cartels

At arguably no point in the lifetime of any living American has the U.S. military been used to defend U.S. soil. Our Middle Eastern forays over the past few decades were completely unnecessary and ultimately probably made us less safe than if we had never gotten involved there in the first place. Vietnam resulted in the deaths of nearly 60,000 Americans and over 2 million Southeast Asians.

There is a case to be made that the Korean War was ultimately a just war given the stark contrast today between the half of the Korean Peninsula we liberated (South Korea) and the other half that we didn’t (North Korea). But at the end of the day, communism in Korea doesn’t affect America at all. I’m not talking about “U.S. Interests™” (a globalist term used to justify going to war in faraway places). I’m talking about American soil itself. We were never under any sort of threat by the Korean communists.

Many would say that World War II was the last “just war” this country ever fought, and up until quite recently I would have whole-heartedly agreed. But Pat Buchanan makes an excellent case that WWII was not worth it, and he’s convinced me to view WWII in a whole different light. After all, it began as a territorial dispute between Germany and Poland over a small bit of land (Danzig) that Germany rightfully felt was unfairly taken from it at Versailles following WWI, and ended up as the bloodiest conflict in human history:

“Churchill is the “man of the century” for persuading Britain to stand alone against Nazi Germany in 1940, Britain’s “finest hour.”

But at war’s end, what was the balance sheet of Churchill?

The Poland for which Britain had gone to war was lost to Stalinism and would remain so for the entire Cold War. Churchill would be forced to accede to Stalin’s annexation of half of Poland and its incorporation into the Soviet Bloc. To appease Stalin, Churchill declared war on Finland.

Britain would end the war bombed, bled and bankrupt, with her empire in Asia, India, the Mideast and Africa disintegrating. In two decades it would all be gone.

France would end the war after living under Nazi occupation and Vichy rule for five years, lose her African and Asian empire and then sustain defeats and humiliation in Indochina in 1954 and Algeria in 1962.

Who really won the war?

Certainly, the Soviets who, after losses in the millions from the Nazi invasion, ended up occupying Berlin, having annexed the Baltic states and turned Eastern Europe into a Soviet base camp, though Stalin is said to have remarked of a 19th-century czar, “Yes, but Alexander I made it to Paris!”

After the war, every country in Europe east of Austria was under Soviet Rule. An estimated 20 million people were either starved or murdered by the Bolsheviks by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and millions more were enslaved in the gulag archipelago–a network of labor and torture camps that put Hitler’s to shame. Some estimates even put the final Soviet death toll at over 60 million. And this does not even include the 70-85 million combined civilians and soldiers killed during WWII.

Was WWII worth 100 million+ lives, especially considering it also resulted in the collapse of the British and French empires and the rise of the Soviet Union?

And don’t tell me the Nazis were seeking GLOBAL DOMINATION. They were never going to try to invade America. For Pete’s sake their navy couldn’t even conquer Britain, and that was before we entered the war. How were they ever going to cross the Atlantic Ocean and conquer America? The idea is laughable.

There’s little evidence Hitler wanted to annex anything more than the land Germany had lost following World War I, which is to say Danzig, Czecholslovakia and the Rhineland. Here’s a map of Germany in 1944 at the height of Nazi power:

And here’s a map of the German Empire prior to WWI:

Almost identical, no? Hitler’s aim was to retake all the territories he felt were unjustly ripped away from Germany at Versailles. Nothing more. He only went to war with France because the French declared war on Germany first, after Hitler invaded Poland. This is an indisputable historical fact.

The point here is to illustrate that virtually none of the wars of the past century were worth it. Don’t even get me started on World War I: if we hadn’t gotten involved in World War I, there would have never even been a World War II.

The U.S. military has been consistently and repeatedly misused for the past century-plus.

Importantly, none of what I’m arguing here is to disparage or belittle the troops or anything our boys have done on our behalf–don’t take it that way. Our troops obey their superiors and have fought valiantly wherever they’ve been sent.

What I’m saying is that the people in charge have not for a very, very long time used our military justly and deservedly. My ire is directed entirely at the people in charge, not the troops.

The purpose of the military is to defend the homeland from immediate threats, and it hasn’t done this since the 19th century.

