Open to Debate: Should the United States Militarize the War on Drugs?

In a collaboration between CFR and Open to Debate, panelists debate the legal, moral, operational, and diplomatic trade-offs of the Trump administration's recently authorized military strikes against suspected drug trafficking vessels and its designation of certain cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Supporters argue this is a necessary deterrent and part of a broader strategy to treat narcotrafficking as a national security threat. Critics claim it violates domestic and international law, undermines sovereignty, risks civilian harm, and may provoke dangerous escalation. Under what circumstances, if any, is military force justified in combating drug trafficking networks?

Open to Debate is the nation’s only nonpartisan, debate-driven media organization dedicated to bringing multiple viewpoints together for a constructive, balanced, respectful exchange of ideas. Open to Debate is a platform for intellectually curious and open-minded people to engage with others holding opposing views on complex issues.

NARRATOR: (From video.) The Trump administration has taken the war on drugs in a bold new direction, using aircraft carriers, intelligence networks, even military strikes across Latin America to target drug cartels. Supporters call it a necessary response to transnational crime, arguing that cartels now operate like insurgent armies and only military force can stop the fentanyl crisis and secure the border. Critics call it dangerous overreach, bypassing Congress, straining international alliances, and repeating decades of failed militarized drug policies that often leave civilian casualties and lasting instability. Tonight, Open to Debate, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations, debates this question: Should the U.S. militarize the war on drugs?

(Applause.)

DONVAN: This is Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan. Hello, everyone. Welcome to a debate around an American military operation that continues to unfold even as we debate it. Off the coast of Venezuela, the U.S. has carried out close to a dozen deadly strikes against boats that the Trump administration says have been ferrying narcotics bound for the U.S. market. In terms of what has long been called the war on drugs, this is the closest to actual war we’ve ever been before, an escalation that includes the largest concentration of U.S. warships and personnel in the Caribbean Sea since the Cuban Missile Crisis sixty-four years ago. Opinion is divided on whether this action makes tactical or strategic sense, and on whether it’s the beginning of a solution or something the U.S. will come to regret doing.

We are here at the New York office of the Council on Foreign Relations, our partner for this episode, to hear people who care and think and know about the situation argue about the choices made and the choices to come. The question we are debating: “Should the U.S. Militarize the War on Drugs?” We have four superbly qualified debaters. Let’s welcome them to the stage. Arguing yes, the U.S. should militarize the war on drugs, I want to welcome Sean McFate and Andrés Martínez-Fernández. (Applause.) And crossing to the other side I want to welcome Aileen Teague and her partner, Will Freeman. (Applause.)

I just want to emphasize we have rules for our debates. And we have talked with our debaters ahead of time, I will enforce them. Those rules are no personal attacks, stay on topic, no endless repetition of talking points to the exclusion of real argument, and please listen to what the other side is saying, and please engage with what the other side is saying. And as I said, I will enforce those rules.

Before we start, I just want to quote from President Trump’s letter to the to Congress in which he explained what he was doing after the first of these attacks took place in September of 2025. Quote, “I directed these actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans’ and United States’ interests abroad, and in furtherance of national security and foreign policy interests pursuant to my constitutional authority as commander in chief and chief executive to conduct foreign relations.” With that context, we understand the justification that the administration is giving. We will be debating many aspects of that throughout the evening as we welcome our debaters to begin their opening statements, which is what we’re going to do now.

Our first opening statement will come from Sean McFate. Sean, you can make your way to the—to the metaphorical spotlight. You started your career as a paratrooper and officer in the army before you went to work as a private military contractor. This took you all over the world. It became fodder for several novels that you have written. These days you’re a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and you also teach at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. As I said, you’re an author, but you are not only writing fiction. You also write nonfiction, including The New Rules of War, about the evolving world of modern warfare. Sean, you have the floor to tell us in four minutes or less why you are arguing, yes, the U.S. should militarize the war on drugs. (Applause.)

MCFATE: Did you know that in the last five years more Americans have died of drug overdoses than all Americans in all foreign wars combined? Did you know that the health care costs and the economic impacts of the drug scourge in this country cost $2.7 trillion in 2023? The “drug wars,” quote/unquote, it’s really slow motion WMD crisis for our country. They shouldn’t even be called the drug wars. That’s a misnomer that goes back to Nixon’s press pool when he announced this. It should be called not the war on drugs but the war on thugs, because that’s the context here. That is the target. We’re targeting international cartels. And we are targeting transnational criminal organizations, particularly in our hemisphere. And in many parts of the world, like parts of the hemisphere, networks are replacing states. And they go to war with each other. And they even take over states. We call them narco-states.

Venezuela is an example. It’s actually worse. (Laughs.) It’s a narco-dictatorship that’s completely illegitimate. But the point is this, is that these organizations traffic narcotics, people, weapons. And when they move into a territory, they take it over. They penetrate into the highest aspects of that country’s institutions by asking every policymaker, from a mayor to the president, here’s the choice: Take the gold, take the lead. Your choice, right? A world where you’re living in narco-land, it’s full of extreme violence and death. They engage in nationwide racketeering and extortion. And not only does it destroy the economy, but it destabilizes entire regions. And this causes people to flee those countries and risk life and limb to immigrate illegally into this country.

The immigration crisis and the war on thugs crisis are interrelated. Now, the policy of the war on thugs for the last fifty years has been a failure. I think there’s general consensus that treating it as a law enforcement problem is necessary but insufficient to solve it. And what I am arguing for tonight is not that we militarize it, just simply that we use all instruments of national power to deal with this big problem. Using all instruments of national power, including the Department of Defense, is how you execute all foreign policy. So why should this be the exception? So we should have done this decades ago. We can discuss, you know, is the current example of this the right way or the wrong way to do it, but the overall idea here is that we must use all instruments of national power and not just a law enforcement approach. Thank you. (Applause.)

DONVAN: Thank you, Sean. Next up to take the spotlight I want to welcome Aileen Teague. Aileen comes from a military family herself. That also took her around the world. In fact, she was born in Panama. You’ve served in the U.S. Marine Corps for eight years. You currently teach international affairs with a focus on relations with Latin America at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. You’re also a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Aileen, you are arguing against militarizing the war on drugs. Your chance to tell us why.

TEAGUE: I sure am, John, because the historical record is indisputable. We’ve already done this. And, quite frankly, I’m very excited to talk about this term “war on thugs,” because I’m quite uncomfortable with it. The United States has done this for many decades. We’re not arguing for nonintervention. And nonintervention should not be conflated with inaction. Everyone here wants to save lives, but a durable strategy, an enduring strategy requires pivoting away from militarized intervention, which is what we’ve been doing since the 1970s, and moving towards a comprehensive strategy based on strong diplomacy, which my partner will talk about, multilateral cooperation, and, most importantly, demand reduction at home.

While military—excuse me—while military force may seem like—may produce short term battlefield successes, I understand what that might look like, it fails to take into account long-term kind of comprehensive strategies. The U.S. has deployed warships, as we saw from this fun video that we opened up with, and intelligence assets, et cetera, et cetera, throughout the region. And the results have been marginal. Violence has escalated. States have been weakened. And criminal organizations have been fragmented. Mexico’s two-decade-long campaign against the—against cartels led by Felipe Calderón intensified bloodshed, and it didn’t get at the underlying criminal infrastructure.

