Pennsylvania Republicans in key swing state Senate support use of military in fight against fentanyl

Associated press

STEELTON, Pa. (AP) — The Republican challenger trying to flip the U.S. Senate seat in swing state Pennsylvania has said he will push for U.S. military action in Mexico to target fentanyl trafficking networks, a controversial and complicated idea that seems to have emerged from former President Donald Trump.

David McCormick, who is challenging Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, is making the idea part of his plan to combat the fentanyl scourge, which is playing a major role in the campaign and has been at the center of the dueling TV ads in the United States. States. race.

The idea of ​​using the military attracted attention during last year’s Republican Party primaries, before Trump emerged as his party’s presidential candidate for the third time in a row.

But now McCormick — a decorated military veteran and ex-hedge fund CEO who served on Trump’s Defense Advisory Council — is testing the message of unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico in a state that could be decisive in determining which party takes over the White House. wins. and a majority in the Senate in the November elections.

McCormick is considering using the U.S. military’s drones and special operations teams in Mexico to destroy cartels in the fentanyl trade, though he insists the military must be deployed “selectively and thoughtfully.”

“I’m not saying we’re going to send the 82nd Airborne Division to make a jump into Mexico,” McCormick said. “What I’m saying is that the combination of special operations and drones, I think, could wipe out the manufacturing facilities, destroy the distribution networks and put 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. should not wait for a blessing from a Mexican government that has failed to address the problem of fentanyl production and trafficking, he said.

“So the time for negotiating with the Mexican government to get their DEA on this is over,” McCormick told an audience in September. “We have to take tough action against it. And that’s what I would do.”

The idea gained widespread 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 idea that Esper and other defense officials quickly dismissed.

The idea gained cachet among some Republican lawmakers last year and Trump embraced it, saying, “Now is the time for America to go to war against the cartels.”

Trump’s then-competitors on the Republican presidential campaign trail also embraced the idea, but that talk has died down. Legislation to authorize military authorization has not yet received a committee vote in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and while McCormick’s proposal lacks specifics and reflects an idea Trump put forward, it goes beyond what most – if not all – other Senate candidates around the world say. US

Critics of the US military’s deployment to Mexico say such operations would do little to harm the cartels or stem the flow of fentanyl, while raising delicate questions about sovereignty.

For example, they could destroy relations with the U.S.’s largest trading partner, whose just-departed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has repeatedly denied that Mexico produces the synthetic opioid, despite significant evidence to the contrary.

Casey has neither criticized nor supported the idea of ​​deploying the U.S. military in Mexico. Instead of. he has noted his support for measures in Congress to strengthen screening at border checkpoints.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the vast majority of fentanyl seized is brought into the United States by U.S. citizens at the southern border.

McCormick and other Republicans compare fentanyl deaths to combat losses in the Vietnam War: about 110,000 drug overdose deaths each of the past two years, in which fentanyl was the primary culprit two-thirds of the time, compared to 58,000 reported U.S. victims in the war.

“What we are experiencing now is unprecedented,” he said. “The numbers are beyond imagination in terms of what we are experiencing now.”

McCormick says the closest model to what he has in mind is the U.S. military’s cocaine interdiction, working with 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 stem the flow of cocaine.

It is true that Colombia has become more stable, governance has improved and cartel activity has decreased, Logan said. But the price of cocaine in the US dropped significantly, which he called an indication that cocaine had become more widely available.

“And I think this is the first reason to be skeptical about the claim that deploying the U.S. military against the cartels in Mexico in the United States will have an effect on the quantity and abundance of fentanyl in the United States,” said Logan. .

Analysts say it seems unlikely that Mexico would agree to US 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 needed to close labs and sort out the management of a human trafficking network.

But unilateral U.S. military strikes will have little effect in the long term because the labs and cartel commanders that are taken out can be easily replaced, she said.

“And in the meantime you would incur very high costs,” she said. “You can imagine the complete breakdown in the relationship, which has many consequences.”

Mexico, for example, could end its cooperation to stem the flow of migrants to the U.S. border, she said.

In Congress, the bipartisan deal centered on 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 smuggling networks and money laundering.

Meanwhile, Democrats have accused Trump and Republicans of hypocrisy after passing a sweeping immigration reform bill this year that included hundreds of millions of dollars to hire more customs agents and strengthen investigations into fentanyl trafficking.

Trump said the associated immigration measures were not strict enough.

If he wins in November, congressional approval may not matter. Trump has said he plans to act with or without congressional approval.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, has suggested that it already has the legal authority to target cartels in Mexico if it so chooses.

Presidents will always argue that they have 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 School of Law.

Congress passed a law in 1973 requiring their approval to take such action, but presidents have assumed the authority to attack non-state enemies in other countries they believe are unwilling or unable to to keep it in check, Corn said.

It is a gray area of ​​international law that has been challenged by presidents of both parties.

“It’s the same reasoning Obama used when he ordered an incursion into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden,” Corn said. “As far as we know, we did not have permission from the Pakistanis for this.”

So the question might be whether the flow of fentanyl into the United States warrants military action, Corn said.

“It’s a tough question,” Corn said. “It’s killing millions of people, but it’s not like they’re flying drones across the border and dropping this stuff.”

___

Follow Marc Levy twitter.com/timelywriter