The major reason our military hasn’t been used to defend the homeland in well over a century is simple geography: America benefits from the fact that it only borders two other countries, Mexico and Canada, and is sandwiched by two vast oceans which insulate it from the chaos of the “Old World,” i.e. Europe and Asia. After our great nation had established itself as a major power around the start of the 20th century, none of the old world powers in Europe and Asia wanted any trouble with us. It’s not difficult to see why: our economy had become a juggernaut, our relative size advantage made us formidable, and our location an ocean away made it generally unnecessary for us to meddle in the affairs of the old world.

This is how things have traditionally been in human history: nations used to only go to war with neighboring countries. Up until the era of imperialism–and its successor, globalization–there was never any reason for America to go to war with Japan, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Germany. Rome never went to war with the Han Dynasty in China.

Everything used to be more or less regional.

When you look at our military from the perspective that it exists for no other reason than to defend the homeland, the logical conclusion is that the only “just war” we could ever fight would be one with Canada or Mexico, or perhaps some country/countries in the Caribbean (Communist Cuba specifically comes to mind) or in South America.

In light of that, and given the present state of affairs in our corner of the world, the only situation that would truly justify mobilizing the U.S. military would be going to war with the Mexican drug cartels, an idea President Trump floated today in light of the news that nine Americans were brutally murdered by the Mexican drug cartels just 42 miles from the U.S. border:

The details of the massacre are sickening, and as such now have many Americans entertaining the idea of a war with (more accurately, in) Mexico for the first time since the 1840s.

At first blush, the idea of going to war in Mexico seems crazy. We Americans are not used to the idea of a war being fought on our doorstep. We’re used to our wars all being fought “over there.” And it’s not as if Mexico’s government itself has done anything to warrant us declaring war on it.

But the crucial fact here is that we wouldn’t be going to war with Mexico, we’d be assisting Mexico’s government in its war on the cartels.

In the Mexican Drug Cartels, America may now, after well over a century, have a true, genuine reason to actually go to war.

The drug cartels must be destroyed primarily because their drugs are destroying America. Drug-related deaths have skyrocketed over the past 20 years in America to never-before-seen levels, and this is mostly because of the cartels.

Drug culture in America is out of control. Just about everyone knows someone–either in their community or their own family–that has either died or had their life ruined due to drug use. Many millions of Americans’–young and old–lives revolve around drugs, and this is because of their ready availability due to the cartels.

Drug trafficking into America has become an enormous business. The main cartels in Mexico rake in more money than many of the companies on the S&P 500. The famous kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel “El Chapo” Guzman had a net worth of over $12.6 billion by the time he was sentenced to life in prison this past July. A 2017 study found that the global drug trade was worth at least $462 billion per year, and the Mexican cartels represent a large chunk of that.

Most of the drugs that enter America come from either Mexico, Peru or Colombia, and the cartels facilitate the whole process. Business Insider has a bunch of maps that show where all the drugs come from, but here’s the main one:

The majority of the drugs that make their way into the U.S. from their South American origin points come through Mexico by way of the cartels. Stories of the cartels’ violence have grown more and more common with each passing year.

The cartels are now so powerful that they’re going toe-to-toe with the actual Mexican Army and winning. You may recall hearing last month about how the Sinaloa Cartel tried to spring their new boss, Ovidio Guzman Lopez (El Chapo’s son and successor), from police custody by waging a full-on firefight with the Mexican Army in the city of Culiacan. The Mexican government attempted to portray the cartel’s attempted prisonbreak as a “failure” but wound up releasing Lopez to purportedly “defuse” the situation. Does that sound like something a government solidly in control of its own country would ever do? Of course not. They were militarily overpowered by the cartel.

And this is all happening just on the other side of our border.

Another major reason the drug cartels must be destroyed is that they are also destroying Mexico itself, and that affects America. A major driver behind mass immigration (both legal and illegal) is the simple fact that America is much safer than cartel-controlled Mexico. Lots of Mexicans are simply trying to flee the violence that now ravages their country.

The power of the cartels has grown so much over the past few decades that it now rivals and arguably exceeds that of the Mexican government itself. They have destabilized the Mexican government to the point where it now poses a direct threat to actual U.S. interests (as opposed to “U.S. Interests™” in the globalist sense).

The cartels are destroying the fabric of our communities with their drugs. Their violence is causing an immigration surge that America cannot handle. And now they are brutally murdering Americans who happen to cross their paths.

A wall alone is not enough to keep America safe from the failed state south of our border.

At long last, it is time to call upon the American military to do the one thing it exists to do, yet has not been ordered to do in more than a century-and-a-half: defend the homeland from immediate danger.