What a MAGA military operation in Mexico could look like
With much attention directed toward President Donald Trump’s threats to strike Iran and refusal to rule out the use of force to assume control over Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, there is another nation that may soon be on the receiving end of U.S. military action.
Mexico was among the first targets that Trump turned his attention to after demonstrating his commitment to his new Monroe Doctrine “corollary” through the U.S. Delta Force raid earlier this month that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. As the pair were transferred from Caracas to New York City to face “narco-terrorism” charges, the U.S. leader told reporters that cartels were effectively “running” Mexico.
“Mexico has to get their act together because they’re pouring through Mexico, and we’re gonna have to do something,” Trump said at the time. “We’d love Mexico to do it. They’re capable of doing it, but unfortunately, their cartels are very strong in Mexico.”
Unlike Maduro, whose legitimacy has been challenged abroad by accusations of electoral fraud, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum enjoys broad regional and international support and has even received praise from Trump over her response to his intensified pressure to rein in the cartel crisis. The U.S. and Mexico also signed a new security cooperation agreement Thursday aimed at “delivering tangible actions to strengthen security cooperation and meaningful outcomes to counter cartels, and stop the illicit flow of fentanyl and weapons from crossing our shared border.”
On Friday, the Federal Aviation Authority announced restrictions on flights over Mexico and parts of Central and South America, indicating new operations may be imminent.
As the White House’s preference for high-profile displays of force looms large over the neighboring nation, Leonardo Curzio, a journalist and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Center for Research on North America, argued that “Trump is playing a double game with Mexico,” one in which unilateral intervention cannot be ruled out.
“So far, the outcome is positive. The political pressure on Claudia Sheinbaum is fostering cooperation, both in sealing the border and on the field of seizing drugs, destroying narcolabs and capturing criminals,” Curzio told Newsweek. “Simultaneously, he’s pressing to create the conditions for a unilateral attack to a very valuable target—probably a politician.”
“Trump is trying to get a political prize at least at the same level that Biden did with [former Sinaloa Cartel member] El Mayo,” Curzio said. “Cooperation is, nevertheless, the best option, but it is impossible to discard the second option, I mean a direct intervention of the U.S. in Mexico, even if that could jeopardize the framework of cooperation and mutual trust.”
A Battle Across the Border
As with many of Trump’s seemingly outlandish threats, from taking over Greenland to annexing Canada as the 51st state, the U.S. leader’s warnings to Mexico are being received in a far more serious manner in the wake of Maduro’s capture. The operation also demonstrated that the White House is adept at employing limited and precise force to achieve specific goals, regardless of criticism from abroad or even Congress.
Mexico was among the nations that came out strongly against the raid against Maduro. It was also one of the few Latin American nations who refused to rescind recognition of Maduro’s government in favor of the U.S.-backed opposition that unsuccessfully sought to unseat the Venezuelan leader under the first Trump administration in 2019.
Reached for comment by Newsweek, the Mexican Embassy to the U.S. cited Sheinbaum in reaffirming the nation’s continued to adherence to the Estrada Doctrine established in 1930 that avoids declaring recognition of foreign governments.
“We defend the Estrada Doctrine and what our country’s foreign policy represents, which is established in the constitution. That is, against interventions and in favor of the peaceful solution to any conflict,” the embassy cited the Mexican leader as saying. “We also are in agreement with article two of the United Nations Charter, which clearly stipulates that there should be no military intervention without a multilateral solution within the framework of the United Nations—that is our position.”
“President Sheinbaum has continued to highlight that there is a good relationship of understanding, communication, and collaboration without subordination, with the U.S. government,” the embassy added.
Such cooperation could prove key in the event of a U.S. operation—should Mexico approve it. William Dunn, retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel who leads the Strategic Resilience Group government consulting firm, said it “is important to have the support of any host nation in which the U.S. intends to operate overtly or covertly.”
At the same time, he pointed out, “it is obvious that at times the U.S. operates both without the support of the host nation,” even if such a scenario “significantly increases the risk to the operating forces as well as increasing risk to U.S. national prestige shall the mission fail.”
Dunn cited as an example the 2011 Navy SEAL Team Six raid that led to the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan, an operation that was “not supported by Pakistan but they were unable to stop the U.S. mission.”
“The same concern applies to Mexico,” Dunn told Newsweek. “Although the ability for Mexico to impact the U.S. militarily is limited, their ability to alter support between our two nations could ultimately increase the flow of drugs into the U.S. due to Mexican lack of support. We need Mexican support to effectively target the cartels in the most efficient manner.”
“The U.S. has fought the war on drugs for decades,” he added. “This is the first time that I have seen where we are actually overtly fighting the narco-terrorists. We are taking the fight to them in any time or place.”
