STEELTON, Pa. – The Republican challenger trying to flip the U.S. Senate seat in swing-state Pennsylvania said he’ll press for U.S. military action in Mexico to target fentanyl trafficking networks, a controversial and complicated idea that seemed to originate with former President Donald Trump.
David McCormick, who is challenging third-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, is making the idea part of his plan for fighting the fentanyl scourge, which is playing a big role in the campaign and has been central to dueling TV ads in the race.
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The idea of using the military garnered attention in last year's GOP primaries before Trump emerged as his party's presidential nominee for the third consecutive time.
But now, McCormick — a decorated Army combat veteran and ex- hedge fund CEO who served on Trump’s Defense Advisory Board — is testing the message of unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico in a state that could be decisive in determining which party wins the White House and a Senate majority in November’s election.
McCormick envisions using the U.S. military’s drones and special operations teams in Mexico to destroy fentanyl trafficking cartels, though he stresses that the military should be used “selectively and thoughtfully.”
“I’m not saying we’re going to send the 82nd Airborne Division to do a jump into Mexico,” McCormick said. “What I’m saying is the combination of special operations and drones, I think, could eradicate the manufacturing facilities, kill the distribution networks and do a real dent in what is a terrorist activity.”
Military action is justified, McCormick says, by what he calls “the biggest killer in our country.” The U.S. shouldn’t wait for a blessing from a Mexican government that has failed to address its problem with fentanyl production and trafficking, he said.
“So the time for negotiating with the Mexican government to get their DEA on this is gone,” McCormick told one audience in September. “We’ve got to get tough on it. And that’s what I would do.”
The idea received high-profile attention when Trump’s former defense secretary, Mark Esper, said in 2022 that Trump had asked him about firing missiles into Mexico, a precedent-setting notion that Esper and other defense officials quickly rejected.
The idea gained cachet among some Republican lawmakers last year and Trump embraced it, saying “it’s now time for America to wage war on the cartels.”
Trump's then-competitors on the Republican presidential primary campaign trail also embraced the idea, but that talk has quieted. Legislation to provide military authorization hasn't received a committee vote in the Republican-controlled House and, while McCormick’s proposal lacks specifics and echoes an idea Trump broached, it goes further than what most—if not all—other Senate candidates are saying across the U.S.
Critics of using the U.S. military in Mexico say such operations would do little to hurt the cartels or stem the flow of fentanyl, while raising delicate questions about sovereignty.
They could, for example, destroy the relationship with the U.S.' largest trade partner, whose just-departed President Andres Manuel López Obradorrepeatedlydenied Mexico is producing the synthetic opioid despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
Casey has neither criticized nor backed the idea of using the U.S. military in Mexico. Instead. he has pointed to his support for measures in Congress to strengthen screening at border checkpoints.
The vast majority of fentanyl seized is brought into the United States by American citizens at the southern border, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
McCormick and other Republicans compare fentanyl deaths to combat losses in the Vietnam War: Roughly 110,000 drug overdose deaths each of the last two years in which fentanyl was the primary culprit two-thirds of the time, compared to 58,000 reported U.S. casualties in the war.
“What we’re in is unprecedented,” he said. “The numbers are beyond imagination in terms of what we’re experiencing right now.”
McCormick says the closest model for what he has in mind is the U.S. military's cocaine interdiction work with the cooperation of the Colombian government against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. McCormick called that effort “incredibly successful.”
But Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, said the Colombian operation failed to stop the flow of cocaine.
It’s true that Colombia became more stable, its governance improved and cartel activity receded, Logan said. But the price of cocaine in the U.S. dropped significantly, which he called an indication that cocaine had become more widely available.
“And I think that is the first reason to be skeptical of the claim that using the U.S. military against the cartels in Mexico is going to have an effect in the United States on the amount and abundance of fentanyl in the United States,” Logan said.
Analysts say it seems unlikely that Mexico would agree to U.S. military operations on its territory.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Brookings Institution's Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors, said a sustained military and law enforcement effort by Mexico over months or years would be necessary to shut down labs and round up a trafficking network’s management.
But unilateral U.S. military strikes will have little long-term effect, because the labs and cartel commanders that get taken out are easily replaced, she said.
“And meanwhile you would incur very large costs,” she said. “You could imagine the complete rupture in the relationship that has many consequences.”
Mexico, for example, could end its cooperation of stemming the flow of migrants to its border with the United States, she said.
In Congress, bipartisan agreement has revolved around hiring more Customs and Border Patrol personnel at the southern border and expanding the capacity to screen vehicles coming from Mexico.
In April, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation to expand the use of sanctions to disrupt trafficking networks and money laundering.
Democrats, meanwhile, have accused Trump and Republicans of hypocrisy after they sank a sweeping immigration reform bill this year that carried hundreds of millions of dollars to hire more customs agents and bolster investigations into fentanyl trafficking.
Trump said the attached immigration measures weren't tough enough.
If he wins in November, congressional authorization may not matter. Trump has said he intends to act with or without congressional approval.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has suggested it already has the legal authority to strike cartels in Mexico, if it wanted to.
Presidents will always assert that they have the inherent authority to use the armed forces to protect the national security of the United States, said Geoffrey S. Corn, director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech’s School of Law.
Congress in 1973 passed a law requiring their approval for taking such action, but presidents have assumed the authority to strike at non-state enemies in other countries that they deem to be either unwilling or unable to rein them in, Corn said.
It’s a gray area of international law that has been tested by presidents of both parties.
“It's the same rationale that Obama used when he ordered a raid into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden,” Corn said. “As far as we know, we didn't have consent from the Pakistanis to do that.”
The question, then, may be whether the flow of fentanyl into the United States warrants military action, Corn said.
“It's a hard question,” Corn said. “It is killing millions of people, but it’s not like they're flying drones across the border and dropping this stuff.”
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Follow Marc Levy at twitter.com/timelywriter