Several influential Republicans, including Trump, are on record proposing some sort of special American military excursion into Mexico to put an end to the smuggling of illegal drugs. Some of these people don’t see anything wrong in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Is this a reasonable solution to an admittedly serious problem?
Of course not. It might make some sense if the military could put an end to the drug trade by dropping a bomb on some enormous factory, but the business of manufacturing and smuggling drugs isn’t that centralized. Identifying a wide range of culprits is as important and difficult as catching and punishing them. This is a matter for law enforcement, not the military, which is not trained for that purpose.
To put it another way, Pancho Villa died about 100 years ago. The American and Mexican economies are highly and increasingly interdependent. The idea of sending in American troops in violation of Mexican sovereignty was controversial even when a power vacuum of sorts existed in parts of Mexico; to do it today, given the importance of our relationship with the Mexican government, would be ludicrous.