Out of the Shadows
The U.S. has long conducted covert operations across the southern border. From Cold War-era espionage geared toward countering leftist movements across the region to establishing secret cartel monitoring networks that became crucial tools in the “war on drugs” first launched with the establishment of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the 1970s, Washington has always viewed its neighbor as a front-line position against perceived national security threats.
Trump’s designation of eight top cartels as foreign terrorist organizations last year added extra weight to this effort. Six of the listed groups—the Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Northeast Cartel, the New Michoacan Family, the Gulf Cartel and United Cartels, also known as the Resistance—originate and primarily operate in Mexico.
But the record of U.S. operations is mixed. Recent history includes notable successes such as the captures of El Mayo in 2024 and former Sinaloa boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán a decade later. There were also major controversies like the notorious “Operation Fast and Furious,” through which Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents deliberately allowed the purchase of firearms to illegal buyers in hopes of nabbing cartel operatives, only to lose track of the majority of the guns.
A Reuters report published in September indicated that the CIA-vetted U.S. military units have for years been running operations on Mexican territory, often in collaboration with the Mexican government and personnel. But Trump has also repeatedly voiced his willingness to take unilateral action and the Reuters report, which neither the CIA nor White House denied, released as the U.S. embarked on a campaign of airstrikes on suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean.
The president just last week reiterated his intention to expanding the effort to terrestrial targets, telling Fox News that “we are gonna start now hitting land with regard to the cartels.”
While directed primarily at cartels themselves, the warning is also being read as a notice to officials in Mexico, where many citizens have expressed frustration over a perceived lack of results in their government’s own ongoing war on drugs, even if Sheinbaum’s administration had taken real steps toward the addressing the crisis.
In addition to pressuring Sheinbaum on other issues such as trade agreements that have been at the center of U.S.-Mexico tensions over the past year, “it is also highly probable that, as part of Trump’s pressure, we will see a military operation against cartels from U.S. security agencies on Mexican territory, with or without the authorization of the Mexican Senate and Mexican security agencies,” according to Miguel Alfonso Meza, CEO of the Defensorxs human rights groups and coordinator of the journalistic project Narcopolíticos.
“Furthermore, it is almost certain that narcopoliticians from Sheinbaum’s party, Morena, and the opposition parties in Mexico are going to face formal indictments in U.S. courts because of their support for narcoterrorist organizations,” Alfonso told Newsweek.
He asserted that Mexico already has the capacity to successfully route the presence of cartels operating in the country and it was not a lack of authority, but rather collusion across party lines as well as in the military and legal institutions that repeatedly hindered domestic efforts on this front.
“The problem is that, over the decades, Morena’s politicians, as well as former governments of opposition parties, have built a narcostate that has infested all public institutions, including political parties, civilian security agencies, Mexico’s Navy and Armed Forces, virtually all state governments, the prosecutor’s office, etc.,” Alfonso said.
“It is false to think that cartels exist where there is an absence of Mexican state authorities; rather, there exists a complex arrangement between cartels and formal authorities that rule together over the country: the narcostate,” he added. “As long as Mexico’s politicians continue to sustain their power through collaboration with organized crime, cartel influence will continue to grow.”
But the options available to Mexican officials are not always clear-cut and sometimes include steps that would prove uncomfortable for their northern neighbors.
Alfonso pointed out that “some of the decisions that Mexico has to make to end cartel influence are contrary to U.S. interests, such as the decriminalization of drugs and ending the flow of weapons from the U.S. into Mexico.”
Blowback
Even victories against cartels often bring with them unintended consequences. The weakening of one cartel frequently leads to bloody power struggles among competitors and splinter groups, producing some of the bloodiest outbreaks of violence Mexico suffers from today.
As such, Alfonso warned, “an armed intervention by the U.S. could worsen the situation in Mexico, destabilizing the existing arrangements between cartels and authorities and creating new chaos as cartels and politicians fight each other to fill the resulting power vacuum.”
Erin McFee, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Latin America Center and president of the Corioli Institute, pointed to a recent example of how “decapitation strategies alone almost always lead to more violence.” Since the capture of El Mayo in 2024, she described a state of “narcopandemia” in the city of Culiacan in Sinaloa, which “currently lies under a cartel siege, enduring its deadliest era in over a decade.”
“Yet the heavy concentration of Mexican troops has failed to stem the bloodshed, leaving structural roots of the crisis drivers like youth unemployment, corruption, and weak social services ignored,” McFee told Newsweek.
A truly supportive yet active role for the U.S. military, she argued, would be one that is “tightly scoped, Mexico‑led, and focused on integrated campaigns that combine precision targeting with long‑term support to local institutions.”
