There was a curious moment at Donald Trump’s White House event on Thursday afternoon related to the president’s thoughts about our neighbors to the south. At one point, the Republican declared that he and his administration are “waging war” on drug cartels in Latin America, and soon after, he added that Mexico is “run by the cartels — and we have to defend ourselves from that.”
The combination of comments made it sound as if the American president was eyeing some kind of military conflict with the U.S.’ neighbor and largest trading partner.
If that is what Trump has in mind, however, Mexico will have to get in line. The Republican has also been saber-rattling toward Venezuela — the U.S. flew Air Force B-1 bombers near Venezuela on Thursday — including a recent all-caps warning about the South American country paying an “incalculable” price. There have also been rising tensions between the U.S. and Colombia, whose president has accused Trump of “murder.”
The Republican administration has approved 10 deadly military strikes against civilians in international waters in and around the Caribbean and Latin America, and Trump has raised the possibility of expanding operations to include additional strikes on land.
So it was alarming when Reuters reported Friday:
President Donald Trump dramatically escalated a U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean on Friday by deploying the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier group to Latin America, a show of force that far exceeds any past counter-narcotics need and represents Washington’s most muscular move yet in the region. The deployment is part of Trump’s military buildup in the Caribbean, which includes eight additional warships, a nuclear submarine and F-35 aircraft.
The Reuters report, confirmed by MSNBC, added that the deployment “is likely to raise concern in the region about the Trump administration’s intent,” which seemed like an understatement.
I won’t pretend to know what, if anything, will come of this dramatic escalation, but as the world assesses the latest moves (and as Trump’s odds of winning a Nobel Peace Prize collapse), spare a thought for those voters who backed the Republican ticket last year because they believed Trump was the candidate of foreign policy restraint and isolationism.
Just this year, the president has used military force in premeditated extrajudicial killings; launched preemptive military strikes on targets in Iran; initiated a bombing campaign in Yemen; announced his desire to annex Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal and the Gaza Strip; and spoken publicly about possibly returning U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
All of those developments, of course, pre-dated the Republican administration’s decision to deploy an aircraft carrier group to Latin America.
If you voted for Trump because you expected restraint on foreign policy and the use of military force abroad, I have some bad news for you.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