Even with trusted foreign forces, military intervention still produces criminal infighting. Despite Plan Colombia’s militarized policies and gains made on public safety, the cocaine trade thrives there today. Brazil, El Salvador, and Ecuador have each faced criticism for human rights abuses. But the main risk is escalation, turning long-term challenges into protracted military conflicts. As someone who has served in the Marine Corps—and I wasn’t trained for this, you know, nor—this is not why I decided to serve, to do this kind of thing. Once deployed, militaries are very difficult to withdraw. And they undermine civilian governance. Iron fist strategies, like we see in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele may produce these short-term risks, but they create these situations in which citizens fear the state more than they do gangs.

Critics may argue that we’re not seeing results. However, we can’t measure these results on eradication of the drug trade alone. When applied in places like Colombia and Mexico, measures for success such as criminal leadership disruption and protection of urban centers reveal tangible, albeit uneven, progress. These gains, though imperfect, suggest that a military—that targeted law enforcement, when coupled with institutional reform, is more effective than military escalation alone. Recent polling also underscores that many are not in favor of a militarized approach. Only 28 percent of Republicans approve any kind of intervention in Venezuela. And 46 percent of the American people do not want to take any kind of action against its leader, Hugo Chavez.

At the core of this argument really is U.S. domestic demand here in the United States. And in 2025, our own administration made substantial cuts to treatment and overdose prevention programs, undermining our abilities to make really, like, measurable impacts on domestic drug demand. This mismatch reflects a—this sort of long-term notion that I’ve studied much in my work, that since the 1960s the war on drugs is not about public health. And it’s not about saving American lives. It’s about geopolitics and it’s about social control. Long-term progress requires patience, collaboration, and a reimagined approach in the Western Hemisphere. Thank you. (Applause.)

DONVAN: Thank you, Aileen. And now to give his remarks I want to welcome Andrés Martínez-Fernández. Andrés specializes in U.S.-Latin America relations as a senior policy analyst for Latin America at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Security. Before joining Heritage, Andrés, you advised executives from multinational companies, bringing your expertise in Latin America to the business world. It’s great to have you on the stage with us. You get your four minutes starting now.

Martínez-Fernández: Thank you very much. As Vice President Vance put it, killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of the U.S. military. The vice president’s sentiments are reflected with the approval and support of 73 percent of Americans, who have seen drugs and mass migration destabilize and destroy their communities. The reality is, the narco-terror threat is the most direct and active foreign threat to the American people today. Drug cartels and narco-dictators drive mass migration to the United States and kill far more Americans than Houthi rebels, Libyan dictators, Russia, and China combined. Yet, while Washington has seen fit to confront these other foreign threats with the full force of our national security apparatus, including the U.S. military, it has largely ignored the narco-terror threats in our own hemisphere.

As Steve Murphy, one of the DEA agents who helped to take down Pablo Escobar put it, quote, “going after the world’s most wanted criminal, the world’s first narco-terrorist, what did the United States send to Medellin? Two guys.” That’s not a war. It’s a joke. For years, U.S. Southern Command has warned Congress that a lack of resources has forced them to, quote, “sit and watch” as upwards of 80 percent of suspected narco boats pass them by. Security cooperation with Latin America has also been woefully neglected, leading to the collapse of the counternarcotics consensus in our hemisphere. Law enforcement tools have proven wholly insufficient to combat the modern cartel threats. As has outsourcing our hemispheric security policy to NGOs through the so-called root causes approach.

Today, drug cartels are larger, better equipped, and more powerful than most militaries in the world. Consider that just one of Brazil’s multiple drug trafficking gangs has more members than Portugal has active-duty military personnel. Drug cartels in Mexico are the largest employer in that country, with more people on their payroll than there were ISIS combatants at the peak of their power. Narco-traffickers also have active partnerships with hostile foreign regimes, including Venezuela and China, destabilizing the U.S. with this collaboration. One of the primary tools that they use to attack the American people and destabilize our hemisphere are synthetic drugs like fentanyl, which are more lethal by dosage than nerve agents banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention. Cartels have military-grade weaponry that has allowed them to fight regional security forces to a standstill or an effective surrender.

The reality is clear, decades of neglect of hemispheric security now necessitate drastic action, including from the military. This is also increasingly the conclusion from across Latin America, where leaders in Ecuador, Argentina, and Mexico have actively reversed their past efforts to defund their militaries and empower them to confront their security threats in the form of these narco groups. Indeed, a poll recently showing majority support within Latin America found that most Latin Americans support a U.S. invasion, military invasion, of Venezuela. The U.S. military is an effective and necessary tool in countering these threats. We’ve seen that by the effective shutdown of the Caribbean routes by this current operation.

DONVAN: Andrés, I can give you ten more seconds to wrap.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: And a series of victories within the region where forward-leaning military action has been effective.

DONVAN: I got to break you there. Thanks very much. (Applause.)

And finally, in our opening round, taking the position, again, that we should not be militarizing the war on drugs. I want to welcome Will Freeman, who comes from among you. Will is a fellow for Latin American Studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he works on all manner of U.S.-Latin America relations, including organized crime and democracy. His writing has appeared in numerous publications. And he has lived and worked in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru as a Fulbright scholar. Will, it’s your chance, please, to make your case. The floor is yours.

FREEMAN: Thank you. (Applause.) Thanks, everyone, for being here tonight and joining this important conversation. I think that’s certainly one thing I’ve identified we all agree on, that the threat of organized crime is perhaps the biggest threat facing all of us in this hemisphere, from north to south. And I appreciate the topic, especially getting a chance to talk about it, because I travel this region extensively. I don’t just study this issue from 30,000 feet. I go to Colombia, to Mexico, to Brazil, to places deeply affected by this problem. And I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can more effectively fight it as a hemisphere.

I think it’s important to start, if we’re going to talk about militarization, to define the term. So I don’t understand militarization to mean the military helping in any which way in counternarcotics. That’s normal. For decades we’ve seen the U.S. military help identify suspicious planes and vessels, direct them to the Coast Guard for interdiction, share intelligence around the hemisphere, train police and military counterparts across the region. That’s all perfectly normal. And I actually don’t think any of us up here, or hardly anyone in the U.S. foreign policy community, would agree that that should stop.

What we are seeing, what’s new, and what I’m going to define as militarization as I see it today, is something much more alarming. It’s not whether the military is being asked to participate. It’s how it’s being asked to participate. Namely, by being ordered to kill suspects, to replace investigation and prosecution of drug trafficking with the preemptive use of lethal force. An order that our military, one of the most upstanding, moral, and disciplined in the world, has perhaps never received before, but which is now being received on a weekly basis. I think that this will leave our country worse off. I think it will hurt our institutions. And worst of all, I don’t think it will stop the drug traffickers. (Applause.) Let me let me explain why. Let me explain why.

So, first of all, I think there are strong legal arguments against what we’re seeing today, what I’ve defined as the new militarization. Congress, according to our Constitution, is the sole institution with the power to decide to make war. And yet, we’re seeing that power usurped by the White House. There are strong ethical arguments against it. Some of you might be disturbed right now, feel like your stomachs might be churning, realizing that we’re here at the Council on Foreign Relations discussing whether or not it’s moral, whether or not it’s ethical or justified, to kill people, to kill suspects before apprehending or investigating them. And I think those arguments matter a lot.

