists. They have already launched a massive invasion into the United States; only few want to stamp them with the terrorist imprimatur for the sake of political expediency.
Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is a politically impotent and inefficacious puppet, declared from the beginning of his tenure that he would suspend hostilities against transnational criminal organizations, adopting “embraces and not bullets” (abrazos y no balazos). Like today’s woke prison abolitionists, he proclaimed that it was more desirable to attack the root causes of narco-violence which could be traceable to poverty and lack of opportunity for millions of uneducated youths in the traditional labor market.
The result was and continues to be an alarming increase in violence. During the year of his presidency, close to 33,000 Mexicans have lost their lives to gang violence.
Mexico also has purchased in excess of $2 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S. We also provide arms and support equipment (including Black Hawk helicopters) funded by U.S. taxpayers. While the cartels pay off, or completely disarm, the various Mexican government institutions including law enforcement agencies, Mexico’s laws prohibit citizens from arming themselves. Completely. Mexico has a totally disarmed civilian populace, and armed cartel terrorists running roughshod over an empathic woke government.
Talk of comprehensive immigration reform fails to capture that it is the cartels that are bringing hordes of immigrants to the border armed with drugs including fentanyl and the deadlier Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that causes flesh wounds to incurably rot at injection sites. Such talk fails to realize that hordes of these gang cartels are crossing our borders each day and working in tandem with larger established cartels in Mexico to literally destroy America.
It is time for the United States to step in and clean up Mexico by whatever means necessary.
Mexico, ruled in all but name by the cartel terrorists, is a hostile foreign power attacking the United States. A recalcitrant and incompetent government and, more importantly, an agglomeration of ruling cartels, has sent its poor to the United States and used them to fight a proxy war with the United States. This has allowed Mexico’s criminal oligarchy to get richer, and at great expense to the United States.
Statistics show a marked increase in crimes committed by illegal immigrants. The proliferation of Mexican gangs across U.S. cities is tragic and unacceptable.
Mexico is, undoubtedly, a political, economic, and ecological disaster.
The larger issue, though, is that by whatever skewed and biased and ever-fluctuating criteria are used to determine what counts as a rogue state — Mexico is one. And the national security question remains: is it in our national self-interest to have a violent, porous-border, rogue state as our neighbor? For myriad reasons the answer has to be “no.”
Mexico is also an economic failed state. It has failed to put into practice a set of sound economic policies that satisfy the basic needs of a substantial number of its citizens.
Rogue states deliberately invoke regional or international instability in ways that upset the security among its immediate neighbors or global compatriots in general. Even small-scale regional instability can spread in ways that are inimical to the authority of leading global political actors. The instability promotes the message that there exists a political state in some corner of the globe that is beyond the reach and scope of America’s power orbit and capacity to invoke law and order; not for the sake of power qua power, but for rights of citizens of that region of the world, and, just as importantly, for the just peace and security of Americans, for their right not to be invaded by drug cartel terrorists and subjected to war and mayhem in their own country.
Failed states and rogue states are sinkholes in the world. They actively detract value from the region in much the same way that condemned buildings used by criminals spread mayhem and drag down home values throughout a neighborhood. Since regions are interconnected via a vast causal network of interlocking social, political, and fiscal systems, they contaminate the entire liberal order.
Mexico has reneged on its claim to both de jure and de facto sovereignty and national autonomy. Sovereignty is not an unquestionable given or a political axiom. It is a contested concept dependent on constraints of justice and criteria that warrant its legitimacy.
Sovereignty in a proper society is always endorsed by the will of the people that ratifies a body politic to govern them in ways conducive to their well-being and flourishing. No rational people would ever grant sovereignty to a government to enslave them, condemn them to economic policies that lead to their destitution, or obstruct their liberty.
When, through political calumny, a country compromises the security of its people, it morally forfeits its right to sovereignty and autonomy.
When the violated citizens of an economic rogue state make excessive demands against the United States, it is time for the U.S. to take actions to secure its national self-interests. Mexico, in extricating itself from the process of history, endangers the world order and, more immediately, the security of the United States.
What can the United States do? It can place Mexico in economic and political receivership. Receivership is an act of self-defense and an act of political and economic retraining of a politically immature nation in need of guidance of how to manage its internal affairs and governance.
The United States has, as does any mature and free nation, the right to strip Mexico of sovereignty and autonomy to the extent that it gives the latter a chance to save the Mexican people from ruin, and just as importantly, to protect America from numerous security crises as thousands pour illegally and unvetted into the country.
The United States could be custodians of Mexico’s internal and natural resources that could be ethically appropriated by an external governing body to restructure the state by raising it to a level of functionality. It can do this by reordering its political regime, restructuring its constitution to one resembling a U.S.-based model predicated on liberal republican values. Hence we may propose trusteeship and receivership as proper modes of self-defense against incursions into our state that threaten our national security.
The United States could also bomb terrorist drug cartel operational sites out of existence. What is clear is that the United States is beyond talk of pre-emptive and preventive measures. The cartel war has been declared against America for a long time. This is a war of self-defense that would finally be enacted.
A system of ethical trusteeship and political and economic receivership would be no more unethical than what China is doing on the continent of Africa. The United States could simply defend such actions as deterrents against existing and future threats against its national security. Proper appropriation of the natural resources of a failed-rogue state, whether they be petroleum, gold, copper, silver, iron, coal, and timber, can finance the restructuring of a failed state, along with the levying of appropriate rescue and restructuring taxes, are all possibilities.
This model could be applied to any failed state, or rogue state — annexation would be justified in the case of the latter. What should be clear is why both rogue and failed states pose a threat to the Unites States. In the interlocking world of global geopolitics, no state can be allowed to behave with impunity. If it does, it sends a signal to other states that they too can behave in like manner.
This signals a world without both political-military and moral leadership. It creates a vacuum that leaves room for nefarious and reprobate states to fill. A world in which moral and political incorrigibility is left unchallenged, where obstreperous nations and/or states afflicted with arrested political development are left unchallenged by those with civilizational and political maturity, is one in which not only a spirit of disrespect for global order becomes the norm, but a sense of disorder and anarchy is seen as the de facto normative structure of geopolitical governance.
This is not a world in which leadership is possible, and it is not a world in which the United States will have much continued leverage and political clout. It is certainly not a world in which the rule of law as wielded by a strong imperium is possible. Rogue states function as incubators for global terrorists, pirates, and criminal, non-state actors. They are major exporters of diseases, excessive refugees, insurgencies, organized criminal networks, regional anarchy, and a systemic threat to the liberal order of which the West and, fundamentally, the United States, are the primary architects.
The moral case for military action against the cartel terrorists has been established. The issue now is one of strategy and logistics. And, as I often like to say: the jungles are not approaching our cities, and the barbarians are not at the gates. The jungles have become our cities, and the barbarians long ago smashed down the gates and are inside the walls, tearing our cities down. What, then, are we going to do about it?
No comments:
Post a Comment