February 21, 2025 - 6:00pm
Elon Musk posted on his X social media platform on Wednesday, celebrating President Trump’s designation of numerous Mexican and other Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs). The designation, Musk said, meant that the cartels would be “eligible for drone strikes.”
Musk is half-correct. While an FTO designation does not provide a specific legal or political authority for the US government to use force against cartels, it provides two related benefits. First, it provides an important contextual finding to support a later decision to use force. In essence, it allows Trump to tell Congress: “I used force against what my administration has found to be a terrorist organisation that significantly threatens US national security.” Second, it provides supporting evidence to Trump in the event that he wishes to issue a covert action finding against any of the FTO listed cartels.
That covert action finding, which has likely already been issued, is the critical element related to possible drone strikes. The immediate impact of an FTO is to make illegal any transaction or material engagement by US persons with a cartel or affiliated operations. This will have a significant impact on US engagement with Mexican businesses that have proximity to cartels, of which there are many.
Covert action findings allow a president to authorise deniable or “covert” use of force, or other levers of hostile manipulation, against a designated entity. Highly secretive, they are briefed only to the so-called “Gang of Eight” ranking members of the Congressional leadership and Intelligence Committees. Trump has offered numerous hints that he would issue a covert action finding, including via his selection of a former CIA paramilitary operations officer as his new Ambassador to Mexico.
The CIA would take the lead in terms of any direct action against cartels. Sentiment inside the CIA is heavily supportive of more aggressive use of force in light of casualties officers and agents have suffered at the hands of those groups in recent years. Covert action would be expected to entail blackmail, influence, kidnapping, and assassination actions against cartel officers and their enablers in Mexico’s security and political apparatus. Because of the obvious political risks of targeting powerful Mexican government officials or their interests (Mexico’s ruling Morena party is viewed by US intelligence services as retaining close links to the Sinaloa Cartel, for example), Trump’s appetite for risk will be the key element in shaping how far the CIA is allowed to go.
Drone strikes could certainly form part of the covert action campaign. Indeed, the Trump administration has already escalated the activity of CIA operated MQ-9 Reaper drone flights over Mexico. And while these drones are not involved in combat action thus far, they could easily be loaded with weapons to enable that capability. Media leaks of these flights appear designed to pressure the Mexican government to take more robust measures to confront the cartels or face the cartels suffering direct US confrontation.
Based on Trump’s priority to reduce fentanyl smuggling into the US, we should expect drone strikes and other actions to occur in the coming months.
Mexico’s sovereignty be damned? What’s missing in the debate over borders in the Trump era is that, at the end of the day, it is a nation’s responsibility to secure its own border. It is not the responsibility of Mexico or Canada, which are instead responsible for their own borders. The MAGA dummies might wish to blame this all on Mexico, but ultimately, it’s the U.S. that is failing and instead deflecting blame on its neighbours.
Hmmm….. WAS failing, is the operative verb, I believe. MAGA ended the cultural Marxist revolution of woke, open borders, unlimited spending and censorship.
I also believe that the UK pointed fingers at the French, not long ago.
Mexico is, in many respects, a failing narco state. The US can, and should, protect its interests. In the past, Mexico fully cooperated. Have the cartels won in Mexico?
I give it six months or less before the honeymoon ends. Deportations and tariffs would mean skyrocketing interest rates and inflation, and Musk’s DOGE cult movement – the far-right Woke – will over time only serve to disgust the majority in the centre. The horseshoe theory of politics in plain sight. Meanwhile, the U.S. stock market performance has been muted this year (European and Canadian markets have been doing very well) and has declined quite a bit today over worries that Trump’s policies are starting to negatively affect the economy.
I agree that MAGA is in a race. Will cheaper energy and easier supply side economics improve productivity and people’s lives faster than decreased gov’t services and / or inflation create resentment? There are inflation and deflation pressures present; as well as ~$6Tn cash on the investment sidelines.
Big forces in the wings, and no one knows how this will go.
You are correct in some respects. USA, Europe, UK, Canada and others have completely failed to protect their borders. This partly thanks to the surrender to the human-rights mafia, partly wokism and partly leaders being so self-satisfied and arrogant about the virtues of democracy and socially liberal values that we have forgotten the foundations of our wealth and freedoms.
But there’s no reason why any of us should be held responsible for foreign organised crime!
Fantastic. The sooner the better.
Good news, do it. If only our lot had the same courage, mind you, that’d be the end of HSBC….
This is a very interesting topic, and I agree 100% that a country should take care of its borders. However, there are two major issues that the one-sided article and its equally one-sided commenters fail to address.
First, about 20% of Americans identify as Latino—roughly 65 million people, close to the population of the UK. If you start using high-tech or high-powered weapons against a group that lives among you, what exactly are you trying to achieve? You may claim to be targeting cartels, but remember, cartels are embedded within these communities. What you are not considering is that such an approach will only radicalize these groups because they are interconnected—they live among each other and among the rest of the population.
The U.S. has been able to wage wars in the Middle East, destroy regions, and then walk away, leaving the problems behind. The main cost at home has been PTSD and the relatively small number of soldiers lost in combat. But that strategy only works because the conflict is far from American soil. You can’t do the same thing when the war zone is inside your own country. In an urbanized conflict, you don’t just bomb a distant enemy and return home—you bring the destruction into your own neighborhoods, radicalize people who are already part of the fabric of society, and create an endless cycle of violence that you can’t escape. Latinos in the U.S. are concentrated in highly populated states like Texas, and if this turns into a war among us, the consequences will be far worse than any foreign intervention.
Secondly, conflicts like this cannot be solved through war when they are so close to home. They can only be addressed through diplomacy and financial strategies. Yet, the commenters and the article’s author fail to acknowledge this because they are trapped in a superiority mindset, lacking any real depth or consideration of the consequences.
The irony is that many of the people climbing over the U.S. border walls are fleeing the exact kind of violence and instability we are now contemplating. But if we escalate these conflicts within our own borders, where will we run? Imagine what the U.S. will look like in five or ten years if we start deploying drones against invisible cartels—it’s a joke! It’s the same flawed thinking that led us into Afghanistan and Iraq, and it already make us broke financially and beholden to other countries…we fell sleep and woke up to China running the world!
So, why are cartels so powerful? Because they have money. And where is that money coming from?
The issue no one wants to talk about: the money!