Don’t bring the war on terror to the Western Hemisphere
This article appeared in Defense Priorities on February 10, 2025
Early on in President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration designated gangs such as Tren de Aragua and Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. “They are now officially in the same category as ISIS, and that’s not good for them,” Trump said in his joint address to Congress in March 2025.
In a sense, he was heralding the war on terror’s expansion into the Western Hemisphere.
Drugs are a major problem in the United States and its near-abroad. A new national security approach to Western Hemisphere affairs ought to prioritize stemming drug trafficking and its connections to governments. But the president, who pledged to end forever wars on the campaign trail, should not reach for the flawed tools of a counterterrorism campaign that defined two decades of American militarism.
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Read more of Jonathan’s article in Defense Priorities
Written by Jonathan Guyer
Jonathan is the Program Director of the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group’s Independent America program.
This post is part of Independent America, a research program led out by Jonathan Guyer, which seeks to explore how US foreign policy could better be tailored to new global realities and to the preferences of American voters.
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