The best news about President-elect Donald Trump returning to office is that we will again have a president who treats Mexico with the hostility it deserves; because the Mexican government is not an ally of the United States.
Whether Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico are worthwhile or not, with the increased costs to consumers and the increased burden in dealing with trade with China, is up for debate. What is not up for debate, though, is that Mexico is a poor ally and poor neighbor with no interest in helping the U.S. address problems that are coming into the country through the southern border.
Mexico has been stonewalling American offers of cooperation to address the fentanyl that is flowing over the U.S.-Mexico border, including refusing to extradite hundreds of drug criminals who would face charges in the U.S. and refusing to share any information about fentanyl seizures or Mexican drug labs. Mexico’s previous president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, lied about Mexico not producing fentanyl and blamed Americans for dying from it.
Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, went even further. In response to Trump’s threatened tariffs, Sheinbaum said that Mexico is actually the victim of the U.S. on the fentanyl crisis because Mexican cartels use American guns. According to Sheinbaum, “Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours.”
Mexico’s new president blames the U.S. for the Mexican cartels that Mexico has allowed to infest its society and take over areas of the country, and blames dying Americans who are being killed by Mexican drugs for those drugs being mass produced by those cartels. This problem has a constant variable, and it isn’t American guns.
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Sheinbaum similarly takes no responsibility for Mexico’s role in the border crisis that has brought hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants across the border along with Mexican fentanyl. Sheinbaum instead would rather lecture the U.S. and claim that we can solve the “deeper drivers of migration” if the U.S. takes “a fraction” of what it spends on “warfare” and puts that toward “peacebuilding and development.” Of course, that would mean giving American taxpayer dollars to the countries that these illegal immigrants are leaving, including, conveniently, Mexico.
Mexico is not an ally or a partner. With its government constantly focused on deflecting blame and never willing to actually address the spread of fentanyl, the rise in power of cartels, or massive illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border, Mexico is part of the problem. All negotiations and “diplomacy” with Mexico should be filtered through that lens until Mexico proves that it is serious about solving these problems and not just mooching off the trade and economic power of the United States.