But tonight, you’re going to hear me mostly talk about a different one, which is the argument of efficacy. Will this work? Because what we all share up here is a priority on stopping these organizations, saving American lives, and curbing the flows of deadly drugs. I think there’s three reasons that militarization will not work. It will not weaken the drug trafficking organizations, regardless of what you think of it legally or ethically. The first is that we are so far seeing the wrong assets targeted. We’ve seen a string of small speed boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific blown up. Guess what? Those are the most easily replaceable assets for these drug trafficking organizations. You know what they can’t replace? Complicit politicians, corrupt police, money launderers, members of the banking community who do their bidding. And are we seeing this administration focused on those actors? Hardly.

Second, we’re focused on the wrong place. We’ve massed 10 percent of our naval assets in the world off the coasts of Venezuela—which I agree with my opponents is a terrible dictatorship—but which has zero role in bringing deadly fentanyl to the United States. So we’re focused on the wrong place. And last, we’re seeing the wrong priorities enacted at home. A massive shift of resources away from prosecuting drug trafficking crimes in the United States and towards prosecuting immigration crimes—immigration—people falling astray of the immigration system. So I think in all those ways we’re seeing ourselves go astray. We’re adopting a counternarcotics policy that will not make the drug traffickers weaker, will make us as a country weaker, and will undermine the integrity of our institutions.

The most tragic thing is, we don’t have to do this. We have civilian law enforcement that can win this fight if we put the necessary resources there. We are not facing a choice where we need to choose our military over any other tool, as often and tragically Latin American countries have. And so I hope tonight to convince you that there is a better way, that our military can play a supporting role, but that it should not be the protagonist and, most of all, it should not preemptively kill suspects and reduce us—a country that’s far above that—to that level. Thank you. (Applause.)

DONVAN: Thank you. Thank you, Will. Thank you to our four debaters for telling us why they’re taking the positions they are. We’re going to move on to a portion of the program now, our second round fundamentally, and we talk about everything that’s been said before. And I just want to repeat back some of what I’ve been hearing.

I hear Sean McFate and Andrés Martínez-Fernández arguing that the status quo is not working, that more people are dying of drugs than in all of our wars—recent wars combined, that the flow of drugs has not been stopped. They refer to it as a war on thugs. They talk about the fact that the adversary in this is not—it’s not a criminal gang on the street, that these are almost quasi-governmental organizations that have power, that have influence, that are deadly, that are organized, that are large scale. And that are not therefore susceptible to normal law enforcement-type of approach to stopping what they’re doing. A quote that I picked up was that this is the most direct and active foreign threat to the U.S. today, a question I want to take to the other side as the conversation unfolds.

But, to talk about the other side, Aileen Teague and Will Freeman are acknowledging, first of all, and I think everybody understands this, everybody agrees that there has been military action in the war on drugs from time to time since the 1980s, that that is nothing new. What we are talking about that is new is what we are seeing happening in the Caribbean now. We’re talking about the shooting of the boats off the coast of Venezuela. We’re talking about the movement of troops and the concentration of naval power in the Caribbean. That’s what’s new. That’s why we’re even having this debate. But they say that in the past these military actions have not proven to stop the flow of drugs. That in fact, they are destabilizing. And that this destabilization gets to the source of the real problem, which is corruption—corrupt police, corrupt politicians. And, in addition to that, here in the United States we’re providing the market for these drugs. And that work could be done here in the United States to work on the demand issue.

So that’s what I’m hearing all of you saying. But as I mentioned, I heard your opponents argue, again, to quote, Andrés, this is the most—what’s happening with the drugs are the most direct and active foreign threat to the U.S. today. Which sounds like it reaches the level of something where we have to do something drastic. And they use the word “drastic.” And they’re talking about using military action, the kind that we’re seeing now, as a drastic response. What do you—how do you assess their assessment of just how serious the crisis is?

TEAGUE: You can go first.

FREEMAN: Look, I completely agree with the assessment. I’ve said it myself often in writing and speaking, that for me this should be our number-one foreign policy priority when we look out at the world at threats. You know, I’m from Minnesota. I know people personally who’ve died from the fentanyl crisis. I feel that. You know, I don’t know people who’ve died in other foreign wars or foreign crises, you know, that’s targeted this way. But I do in this one.

But look, this is what I’ll say. I don’t think, for all the reasons I just articulated, that a gloves-off military approach is actually going to eliminate the assets that these groups use to thrive. For me, the boats can be replaced. The fentanyl labs can be replaced. The foot soldiers, the poorest, most exploited members of these organizations, can easily be replaced. You know what can’t easily be replaced, the narco-politicians, the narco-generals, the narco-prosecutors, in some cases, the narco-judges. That’s what I want to see the focus be. I want to see a gloves-off diplomatic approach that takes aim at those actors, regardless of whether they claim to be allies of the U.S. And right now, I see a very unfortunate tendency that certain very compromised politicians in the region, just because they say I’m pro U.S., I’m a friend of the president, they stop getting any kind of scrutiny for their corruption scandals. I want to see that be the approach, rather than blowing up boats in the middle of an ocean.

DONVAN: Let’s take it to the other side.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Well, you know, I think what you’re describing is not a novel approach. I think it’s been the approach for at least the past decade, past two decades, of focusing on—using tools like sanctions, anti-money laundering tools, corruption investigations, and diplomatic tools within the hemisphere as the primary means of confronting the cartel and narco threats. We haven’t seen the effectiveness. And we have seen these—when we have arrests or extraditions, these people are replaced. These are not—this alone has not been a sufficient approach to dismantle these networks. And in large part, that’s because we’re leaving entire other segments of these illicit supply chains for the cartels off the table, in part by handcuffing our military and restricting our law enforcement and other tools to a very narrow, narrow field. Now, I think part of this is a focus issue. As I mentioned, I think there hasn’t been enough attention broadly. But I think a consequence of that is a lack of utilization of U.S. military resources in this fight.

DONVAN: So I think what I hear your opponent, Andrés, saying is that the thing that you’re saying hasn’t worked will work if there’s more of it, that it hasn’t—that it hasn’t been sufficiently deployed.

TEAGUE: I’m not sure, because—

DONVAN: Am I right about that?

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Yeah.

DONVAN: OK.

TEAGUE: I guess the most important example comes in my native Panama, when in 1989 25,000 troops were deployed into my country to depose a supposed drug dealer. I mean, it was the first of many times that the United States government has—or specific leadership—has used the threat of a—of the drug trade to substantiate intervention. I completely agree with some of the points that Will made. Here we are talking about deploying military troops in the Caribbean when just in the last two weeks we’ve lost two local politicians in the Mexican state of Michoacán, one a mayor on the Day of the Dead and the other a farmer.

And so I think that the more pertinent question is what is military force intended to achieve? If it’s intended to destabilize or to stabilize, then we need to work more actively with our partners and not just deploy militaries. And I know what it’s like to deploy militaries. I mean, I’ve worked in that department. And it hasn’t worked. But if the goal is to save lives, which I think everyone on this stage, in this room is about that, we need to think more about curbing domestic drug demand, where we’re using our federal resources, and what is it that enforcement is intended to accomplish? Because we are not arguing that we should take enforcement or the use of the military off the table. We need to re-tweak how it’s used and integrate it with other strategies.

DONVAN: Sean.

MCFATE: The problem is those other strategies have failed for five decades. So arguing for more of the same, asking for, you say, patience and more collaboration, it’s the definition of insanity. This is not working. And to the point that somehow going after the boats—going after the boats is the beginning, not the end. Now we can debate and speculate where the end might look like, and we—and that’s at that point writing fiction. We don’t know. But we do know that, you know, going to—you know, capturing Noriega and restoring democracy in 1990 was kind of effective.

