With world attention focused on the US-Israel assault on Iran, US Secretary of War Peter Hegseth delivered a speech last week at the inaugural Americas Counter Cartel Conference in Florida. Hosted in a part of Miami that shares its name with an addictive benzodiazepine (Doral), the event on 5 March brought together 17 ‘American’ countries who were urged to sign a joint declaration on the need for direct action against criminal cartels. Notable drug-affected countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Mexico were not present.

Hegseth was clear that if those countries lacked the resolve to tackle the drugs menace head on, the US was prepared to go it alone. A few days earlier, Donald Trump had hosted his own summit called the ‘Shield of the Americas’, urging another 12 hemispheric partners to commit to destroying the drug cartels. Military power, not criminal justice, was the US President’s proposed method of choice.

The most interesting element of Hegseth’s opening speech last week, though, was how drug wars and cartels have given the Trump administration a fresh opportunity to reframe America’s relationship with its southern counterparts. From the 1970s, the self-declared ‘war on drugs’ was about blocking drug flows and disrupting production in the field. In Trump’s first administration, the focus was on building a ‘beautiful wall’ and reinforcing US-Mexican border security. In the second Trump term, the spectre of ‘narco-terrorism’ is now used to justify both direct action against Venezuela, field campaigns and a grander project around hemispheric dominance.

Trump’s appeal to a ‘Greater North America’ is a psychological chokehold

Trump’s appeal to a ‘Greater North America’ is a psychological chokehold

President Trump had, according to Hegseth, ‘redrawn the strategic map from Greenland to the Gulf of America – we call this map the Greater North........

© The Spectator