U.S. Security and the Western Hemisphere - Dr. Mackubin Owens

U.S. Security and the Western Hemisphere - Dr. Mackubin Owens

For most of its history, the United States has been blessed with a favorable strategic geography, primarily in the sense that our neighbors have been militarily weak and/or friendly. For centuries, continental European states have lived in proximity to other militarily powerful states, meaning that a France or Germany always had to place a premium on national security, which in practice meant constant preparation for war. States expanded and contracted; they arose and disappeared from the map. I used to observe that Poland’s primary security problem was that it lay on the road from Berlin to Moscow.

 

This is not to suggest that the United States hasn’t faced security issues in North America, only that Canada and Mexico don’t pose the same military threat to the United States that, say, France or Russia have to Germany in the past. Of course, for the first fifty years of the American Republic, European states maintained holdings in North America, e.g. Great Britain in Canada and Spain in Florida and the Southwest. After France lost its American empire in Canada, Napoleon contemplated reconstituting it in Louisiana. The British allied with the Indian tribes of the Old Northwest to block US expansion to the west.

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But the United States bought the vast Louisiana territory from France, and Florida from Spain. It came to an agreement with Great Britain over the Old Northwest. It annexed Texas and conquered the Mexican territories of California and New Mexico.  
        

However, although the major European threats to US security were eliminated by these acquisitions, those powers continued to do all they could to disrupt US territorial consolidation. While the United States was distracted by its Civil War, France attempted to establish a North American empire in Mexico. During World War I, Germany offered support to Mexico in recovering its lost territories in return for Mexican assistance against the United States. And, of course, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union provided military and material support to the Cuban Revolution and other communist revolutions in Latin America.

 

Since the middle part of the nineteenth century, the main Mexican threat to the United States has arisen from lawlessness along the border and raids by Mexican bandits such as Poncho Villa and the various border tribes such as the Apache. These, in turn, provoked retaliatory incursions into Mexico, e.g., the Punitive Expedition of 1916-17. The problem for the United States, then as today, was the weakness of the central Mexican government. Conditions have been both better and worse in the past, but today, they are as bad as they have ever been.

 

The Trump administration has made it clear that the security of the Southern border is a priority. Curbing illegal immigration is paramount, but so is targeting the very powerful drug cartels that operate with impunity along that frontier. As I have written in these pages before, the cartels are stronger and richer than ever. Their earnings have increased by billions of dollars over the last few years as they have engaged in human trafficking and flooded the United States with drugs such as the deadly opioid, fentanyl, which has killed thousands of Americans over the past few years.

 

There is great opportunity for US-Mexican economic cooperation, an enticement the United States should offer its southern neighbor. But in response, Mexico should be required to acknowledge that it has a responsibility to curb the cartels, something it has previously been unable or unwilling to do. As an incentive, President Trump has signed an executive order designating the cartels as terrorist groups but it would better to have Congress pass the necessary legislation. “Experts” warn against such a step and of course, there are risks, but the benefits would seem to outweigh them. For one thing, such legislation allows the United States to put pressure on the Mexican government, forcing it to act on its own against the cartels, opening up the possibility of unilateral action by the United States against the cartels within Mexico.

 

The Trump administration has inherited a vast array of national security threats: an aggressive China; a dangerous Iran causing mischief in the Middle East; and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. But the reality is that the United States cannot address its global interests unless it is secure in the Western Hemisphere, and it is not secure if the US government does not take the steps necessary to ensure US sovereignty against illegal immigration and lawless organizations operating in our own backyard.