DONVAN: Can you remind—for the listener who’s not familiar. That’s what you were referring to when you were in Panama.

MCFATE: Sure. That’s right.

DONVAN: Yeah. Can you just remind people, in twenty-five seconds or less, what happened in 1990?

MCFATE: In 1989 to 1990, the United States military invaded Panama to remove a corrupt president who was deeply tied with a narco-industry and to restore democracy.

DONVAN: OK. That was fifteen seconds. That was great. (Laughter.) And you’re saying that that was a good thing? That it worked?

MCFATE: I’m saying it’s an example of using the military in the past. And that the current—the overall thing is that what we have been lacking for the last fifty years is a stronger role for the military. And treating it simply as a multinational, diplomatic, law enforcement pandemic, like it’s COVID, is not—we’ve tried that. Let’s not try it more.

FREEMAN: The U.S. government concluded in 1991 and 1999 studies that drug flows through Panama were actually greater after the U.S. invasion than before. 2017, record year for cocaine seizures in Panama. I’m not saying that I think that intervention was a mistake. And I’m certainly not saying that I think it was a bad thing that Noriega went. But let’s get the record clear on that.

If I could follow up on one point. We heard that the same old approach isn’t working, that we’ve been plenty tough on narco-corruption in the region—and let’s be frank, you know, in some parts of our own country—that we’ve been plenty tough on that in the past. I don’t think we ever have. I don’t think we’ve taken those diplomatic gloves off. And let me just cite a few examples.

In March, our government, this one, sent a top gang leader back to El Salvador by the request of that country’s authoritarian president. Why? The gang leader had started to rat him out for corruption. So we just sent him back, dropped the case that we had built against him. We just saw sanctions dropped against Horacio Cartes, the powerful, influential ex-president of Paraguay, whose uncle was arrested in Uruguay a few years ago piloting a drug flight. But he claims to be a U.S. ally.

And last term, from the Trump administration. Trump one, we saw not only the toleration, carte blanche, for Juan Orlando Hernandez. You may have heard of him, Honduran president serving a forty-five U.S. sentence for narcotrafficking just a few miles from here. We also saw the Trump administration return to Mexico the head of the military, Salvador Cienfuegos, who was arrested and charged on U.S. territory for protecting drug traffickers. They just sent him back. So I don’t think that we’ve seen a tough approach on narco-corruption. I don’t think we’ve ever seen those diplomatic gloves come off. And least of all now.

DONVAN: Andrés. (Applause.)

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I don’t—so my—the issue here is that, in part, the tools that you’re talking about, and some of the examples you’re specifying, show the problem with the approach of past administrations. We’ve politicized many of these tools, including sanctions, to disproportionately go after many leaders, including those in countries that are more conservative, while leaving other countries off the table as far as our sanctions and as far as our law enforcement’s efforts. I think there are very serious questions about the allegations that are being made about the Bukele government, and the former president of Paraguay, and others. Certainly, these should be investigated but, I’m sorry, I don’t see El Salvador turning into a narcotrafficking hub under Bukele. We’ve seen a security renaissance there where people can go out and once again enjoy freedom from the cartel violence that they faced on a daily basis.

So as far as whether or not we’re confronting these individual examples more aggressively, I think what we are doing is using and directing U.S. interests in our engagement with the tools of sanctions and others in a way that targets those who are being cooperative and supporting efforts to secure our hemisphere. As I think it’s difficult, very difficult, to argue that the Salvadoran government hasn’t been a net positive for security in our hemisphere.

DONVAN: Aileen, your team has not developed much along the line of argument about the legality of what’s happening. And I’m wondering—and you did—you did refer to sentiment within the military about this. But can you talk a little bit about whether that is a serious concern for you, a top concern for you? And if so, I’d like to your opponents to respond to it.

TEAGUE: I mean, it’s an absolute concern. And, I mean, just to add a little bit to context of something that Sean said, the military only really started participating in policing drugs in 1986 with Ronald Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive. Before that, we have this—we uphold Posse Comitatus Act, in which the military is not supposed to participate in domestic enforcement or enforcement for things like policing for drugs. So this is a relatively, you know, new thing. But I think that the more alarming trend here is the militarization of public security that we’re seeing both inside our country.

I mean, when I went through—today’s the Marine Corps birthday. When I was going through my initial training I wasn’t trained to go and police in American cities. That’s not why I signed up to serve. And some of these trends are alarming in terms of the ways in which we’re deploying U.S. military troops to take care of functions that are traditionally covered by civilian law enforcement. There is a real dilemma in civil-military relations that we’ve seen in places like Mexico, in places like Colombia, in terms of which forces should be doing what. And so those kinds of things need to be clarified.

But I also want to take it back to one last thing, John. Is because we’re going to keep on talking about the Bukeles and, you know, the Venezuela Maduro government. But we still haven’t talked about the fact that fentanyl is what’s causing U.S. overdoses, not Caribbean cocaine routes. And so that is the biggest issue on the table that I think really needs some examination.

DONVAN: OK, let’s take that. Because your opponents made the point that the fentanyl is not coming from Venezuela. That’s where the boats are being shot at.

MCFATE: Sure. Yeah. OK. So, first of all, I want to separate the whole domestic military—

DONVAN: We’ll keep that out. Let’s keep out the domestic military situation because we’re arguing about what’s happening in the Caribbean. So if you want to separate, let’s keep it out. Because that’s a whole other debate.

MCFATE: That’s right, I’m trying to get that out. So, OK. So I would say this, is that what the military adds is vastly superior intelligence, surveillance, and interdiction. Rather than spending all of our wonderful intelligence assets on tracking some guy on a moped in Kabul, we can now use it for this. What’s wrong with that? Second of all, there’s the question of interdiction—kinetic interdiction. These are not suspects.

FREEMAN: They’re not. They very much aren’t.

MCFATE: They’re not suspects. Now, these are not—this is not a bank robber in Fifth Avenue in New York City. And you can frame it that way, but there’s a lot of Americans who would say, this is a war. It’s not a metaphor. And in terms of fentanyl, I think this—I think Venezuela is not the one and done campaign for—I can’t speak for this administration—but I think it’s a lot broader than that.

FREEMAN: So can I ask, what separates them from suspects?

MCFATE: Well, what separates bin Laden from a suspect?

FREEMAN: Well, in that case, al-Qaida had attacked the U.S. Three thousand people had died in an armed attack.

MCFATE: You don’t—you don’t think fentanyl is attacking—poisoning Americans?

FREEMAN: Sorry, and the guys—and the guys on the Caribbean boats, where none of the fentanyl was passing through to the U.S.?

TEAGUE: And they were released. Some of them were—the survivors were released.

FREEMAN: Our buddy in Ecuador couldn’t find enough evidence to convict them.

MCFATE: Poisoning the American people—poison’s a weapon just like an AK-47.

FREEMAN: Is there fentanyl passing through Venezuela or the Caribbean to the U.S.?

MCFATE: No. But to our allies.

FREEMAN: And that’s where they were killed.

MCFATE: The—OK.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Yeah, I’m sorry, but fentanyl is not the only drug killing Americans. I don’t know why we’re only talking about—like, we can only focus on fentanyl.

TEAGUE: Is cocaine killing Americans?

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Oh, yes. It’s certainly—and much of it is laced with fentanyl as well, and other drugs.

DONVAN: If it’s—if it’s laced with fentanyl, yes.

