Why China and Mexico are the right targets for Trump’s attack on the scourge of illegal drugs
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Just a few weeks after the election, President-elect Trump announced that he would impose tariffs of 25% on all Mexican products, and additional tariffs of 10% on all Chinese products, until the flow of illegal narcotics from those countries was stopped. These measures will do more to curb the growing scourge of illegal drugs than all the steps taken so far in the “war on drugs.”
In the last few years, the flow of illegal narcotics into our country has become a tsunami, with fentanyl pill seizures skyrocketed from 4 million in 2020 to 115 million last year. The destruction this traffic has wrought on American society is catastrophic.
The opioid crisis alone costs us more than 100,000 overdose deaths and $1.5 trillion a year, while the flood of powerful methamphetamine from Mexico fuels a new wave of meth addiction, ravaging lives, families and neighborhoods.
President Trump’s actions will do more to curb the growing scourge of illegal drugs than all the steps taken so far in the “war on drugs.” (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
The Biden administration has enabled this deadly traffic by weakening our border defenses and ignoring opportunities to choke off the supply chain for illicit drugs, now centered in China and Mexico.
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Instead, he focused on “harm reduction” within the US – introducing overdose drugs like Naxolone and funding more addiction treatment. Although these steps are inconspicuous in themselves, they are an inadequate response to the flood of toxins we face. It’s like dealing with violent crime by offering more bandages.
Real progress requires eliminating the drug supply at the source. This is where the US has a golden opportunity because the supply chain for the drugs poisoning America has become highly concentrated and vulnerable. It depends entirely on the illegal activities in the two countries – the production of illegal drugs in Communist Chinaand drug processing and distribution operations in cartel safe havens in Mexico.
All these illegal activities are carried out with – and indeed require – the permission or willful blindness of the host governments. As Trump’s announced tariffs show, the US has the tools and leverage to force China and Mexico to shut down those operations. This would deal a decisive blow: once these operations were terminated, it would be impossible to repeat them anywhere else and close to the current scale.
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China has become a center of illegal drug production as illegal narcotics are increasingly synthesized chemically, rather than being produced from cultivated plants. China offers the two prerequisites needed to supply the US market: a large chemical industrial base and a government willing to allow its factories to produce illegal narcotics and their precursors in large quantities.
Chinese factories produce basic ingredients for almost everything fentanyl and other synthetic opioidsas well as 80% of methamphetamines, which come into the US, and produce a new wave of drugs worse than fentanyl, such as nitazene and xylazine (“tranq”). Simply put, without Chinese manufacturing, America’s drug problem would be a fraction of what it is.
Communist China could easily stop this activity if it wanted to. But a recent bipartisan select committee report on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shows that China’s involvement in the illegal drug trade is a deliberate policy.
According to the report, the Chinese government and the CCP provide tax subsidies to encourage their pharmaceutical companies to produce and export — for U.S. consumption — fentanyl and other deadly drugs that are illegal in China, the U.S. and around the world. world.
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This is an intolerable situation. The US must force China to stop producing these drugs by imposing a series of escalating consequences on those involved.
Initial tariffs announced by Trump the first step is critical. If it does not get results, further tools are available – imposing higher tariffs; directing sanctions against the Chinese pharmaceutical companies involved and potentially indicting and seizing the assets of those companies; sanctioning Chinese banks found to be involved in drug money laundering; and enabling private lawsuits by fentanyl victims against Chinese drug companies.
Another major hub in the drug supply chain is located in Mexico. Mexican cartels have become a one-stop shop for the processing and distribution of almost all illegal drugs coming into the US – synthetic drugs produced in China, as well as cocaine from coca plants in Latin America.
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The experience of taking down Colombia’s Medellin and Cali cartels in the early 1990s shows that the US can dismantle these organizations when it intervenes directly, works together with host governments and local forces, and uses all available national security and law enforcement tools.
But Mexico presents a special challenge. Using bribery and terrorist tactics, the cartels intimidated and co-opted the government to the point that it would not stand up to them or allow the US to take effective action against them. And, even if the Mexican government is willing to tackle the cartels, their military and police are so riddled with corruption that they are unable to act effectively on their own.
Our country cannot tolerate a failed narco-state at our border that is flooding America with poison. The only way forward is for the US to use its enormous economic power to force the Mexican government to take a stand against the cartels. President Trump’s announced tariffs do just that.
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Because Mexicans cannot do the job alone, eliminating the cartels will require a concerted campaign through which the US engages in direct action against the cartels, using a range of our police, intelligence and military capabilities. Mexican cartels they look more like foreign terrorist groups, like ISIS, than the American mob, and it’s time to confront them as threats to national security, not law enforcement.
Attacking the source of the problem abroad does not mean we should retreat from trying to dismantle human trafficking operations inside the US, but progress abroad will produce exponentially greater results than anything we do at home. Trump’s tariff initiative shows that Trump is willing to tackle it with decisive action, rather than waver on America’s stubborn drug crisis and pass it on to his successor.
