Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Towards the end of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, the fascist dictatorship which has come to power in the US has launched a war of aggression against Mexico. I thought of this as I read that President-Elect Donald Trump has been talking about using US special operations units against Mexican drug cartels.

Trump had considered launching missile attacks against the cartels in 2020, the final year of his first term as president. Mark Esper, at that time Trump’s secretary of defense wrote in his 2022 memoir, A Sacred Oath, that Trump claimed that “No one would know it was us.”

Never doubt the staying power of a bad idea. Rolling Stone reported in November 2024 and January 2025 that the incoming Trump administration is contemplating a “soft invasion” to obliterate Mexico’s drug cartels; the only question in their minds is the scale of the incursion. US military action could take the form of targeted assassinations or abductions of cartel leaders, airstrikes on drug labs, training of Mexican troops, raids on cartel bases by US special operations forces—or all of the above. These actions would be taken with or without the Mexican government’s consent.

Trump’s plan is being called “Iraq all over again.” It’s also good, old-fashioned Yankee imperialism. Mexicans have not forgotten la intervención estadounidense en México (the 1846 to 1848 Mexican War), a straight-out land grab of half of Mexico’s territory. The western and southwestern US states are almost entirely made up of conquered land. One year earlier, in 1845, the US annexed Texas. In the twentieth century, US forces would intervene twice........

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