TEAGUE: OK, well, then we got a—

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: If I could—if I could finish. Part of the issue here is that you guys are treating fentanyl as if it’s this island within narcotrafficking threats. It’s integrally connected into the cocaine trafficking and the illicit networks that have supported the destabilization and the growth of the cartels and drug trafficking from South America to the U.S. The cartels in Mexico a decade ago hardly had any involvement in—well, a decade and a half ago—hardly had any involvement in fentanyl. Why is fentanyl all of a sudden flooding the United States? Because the cocaine trafficking networks were so well developed that it was a plug and play where fentanyl could easily be integrated into these long-standing networks that the United States had allowed to grow with neglect of the security situation in our hemisphere.

FREEMAN: If I can just say, I think that’s actually a very strong argument. And I—again, this is a reason why I’m not opposed to—I certainly don’t think we should be taking our eye off Venezuela or cocaine trafficking, writ large. But, again, I come back to two points. One is that if we really care about curbing drug deaths, shouldn’t the—shouldn’t our major focus—shouldn’t our assets right now, for those who are pro-militarization, be focused on Mexico and the Pacific? And, second, I just want to raise this, because it’s a concern many Americans have right now. Is that we’re seeing, you know, the prefacing—the preface laid for a regime change war, right, which Americans didn’t vote for, which by and large they oppose. And it’s dressed up as counternarcotics. I’d love to hear how you’d respond to that.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Well, I don’t know that there’s been any announcement of a regime change war from the administration. So I’m—

DONVAN: But does it—does it quack like a duck? (Laughter.)

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I think there’s been a long-term recognition from both parties that the Maduro regime is a threat to national security and that we should be seeking his exit through different means. The question about whether or not these actual—this operation is going to—if we were at oust Maduro is going to have an impact on fentanyl, I think it’s impossible to, again, separate the different threats within the narcotrafficking activity and networks that we see.

FREEMAN: Do you have a theory why we’re starting there, and, for instance, not putting more pressure on the Sheinbaum government to do something about its narco-governors and several Morena-governed states? We’ve seen the pressure completely come off since February on that.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Again, I don’t think you can separate it. I think there’s a very clear message being sent to Mexico through our operations in the Caribbean that the United States is finally committed to confronting these narco-terrorist threats.

FREEMAN: All we’re hearing is about how Mexico is a great partner. I just hear that again and again. Well, Sheinbaum’s been a perfect collaborative partner.

TEAGUE: And the only message that has been sent is through coercive diplomacy.

DONVAN: Please, for those who don’t know who Sheinbaum is?

FREEMAN: President of Mexico.

DONVAN: Thank you.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I think you’ve—there are very clear messages that are being sent to Mexico from the Department of War about the possibility of the U.S. taking direct action against the cartels. And we’ve also seen a surging of military assets, as far as intelligence and surveillance, in and around Mexico. And don’t forget that before these operations in the Caribbean started, the U.S. military was surged to the U.S.-Mexico border. And that quickly ended the migration crisis, despite warnings that it would only exacerbate it.

DONVAN: There was another piece of argument that came up in the opening that I’d like to get to before we go to audience questions. One argument that’s still out there that we haven’t addressed, made by your opponents, is that these military actions are fundamentally destabilizing, that they backfire, that they discredit the civilian governments that are already, you know, on the verge of lack of credibility, et cetera. I’d just like you to respond to that argument and talk about that for a bit.

MCFATE: Sure. Well, I would say that that’s speculative. That most of the drug wars for the last half century have not been military heavy. And that what we’ve gotten is a bunch of fragile states. And so I would turn that argument right back to them.

DONVAN: Do you feel that—

FREEMAN: Can you restate the question?

MCFATE I’m saying that you’re saying that this would add more instability. And I would say, well, we haven’t really tried a military approach. I’m not—you know. And that it’s going to make things worse, whereas your approach we have evidence that it’s gotten worse in fifty years.

FREEMAN: Well, I think maybe my partner would like to expand on this, she brought it up in her introduction, but Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico, 2006 to ’12, he killed something—or killed, captured, or exiled twenty-five of the then top thirty-two drug traffickers in Mexico. Where did that leave us? Is Mexico more peaceful today?

DONVAN: Aileen.

TEAGUE: I mean, I would just add that Mexico is not more peaceful. We’ve even tried—there’s been different levels of militarization applied, without any sort of—with any tangible results. Some people argue that the murder rate in Mexico is actually higher now, when we thought it was kind of—when we thought it was kind of going down. And so I guess one thing I want to highlight very quickly is that what did get Sheinbaum’s reaction was coercive diplomacy. And I think that we have a lot of wiggle room in that area. I don’t think that Mexico is watching warships deployed, the USS Gerald Ford deployed in the Caribbean, and saying, ooh, I’m really scared.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: They should be.

TEAGUE: No. I mean, I think that what they’re scared of is tariffs. And tariffs forced action.

DONVAN: I don’t think your opponents are opposed to diplomacy being part of the mix. I just think they’re saying that military action—

TEAGUE: No, they said it hasn’t worked. And I’m just saying that we were providing examples that it has.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Alone it hasn’t worked.

MCFATE: Alone, it has not worked.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: And that’s what—that’s the result of, again, taking off—the most substantial aspects of U.S. security tools off the table. And I’m sorry, one of the—I just don’t understand how Mexico is now, over the past fifteen years, an example of militarization against the drug war.

MCFATE: Exactly.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: When we’ve had the hugs not bullets approach reign under AMLO, and continue over the past year under Sheinbaum. And even before that, under Peña Nieto, there was a very clear pulling back of offensive operations against the cartels.

MCFATE: And also, don’t compare the Mexican Army with the U.S. military. It’s apples and some other—

TEAGUE: No one’s doing that.

MCFATE: You just did.

TEAGUE: No, I didn’t.

MCFATE: Well, your colleague did.

TEAGUE: I’m saying—

MCFATE: Saying, like, this is like Mexico tried it so it doesn’t work. Well, this is not the Mexican military.

FREEMAN: Isn’t our strategy—and if we could stop using this nice sounding euphemism. (Laughs.) You know, kind of nice-sounding vocabulary of “militarization,” right? Isn’t killing suspects or killing, if you want to call them, drug traffickers on Mexican soil, if we do it, if Mexicans do it, why is it going to produce a different outcome if we do it?

MCFATE: Because we’re—the U.S. military is a different instrument and animal than the Mexican military.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: And because the Mexican military hasn’t been doing that as a core and comprehensive strategy over the past fifteen years.

TEAGUE: Yes, it has.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I’m sorry. It hasn’t.

DONVAN: Who has a question? Sir, if you can stand up, and the mic will be brought up to you. Three rows from the back.

Q: Thank you. Raul Gallegos.

Quick question. I think Will brought it up, but I think that maybe the debate is taking too literally the issue of fighting drug trafficking. Maybe to extent is it fair to say that this is sort of a way to sell regime change to the U.S. public in Venezuela—I mean regime change in Venezuela to the U.S. public? And if that is the case, then shouldn’t we be debating whether it’s a good thing strategically for the U.S. in the long term to take a stab at probably destabilizing or removing a regime in Venezuela? Thank you.

DONVAN: Do you want to take that, Will?

FREEMAN: I’m happy to, yeah. Look, I think—I think all that the administration owes us is—and the American people—is clarity. If the most of the deadly drugs are—well, really none of the deadly drugs—the deadliest drug, fentanyl, is coming through Venezuela, why are we massing our military assets there? If the real goal is to take out Maduro, because he’s a terrible dictator, I completely agree with that. Believe me, if he takes off tomorrow I’ll be the first one celebrating, with my Venezuelan friends. If that’s the goal, though, be transparent about it. But to say that somehow every time we blow up a speedboat off Venezuela we’re saving 25,000 American lives, I think it’s an insult to the people who are losing their lives to fentanyl every day.

