Jan 19, 2022

FAILING STATE: The Border Crisis Is Bad, But In Mexico A Larger Crisis Looms.

U.S. policymakers, in both parties, are captive to the increasingly dangerous delusion that Mexico is a competent and trusted partner, and that our two countries can and should work together to solve problems like organized crime, drug trafficking, and illegal immigration. The animating idea, decades old now and woefully out of date, is that Mexico is a peer nation, acting in good faith, and that we all want the same things.

This gauzy conception of Mexico is how the Biden administration was able to come up with a framework for a U.S.-Mexico security relationship that’s utterly divorced from reality. A joint statement released back in October after a meeting between President Joe Biden and López Obrador outlines what’s supposed to be an update to the George W. Bush-era Merida Initiative, which was focused on helping Mexico wage war on powerful drug cartels.

The new initiative, dubbed the U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health and Safe Communities, seeks to address not just “transborder crime” but also things like substance abuse, “root causes” of violence, and efforts to improve education and economic opportunity — all while “ensuring racial equity,” of course.

Given the stakes, however, all it amounts to is a series of exhausted platitudes. The reality is that the Mexican state is collapsing, and rather than having a partner to address the “root causes” of violence, we don’t even have a partner to address what might well become a humanitarian catastrophe on our border this spring.

Read the whole thing.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/18/the-border-crisis-is-bad-but-in-mexico-a-larger-crisis-looms/

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/498254/