In 2020, during the last year of the Trump administration’s first term, U.S. President Donald Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper a shocking question: Why can’t the United States just attack the Mexican cartels and their infrastructure with a volley of missiles?

Esper recounted the moment in his memoir, using the anecdote to illustrate just how reckless Trump was becoming as his term drew to a close. Those missiles, of course, were never launched, so the entire interaction amounted to nothing in terms of policy.

Yet five years later, Trump still views the Mexican cartels as one of Washington’s principal national security threats. His urge to take offensive action inside Mexico has only grown with time. Unlike in Trump’s first term, using the U.S. military to combat these criminal organizations is now a mainstream policy option in Trump’s Republican Party. According to The New York Times, Trump has signed a presidential directive allowing the Pentagon to begin using military force against specific cartels in Latin America, and U.S. military officials are now in the process of studying various ways to go about implementing the order.

While this may come as a shock to some foreign policy commentators, it shouldn’t. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and short-lived national security adviser) Mike Waltz, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ron Johnson have all left the door open to military force, whether it takes the form of striking fentanyl-production facilities by air or deploying U.S. special operations forces to take out top cartel leaders on Mexican soil.

Effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any.

The Trump administration wasted no time going down this road. The Central Intelligence Agency is engaging in more surveillance flights along the U.S.-Mexico border, and inside Mexican airspace, to gather information on key cartel locations. The U.S. national security bureaucracy was already in preliminary discussions about the possible use of drone strikes against the cartels as well. And on February 20, the U.S. State Department designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which is designed to deter Americans from working with the cartels and lay the foundation for future strikes.

This is all good politics for Trump, who recognizes implicitly that getting tough on Mexico economically and politically is red meat for his base. But politics isn’t nearly as important as policy, and the policy implications of U.S. military operations in Mexico—even if the purpose is a noble one—is riddled with costs and make managing the problems the Trump administration ostensibly cares about even harder.

First, we should remember one thing right off the bat: Using the military to tackle cartels is not a new phenomenon. The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect. Successive Mexican governments since the turn of the century, from the conservative Felipe Calderón to the leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), have relied on the military under the presumption this was the best way the Mexican state could pressure criminal organizations into extinction.

Calderón, for instance, declared a full-blown war on the cartels immediately after his election in 2006, deploying tens of thousands of Mexican troops into some of the country’s most violent states. Despite lambasting the military-first strategy during his own presidential campaign, Enrique Peña Nieto largely continued Calderón’s strategy with a special emphasis on targeting so-called “kingpins” of........

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