DONVAN: Response from the side?

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Again, I don’t think that you can take different aspects of the narcotrafficking threat as if they’re islands. This is a hemispheric threat with transactional networks. You have the same groups that develop this trafficking network through—from South America to the United States have allowed fentanyl to pass through and continue to support the same organizations that are trafficking fentanyl to the United States. Cartels have the resources they have because of the cocaine trafficking that they have done, with very little resistance from governments in the U.S., particularly on the security and military front.

FREEMAN: If I can just add, I just think it’s dangerous to run together all of these cartels and gangs as if they’re part of some super alliance across the hemisphere. It’s just simply not how it works.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I’m sorry, then I don’t think you understand how transnational criminal networks work.

FREEMAN: No, I think I do. (Laughter.)

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: They’re not—they’re not—

DONVAN: All right, I’m going to call an impasse on that one. Another question please, in the far back corner.

Q: Sarah Daly, Columbia University.

I’m hearing a lot of agreement on the nature of the threat, on the reasons for the threat—in part, U.S. neglect of the region—and on the fact that nothing has really been working very well. And also, even agreement on the fact that the military is likely a good force in terms of using it for intelligence, surveillance, et cetera. On the yes side, I’m curious why and how in particular kinetic strikes would work. And for the no side, I’m wondering what exactly would work, and is there a role for the military in that?

DONVAN: Could you do me a favor, again, for the non-expert, the term of art, kinetic strike? Just tell folks what that means in plain English.

Q: (Laughs.) The type of strike we’re seeing in the Caribbean.

DONVAN: A missile hitting a moving boat.

Q: Yes, exactly.

MCFATE: Sure, I can start, if you like. OK, so the kinetic strikes, you know, blowing up boats, right? And I agree with Will that that alone is not a silver bullet, right? We all know that, OK?

DONVAN: Was that a metaphor? (Laughter.)

MCFATE: Yeah, right. So—but I don’t think it’s the end. Now, why? I think it helps create some measure of deterrence. It’s going to make it more expensive. I mean, the real way to take out these cartels is to do economic warfare on them in a variety of overt and covert ways, right? But the covert—but in terms of kinetic, I think there’s a limited role for them, short of some sort of 1990 Panama invasion. We can—that’s a separate question if that’s wise or not. So I don’t know if it’s going to—you know, if it’s going to go beyond what we see. Of course, parking the Gerald Ford is literally overkill.

DONVAN: That’s an aircraft carrier that’s on its way to the region now?

MCFATE: It’s at the region, I think. Yeah. It’s the biggest aircraft carrier in the world, yes.

TEAGUE: I mean, I would just say what could work. You know, strong diplomacy. I mean, even upping the ante on coercion, as we’ve seen the Trump administration do. I don’t think everything they’ve done is bad. And they’ve been able to elicit a response. I think that there are—my contacts in the Venezuelan opposition, they are not opposed to some level of covert action to help destabilize the regime. But they are very clear in the fact that they don’t want strikes and they don’t want any sort of intervention or a repeat war of a protracted conflict like we saw in Iraq or Afghanistan. And I don’t know if—do you have anything you wanted to add?

FREEMAN: Yeah. I think just when we—I appreciate the question, Professor Daly. And thanks for making a little peace and reminding us what we agree on.

I do think that when we talk about what we should be doing, of course, looking out is important. We also need to look in. OK, who arms the cartels in Mexico, right? Seventy percent of the weapons coming from here. How much prosecution is there? There’s something, like, 700 ATF firearms inspection agents across the country. Gun stores selling freely to gun traffickers in southern Arizona, southern Texas. Those weapons stream over the border.

Meanwhile, and I mentioned this in my introductory remarks. I’m a little—I hope we have time to come back to it. We’re seeing a huge shift in our domestic law enforcement personnel and resources away from organized crime and drug trafficking, and to immigration enforcement, OK? Forty-five percent of the FBI agents in the biggest twenty-five field offices in the country, it’s about half, they’re working immigration cases right now. A quarter of DEA agents, Drug Enforcement Agency agents, are working on immigration, OK? DOJ sources are going off record telling media outlets, we were told from day one you’re working immigration now. That is the number-one priority. And you know what we’re seeing? We’ve seen drug trafficking arrests, drug trafficking prosecutions, year to date, fall to their lowest levels in thirty years, OK? That’s what the tough, militarized approach looks like at home. It’s not tough. (Applause.)

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I mean, I would like to see all of the things that you’re talking about, Will. I have no problem with going after people who are trafficking weapons from the United States into Mexico. I think we need to go after the people who are trafficking drugs into the United States, while we also go after the people who are trafficking people into the United States. The problem is that with all these arguments, we’ve seen them weaponized in a way that we are saying, well, we cannot do—we cannot use kinetic strikes, or aggressive law enforcement, or military operations against this threat without also doing this other—this other operation, or focusing on here. It’s treated as a before we can do anything else we need to go after the weapons traffickers from the United States. I have no problem doing that, but we clearly need to stop taking core national security tools off the table in order to confront this threat. And I think that’s just what has been the underlying issue with our approach for all this time.

FREEMAN: Should Congress have a chance to consider that question?

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Consider which question?

FREEMAN: Whether or not we should go to war?

MCFATE: Can I answer that question quickly, and then we’ll get to—

DONVAN: No, we can keep going with this, because I know you wanted to say something too.

MCFATE: All right, the last time—do you know the last time Congress declared war?

FREEMAN: Unfortunately, probably decades ago.

MCFATE: World War II.

FREEMAN: But I’m happy to talk about why the situation is not like the global war on terror.

MCFATE: World War II. Do you know when the last talked—you talked about the war resolutions—power resolutions act, right/ Which the—just the U.S. Congress passed in 1973 as a way to curtail presidents from launching wars abroad. They have to get permission after sixty days. Do you know how many presidents since ’73 have obeyed that law? Zero. Zero, including Obama, when he went to war in Libya, including Clinton when he went to war in Kosovo. So this idea, like, it’s not—we’ve never done this before, the sky is falling. invest in more sky, it’s nonsense we have never done that.

TEAGUE: How about the cases in which we have done it before? Like Plan Colombia, where the United States spent billions of dollars supporting military troops in Colombia. And I would agree that, I mean, a lot of people think Plan Colombia is a success. And it did bring stability and a measure of public safety. And Will and I were discussing this the other day in terms of there’s a lot to be lauded about the increase in state capacity in places like Colombia. But the drug trade thrives there. Paramilitaries operate on the Colombia-Venezuelan border. And ultimately, I mean, what is—sort of, what is it that we’re trying to achieve? I think that now—just to finish my thought here—I mean, I think that we—there’s a really great case to be made about the drug trade used as a convenient rationale for regime change. And that’s something that needs more transparency, if that is—that is the aim. But is the military effective in dismantling the drug trade? And, I mean, this aside that we’re not really talking about fentanyl in Colombia, but it’s not, right? I mean, the Colombian—the drug trade in Colombia right now is thriving more so than it arguably did in the 1990s.

MCFATE: OK, and in Colombia what did work there—

TEAGUE: There are things that did work there.

