President Donald Trump’s approach to the drug war has been characteristically brazen. Since September, spectacular boat bombings by American forces in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific have killed nearly 200 people, violating international law while doing little to curb the U.S. fentanyl crisis. Washington strong-armed Mexico into finally taking out the drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, in February. Two months later, U.S. prosecutors indicted Rubén Rocha Moya, governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, on charges of aiding drug trafficking. In March, Trump hosted 12 Latin American leaders at a Florida country club for the first summit of the “Shield of the Americas,” a new, U.S.-led regional security initiative to counter drug cartels and transnational crime. Casting the effort as an “armed conflict” against “narcoterrorists,” Trump has designated Mexican and Venezuelan cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and is threatening to do the same for Brazil’s powerful prison-based gangs. Across all of these efforts, U.S. officials have floated direct military action that would shred diplomatic boundaries long thought inviolable.

But the president has not been nearly bold enough. For all his pomp and bluster, his approach is depressingly conventional. For three decades, countries in the Western Hemisphere have been hamstrung by the notion that the only way to counter the drug trade is with all-out combat: physically preventing all drug production and trafficking, and arresting or killing all drug traffickers. If antidrug efforts do not achieve these goals, the thinking goes, the answer is to escalate. But the promise of victory via brute force is a dangerous illusion. Drug flows are larger than ever, and militarized crackdowns have not just failed but also backfired, ultimately empowering the cartels that adopt the most violent and destructive tactics.

There is an alternative: what I call “conditional repression.” Countries facing powerful and destructive criminal groups, such as drug cartels and prison gangs, should draw bright redlines and concentrate their fire on the groups that cross them. Escalatory measures, whether military or judicial, could be used to punish only the worst cartel behavior. In this way, the repressive force that is currently failing to stop the drug trade could be used coercively to reduce its most pernicious harms. And nobody understands coercion better than Trump. From tariffs to military operations in Iran and Venezuela, he has seized personal control over levers of power and used it to punish those who do not bend to his will. Trump could do the same to cartels: cow them into ending fentanyl flows and minimizing violence, criminal governance, civilian extortion, and environmental degradation. However contentious his tactics, this president may be uniquely (and surprisingly) qualified to change the way the United States—and the world—fights the drug war.

Trump’s call to fight the cartels with military power is hardly new. Facing both domestic and U.S. pressure, many Latin American states have tried for decades to stop drug trafficking and destroy cartels through brute force. Blanket crackdowns, or “unconditional” repression, may hurt or even eliminate individual cartels, but they do little to deter those cartels’ rivals and often open up more market share. Somebody will fill the gap to meet drug consumers’ voracious demand,........

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