“Conventional forces are best suited to support Mexican-led operations against cartel supply lines by using advanced air, sea, and cyber tools to provide surveillance, transport, and precise strikes that strictly minimize accidental damage,” McFee said. “SOF [Special Operations Forces] should prioritize low-profile missions that train Mexican units to operate independently, while assisting with specific raids to capture leaders and dismantle cartel infrastructure.”
“Simultaneously,” she added, “the U.S. armed forces and the intelligence community need to support Mexican-led efforts to protect communities, stop recruitment, and ensure that operations are immediately followed by effective stabilization that fills the power vacuums new factions will inevitably (and violently) rush to fill.”
Should these factors go insufficiently addressed, she warned the ramifications could extend well across the border onto U.S. soil.
The DEA has assessed that cartels operate to some degree in all 50 states. And while these organizations may maintain a lower profile in the U.S. than in Mexico, McFee said that they have long been preparing for a potential escalation.
“The infrastructure for retaliation is already entrenched and expanding,” McFee said. “For decades, these groups have outpaced containment efforts, demonstrating a resilience and foresight that allows them to evolve faster than the state can react.”
And it’s the kind of war the U.S. may ultimately be ill-equipped to fight without sustaining major casualties, with high-profile targets not accustomed to the same kind of security protocols their counterparts in Mexico have been forced to employ, as evidenced by the “cases of targeted killings of judges in 2022 and 2023, as well as the 2025 attack and killing of Minnesota Senator John Hoffman and state representative Melissa Hortman.”
“The United States lacks both the self-protection culture and the security infrastructure to ensure readiness for cartel reprisals, which would be all but guaranteed,” McFee said. “Home addresses of public officials are easily obtainable through a combination of voter files, property records, and open‑records laws, and daily routines are not resilient to complex, organized security threats.”
The risks are compounded in a scenario in which the U.S. opts to go it alone against the cartels, without the express consent of Mexican officials.
“Ultimately,” McFee said, “striking the cartels without Mexican cooperation risks importing the tactics of the drug war onto American soil, transforming American public servants into soft targets in an asymmetric war for which the U.S. domestic security architecture is dangerously unprepared.”
History in the Making
There may also be geopolitical consequences should the U.S. force a more heavy-handed approach to the war on cartels. The significance of Trump’s systematic effort to mount a more assertive U.S. position in the Western Hemisphere, sometimes referred to as the “Don-roe Doctrine,” is not lost on the Mexican public.
When the Monroe Doctrine was first declared in 1823, Mexico had just recently won its independence from Spain, and the U.S. policy of expelling European influence from the Americas was initially welcomed by Latin American liberation leaders. But the realities of the U.S. desire to expand soon hit Mexico directly in the form of the Mexican-American war that raged from 1846 to 1848.
Washington’s acquisition of vast western territory following the conflict, along with the subsequent Gadsen Purchase, established the modern U.S.-Mexico border that once again threatens to become a flashpoint.
“In Mexico, the U.S. invasion of 1847 is still remembered; sovereignty is a very delicate issue that Mexicans have deeply ingrained in their DNA,” Oliver Santín, coordinator of the Geopolitical and Strategic Studies Area at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Center for Research on North America, told Newsweek.
“We cannot imagine the internal consequences of a unilateral action on national territory against the drug trade,” he added, “although certainly, the vast majority of the population is tired of the violence generated by the high demand for drugs not only in the U.S. but also in Europe.”
And while Santín argued such a move “would be a very strong message against the cartels operating in Mexico,” he also said that “the U.S. knows it cannot expect support from the Mexican government, from any party in power, because Mexico has suffered various military invasions in the past, not only from the U.S.,” and “any unilateral or even cooperative military operation would generate popular discontent quite difficult for the Sheinbaum government to manage and justify.”
Sheinbaum also enjoys historically high approval ratings, at one point rising to some 80 percent, indicating she may emerge from a confrontation as a popular symbol of regional opposition to Trump’s hard-line policies in ways that Maduro did not.
Even if “a significant portion of the Mexican public perceives that Mexican governments could have done more in their fight against drug trafficking,” Santín expressed that a foreign intervention “would be perceived as a violent action against a government that has shown itself to be more receptive than ever to its counterpart in Washington.”
“Furthermore, it would be perceived as an action to improve Trump’s image within his own country ahead of future electoral processes,” Santín said. “It would be very difficult to find channels of cooperation with a neighbor that feels unilaterally aggressed by the violation of its sovereignty, which, in Mexico, is a topic that does not generate discussion, even among the national political class.”
“Of course, there are opportunistic politicians who seek to curry favor with Washington,” he added, “but they are very few and actually lack credibility among the public.”