MCFATE: Was irregular warfare. And that’s different—for the audience, regular warfare looks like World War II. It’s what, you know, we’re seeing missiles take out speed boats. That’s sort of regular warfare. Irregular warfare is like Green Berets go into Colombia and they work with the Colombian military to smoke out and destroy drug traffickers over a long period. That’s another form of kinetic force, but it’s irregular. And it has its own issues as well, I won’t doubt that.

DONVAN: All right, I want to go to another question. By the way, that question was fantastic in moving our debate down a really interesting path. So thank you for that. Right on the aisle at the rear.

Q: My name is Richard.

We’re hearing a lot about how to reduce the supply. When you do that, Economics 101 says you’re going to increase the price. But you don’t affect demand. How come whenever we have this conversation we never talk about demand. Why don’t we—you know, what would be the best and ideal thing? If there was no demand, we wouldn’t be here talking about it. So how do we address demand? How come we don’t hear about that? Why isn’t that part of the conversation?

DONVAN: I want to take that to this side because your opponents did mention demand twice, and that the eye has been taken off the ball on demand, they’re saying, in the last year.

MCFATE: Yeah. It’s a great question. We look at the supply side, not the demand side. You know, for fifty years nobody has figured out how to prevent 25 percent of the American people from putting this junk in their vein. It’s not an answer, but that’s the observation.

DONVAN: But with fentanyl, a lot of people are not aware that they’re even ingesting fentanyl.

MCFATE: Sure. Yeah, but the question is, what politician has come up with some brilliant policy to reduce—I mean, we all remember, like, Nancy Reagan, right? That’s a long time ago.

TEAGUE: The Nixon—I mean, a lot of people don’t know that the Nixon administration actually did devote substantial resources to treatment, in addition to kind of coining, you know, the war on drugs. So there has been attempts during the Carter administration. But those were slashed from the Reagan administration onward.

MCFATE: There’s been lots of attempts.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I think, again, I go back to—I’m for all of this. But again, let’s not—this is a dire and active threat to the American people. It’s killing upwards—in 2023, 100,000 Americans of overdose deaths. We can’t, in this situation, be saying, well, we’re just going to focus on the demand side, which I think, in effect, is what is often argued by people who oppose going after the routes and the traffickers within the region. And neither of those are going to be effective. But I think also, to Sean’s point, it’s very difficult to—often in this assumption with, like, well, we need to go after the demand side. You know, drugs, illicit drugs make people irrational actors. So whether or not you’re going to convince people to stop drugs is always going to be highly limited as far as a way of addressing this threat. And we’ve seen that proven over decades. And the reality is that we need to be prepared to confront the supply as a primary part of this, in conjunction with certainly supporting—

TEAGUE: I agree with you. Yeah, just a quick point. I agree with you that the federal efforts would be severely limited, especially when the Trump administration cut 50 percent of the resources just this year.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Well, I don’t know what resources you’re specifically referring to, but—

DONVAN: Will, why don’t you jump in?

FREEMAN: Sure. Sure. Look, on principle I don’t disagree with my debate opponents. You know, that I think we need a multitude of tools here. And one of the tools is the military. Again, I’m just coming out against the new militarization, which is the preemptive use of lethal force. That’s literally what we’re seeing, right? But I do think that, unfortunately, in the current context that militarized strategy, the new militarized strategy, is becoming a pretext for cutting away everything else we know that does work, right? So we’re prosecuting drug trafficking less, money laundering prosecutions this year, year to date, 25 percent down from last year. We’re also cutting away, I think it was, $56 million for training first responders how to use Narcan in responding to fentanyl deaths and episodes. So none of that—unfortunately, it doesn’t get to the question of demand, which I think is deeply societal, cultural. I’m not sure we have the policy tools to fix that. But we can be saving lives here in the United States and I don’t understand why we’re cutting away those public health resources right now. (Applause.)

DONVAN: Sir, right—and if you could stand up.

Q: Thanks so much for a very informative debate. David Talbot with IP3.

So, you know, for obvious reasons, the debate’s really revolved around the Western Hemisphere. But I think a very interesting point was made that fentanyl has largely come from the Pacific. What does a militarized approach look like in the Pacific? You know, obviously, fentanyl was at the heart of recent U.S.-China talks. Clearly different tools for different approaches, but, you know, there’s a real—there’s a real fundamental challenge here where militarization can only be used against, you know, specific vulnerable states.

DONVAN: Very astute question, actually. So against little states like Venezuela, not so much against big states like China.

MCFATE: So, first of all, there’s been a lot of speculation about China’s role in fentanyl and precursors. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with the head of the Fentanyl Task Force, for example, of BCP and DEA. And we just don’t know the evidence. And we have to be very careful that we don’t draw conclusions. We have to be rigorous about this, right? Also, let’s not forget that a lot of precursors come from India as well, right? So, you know, what does—what does a sort of a whole-of-government response look like to this? All I’m arguing for, as in my opening, is that the military needs to be part of the overall tool set used. But different countries, different actors respond to different tools. Maybe for Mexico it’s not the military, it’s tariffs. Maybe for Venezuela, it’s more military. Maybe for China or India it’s something else.

DONVAN: But can I just jump in, Sean, again?

MCFATE: Sure.

DONVAN: Because I don’t think your opponents are not in any way arguing the military has no role. I think what they’re talking about is that what’s happening right now, with the killing of suspects, is a whole new thing. And that’s why we’re having the debate.

MCFATE: Right. Well, again, they’re not suspects any more than al-Qaida. OK, yeah. I mean, the idea of calling them suspects, to me, is preposterous. These are not American citizens in an American city being arrested for possessing narcotics. These are—you know, we can—we can discuss if the terrorism moniker is accurate or not. They’d be more like insurgents without ideology. Just their ideology is material. But I don’t go too far down that road.

DONVAN: If you would like to respond briefly, I’d like to get in one more question.

TEAGUE: Sure. Just very—you know, go ahead.

FREEMAN: Only going to add one fact here. Which is I think it’s such an important question about how does—how does fentanyl reach us. I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that Chinese chemical companies, hugely deregulated by the PRC, and Indian companies, have been pumping the chemical precursors into Mexico. But, you know, 80 percent of arrests for fentanyl possession at the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. citizens, right? Traveling almost exclusively over the border in either, you know, truck drivers or passenger vehicles, largely the latter. I don’t know how you solve that with the military. I mean, you just said we’re not seeing the U.S. military go after U.S. citizens, but is that what we need? Do we need them to be?

DONVAN: OK. I’m going to let that one stand as rhetorical. In our second row, it’ll be our last question, if you could stand up.

Q: Hi. Constance Hunter. Thank you. This has been really valuable.

So we know, if we—if we take Sean’s point, that we know that these people are criminals. They’re not suspects. They’re identified. And we shot down—or, we shot a boat. We had one survivor. We know he’s a criminal. We don’t try him, like we tried 9/11 perpetrators, right? We don’t try this person. We just send them back. What’s the rationale for that?

MCFATE: I can’t speak to the rationale of some would say the catch and release. Maybe, Andrés, can you speak to this?

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: I’m not sure. I think what you’re referring to is one of the drug traffickers that was—survived a strike in the Pacific and was extradited—or, sent to Ecuador, and then Ecuador didn’t prosecute. Listen, the reality is, Ecuador, as far as its capacities in intelligence and understanding of these networks, Ecuador has no idea about 90 percent of the drug traffickers that are active within their territory. I don’t think they’re going to have a good awareness of some of the maritime movements and the individuals on those ships going to the United States across the Pacific. We have a very good understanding of what these traffickers’ activities are like, what they—what their boats are outfitted with special engines, and that are—that are—

Q: I’m not disputing that. Why let them go? Why let them go?

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: Oh, well, I think at that point it’s a resource question. And the fact that—what is the benefit of arresting and trying a low-level smuggler?

FREEMAN: But there’s a benefit in killing him?

TEAGUE: It’s a—it’s a lack of transparency question. We don’t even know for sure that all of these boats were headed to the United States.

MCFATE: No, some were going to Europe.

TEAGUE: I mean, so why are we—why are we deploying our assets?

MCFATE: Well, I think there is—I’m guessing that there’s a neo-Monroe Doctrine at work here.

TEAGUE: Sure.

MCFATE: OK?

TEAGUE: And maybe that’s the conversation—

MCFATE: I mean, we can speculate all we want about regime change. I don’t speak for the administration. But I think there’s a limited amount of discourse we could have productively about trying to second guess what’s going on in the White House.

DONVAN: That’s a wrap on the questions. Thank you very much for all the great questions. (Applause.)

And now we move onto our closing round. And in our closing round, each of the debaters has ninety seconds to make their case one more time to you why they’re arguing yes or no to our question, we should militarize the war—the U.S. should militarize the war on drugs. And speaking first, you probably know better than I do, Sean. You’re up first. Sean McFate, the floor is yours for ninety seconds. And watch that clock. And once again, just to remind listeners, you are arguing that the U.S. should militarize the war on drugs.

MCFATE: That’s right. So I don’t argue that we should militarize a war on drugs. I am arguing that the Department of Defense should be used as a tool to be used in this sort of war on thugs. And I would say this, I worked for many years in conflict zones in all the worst parts of sub-Saharan Africa. They make Haiti look clean and easy. That is what a narco-state can go to, you know, a place like the Central African Republic or Southern Sudan, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Liberia. Places I lived and worked.

There are times when, you know, a whiteboard in Geneva, or the Hague, or in New York is simply not sufficient for dealing with bad actors in the world. And even though we all have the noblest intentions in mind, sometimes intentions alone are not needed, or not enough. So I’m arguing not that we just continue to blow things out of the water, but that we lean into a tradition that in some ways dates back to the 1803 Barbary Wars, that we can defeat criminality sometimes with kinetic force. Thank you.

DONVAN: Thank you, Sean. (Applause.) Next up, Aileen Teague. The floor is yours. You’ve been arguing strongly against the U.S. militarizing the war on drugs. One more time to tell us why.

TEAGUE: Of course, Absolutely. I just want to conclude by saying that this is a very complicated debate. And I think that we can each find some commonality in some of our positions. And to move away from that complexity, I think I want to just break it down very simply. Imagine a balloon which represents the drug trade. When I press down on one part of the balloon, the air doesn’t disappear. It just moves to another part of the balloon. The balloon bulges where the drug trade thrives.

And this is what happens when we deploy military assets against one trafficking route, one group. Crackdown on coca in Colombia, production just moves to Peru or Bolivia. Dismantle one cartel, another one forms to fill the vacuum—oftentimes more fragmented, more violent, and more difficult to control. This is the balloon effect, which I’m sure many of you have heard and are familiar with, which is sort of the essence of U.S. drug policy since the 1960s. Illicit markets are resilient. They’re adaptive. And they don’t vanish under pressure. They morph. And we are continuing to see the side effects of that.

So what is the takeaway here? We need comprehensive solutions. And I think that to different degrees we agree with that. We just have to hash out the particulars in a more careful way. Militarized policies, the new militarized policies as Will calls them, may look effective. But deploying military force in this capacity, as we’ve seen the administration do, has not worked. So, I mean, I’ll just bring it back to the balloon effect, because until we stop—until we kind of clamp down—or, stop clamping down, we’re just going to continue to chase the bulge in that balloon, never really solving the underlying problem. Thank you. (Applause.)

DONVAN: Thank you, Aileen. Andrés Martínez-Fernández, the floor is yours for the final time. Please convince us why the U.S. should militarize the war on drugs.

MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ: So opponents of the current actions of the Caribbean often describe a U.S. drug war that appears like a dramatic operation where we’ve put substantial resources, efforts, and manpower behind confronting cartels, confronting narcotraffickers, and dismantling these networks. The reality is, we haven’t. And over the past at least fifteen years, many of the recommendations and calls that have been made on the other side have actually dominated our policy, whether it’s going after money launderers, going after politicians with sanctions, other tools that don’t go into the kinetic. And working with security cooperation and through our partners in the region exclusively. All of this has been the focus. And it has not delivered any tangible results as far as confronting these networks and making—securing, protecting the American people or the region from these narco-terrorist threats.

What we need to do is stop taking off—core national security tools off of the table. And that includes the U.S. military, which we have used to protect the American people and American interests across the world with much less justification as compared to what we are seeing in our own hemisphere, and the violence and attacks on the American people. Thank you.

DONVAN: Thank you, Andrés (Applause.) And, finally, Will Freeman. Once again, you are—you do not want the U.S. to militarize the war on drugs. You have the final word in our debate.

FREEMAN: Thanks, John.

First of all, thanks, everyone, for coming tonight and taking part in this with us, hearing us out in our different positions. I’ve argued that the new type of militarization—let me underscore that—the new militarization that we’re seeing is not the right course for our country. I think it’ll hurt our institutions. I think it undermines our principles and who we are. And most of all, as I hope I’ve convinced you tonight, I don’t think it will meaningfully weaken the drug trafficking networks. And I hate to say this. I wish I could stand up here and say that despite all the time I spent in this building thinking about this problem, despite all the places I go in the region, the people I talk to, that I had an answer for how you end these illicit markets or make them substantially less predatory. And I don’t want to let you down by saying that I don’t know.

I think as long as there are buyers who will purchase illicit goods, including drugs, and as long as there’s people desperate enough to be needing to take employment supplying them, we’re going to have some level of this going on, right? There will be drug trafficking organizations in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. What we need to think about is how do we curb their violence, how do we make them less economically powerful, how do we disconnect them from the structures of corruption and impunity that allow them to exercise so much power? And, most of all, how do we make ourselves less complicit? How do we stop arming them? How do we stop paying the money that lines their pockets?

If you believe tonight that you’ve heard convincing arguments that militarization will achieve that—(laughs)—let me know. But I think, overall, I have—the strategy that somehow lethal, pre-emptive use of force—which is, again, what I think is truly new in the last few months—will change the dynamic I just described, I don’t see it. And I think we have better ways through civilian law enforcement, public health, and, as I said throughout the night, taking off the diplomatic gloves and really using pressure to go after the narcotraffickers’ enablers. (Applause.)

DONVAN: So we are fifty-five seconds away from a final bit of stagecraft. But before we get to that, I want to say, so that is a wrap on this debate. And I want to thank our audience for your questions. There were great questions this evening. I especially, as always, want to thank the Council on Foreign Relations for partnering with us and for hosting us here at your headquarters in New York. And, of course, I want to thank our debaters, Sean, and Andrés, and Will, and Aileen, for approaching this debate the way they did, with mutual respect. They actually did hear each other. They actually did engage. And they did so in a way that proves that we can disagree in a constructive way. So thank you all to our debaters and thank you, everybody, for coming out. (Applause.) And our final bit of stagecraft, I want to ask all four of you to step forward and just want to ask you to shake hands to show that—(laughter).

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.