THE country most affecting us day in and day out

ignorance is not bliss

An immigration crisis along the U.S.-Mexican border which one state uses to justify overruling the federal Constitution and is currently bringing virtually everything else to a halt so one candidate can run on his opponent’s failure.

China threatens U.S. leadership globally leading to ever growing concerns at home about our reactions to that danger.

The Israel-Hamas conflict stokes regional turmoil further sparking regional military actions threatening to escalate into a full-scale war as the Biden administration, with critics demanding ever stronger resolve, prepares to retaliate against Houthis for the death of three Americans stationed in Jordan.

Ukraine, running short on weapons while beginning to fracture internally, conducts defensive actions to avoid Russia swallowing it up as Putin has been trying to do for 101 weeks.

Climate change taking Minneapolis from 50 inches of snow by 2 February 2023 to barely a dusting of snow by 2 February 2024 while California this weekend receives 4 feet of snow in the Sierras along with perhaps 6 inches of rain north of Los Angeles.

This is a short list of security concerns on people’s minds today. You might conjure up several you see as more relevant—and I hope you will do so as I welcome hearing your views.

The single least interesting subject to the overwhelming majority of students I saw in the national security community over 30 years, however, was that same Mexico from problem one. When I began reconfiguring our global context course in 1993, because context is vital to any strategy, I could not believe my eyes: we did not cover Mexico in our curriculum. Zip. Zilch. Nada. (We also did not cover Canada which I found as equally bizarre but figured that was because we trusted them; I had no pretense we trusted our Mexican neighbours who have arguably the strongest anti-U.S. nationalism in the world; only Cuba can give them a run for their money).

Every student, before about 2008, had to study a particular region or nation to craft a strategy to apply what he or she had learned in our curriculum. A portion of their study of context involved ‘boots on the ground’ travel to that country or region. The trips provided the opportunity to interview government officials, NGOs, businesses, Embassy officials and Defense Attache’ contacts, academics, and to see for themselves what conditions looked like (‘Wait, you mean this is how poor portions of South Africa really are?’ or ‘No wonder the Israelis wanted the Golan Heights as that terrain gave the Syrians an unbelievable advantage’ were the kinds of statements generated by experiencing the geography of a problem.

Except we had to dragoon people to study Mexico. I mean it was virtually impossible to get students to make the effort to learn why Mexican nationalism against the United States is so strong (‘You mean they owned so much of the western United States before 1848?? I had no idea’ or ‘General Pershing really took it to the Mexicans, didn’t he?’). I remember at least once we cancelled Mexico. It was easier to get people to go to Central America than Mexico which is downright peculiar.

We don’t care about Mexico, in short. It’s not exotic or sexy or historic (really?) or all the things luring us elsewhere. It’s too familiar—and our relationship with them is too bloody hard for most people to stomach, in truth.

It turns out National War College students are harbingers of how virtually all Americans view Mexico. We don’t want to understand their problems because it would detract from our sense of certitude that we are victimised by the masses of immigrant coming across the border to us and us only.

It’s not quite that simple. Many Americans see Mexico as that child’s game of ‘elephant’: blindfolded, one picks a portion of the elephant, then figures out what he or she is holding. We tend to consider the part of Mexico for which we have the most contact, then assume that portion we recognise is the whole of the country. Sadly or thankfully, depending on one’s views, it’s a great deal more complicated than an ‘either/or’.

Every choice we make has all sorts of consequences for them and for us, many of which we just prefer to ignore

Communities in the Yucatan may be virtually culturally isolated within the country because they are Mayan-speaking and agricultural while many Americans only know this region with its many self-contained resorts areas such as Merida, Cancun, or San Miguel de Allende. This breeds some confusion on the part of the locals who wonder if we come to see Mexico or to see American Mexico while not doing much to advance the economy with our dollars.

Mexico is a democracy of 130 million predominantly Spanish-speaking people, most of whom are descendants of inter-marriages between Iberian colonisers and a wide array of native peoples living there. Mexicans may be extremely poor or eye-openingly wealthy with a moderate middle class in between. Some live in rural areas far from the border while Mexico City, Monterrey, Acapulco, Nuevo Laredo, Guadalajara, and many other cities are growing concentrations of fairly vibrant industrial sectors making this nation the single largest trading partner of the United States much of the time.

Mexico is also a place of tremendous violence, some of it spilling over into the United States. Mexican retort by pointing out our non-existent gun laws allowed so many arms into their country in prior decades. Additionally, Actions Create Consequences (here on: ACC): our late 1990s and early 2000s successes in Colombia drove drug traffickers north into Mexico rather than ending the problem.

It is a country where religion plays an interesting role. The majority of the country is still Roman Catholic but a surprisingly robust Protestant Evangelical movement took hold beginning in the 1980s. Mormons have been a vital but small element of the country for a century. The Catholic church lost its historic land power during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1928) but remains an important institution across the nation. Significant numbers of immigrants from around the world have brought both some Islam and Judaism as well. But they do believe faith has a role.

It was hard for Americans to grasp that Chiapas, a southern part of the extensive Mexican geography has for centuries been poor, agrarian, and experiences many of identical migrant difficulties that we face. (Turns out Mexicans aren’t any fonder of illegal migration than we are but have fewer resources to combat the problem).

Most Americans have no idea how strained the Mexican law enforcement community has been over the past fifty years by the massive infusion of illegal drug money corrupting any semblance of a truly independent judiciary and police force. It’s easy to toss out damning judgments about corruption as if it’s just the nature of the Latin American culture but these blase’ comments undervalue the valiant law enforcers who gave their lives to cooperate with the Drug Enforcement Administration as far back as the Nixon administration, only to find that our priorities were not really on drug enforcement. When we cut funding for aid programs or to the judicial support mechanisms due to internal politics, Mexicans wonder how high drugs really have been in our priorities.

In short, Mexico has for decades been the place about which we ought to pay more attention than to any country in the world. I have never understood how we can be so scared of folks crossing the relatively long border, the economy we seek to benefit from, and yet we don’t bother to learn much about Mexico. We take it for granted at our peril. Sure, China may be the country we most fear but aren’t people likely to get tired swimming here from China while they can actually walk from Mexico?

The current border issues are not exclusively Mexican in origin; many of the migrants flood our southern neighbour before they get here. Those migrants see greater hope for their children if they continue north where the economy is bigger, the government more reliable (at least it used to be), and the judicial system treated them as people rather than commodities. Yes, many come illegally. But isn’t that really what is is about—that we don’t like illegal behaviour when it’s someone else?

I give immigrants neither a pass nor feign ignorance. Are those coming from Mexico really all that different than those who have come from other countries over the decades? Did all Irish feel oppressed by the English so they came? Ok but did we hold them to the same standard we are the immigrants coming to the border now? Seriously, people? Abandoning one’s homeland is not a random thought, especially knowing the hostility they will engender when they arrive. People are desperate; it’s a reality of why people abandon their homelands to trek north. We remain the land of opportunity and hope for which so many thousands embark on a dangerous trip to arrive at that border. That success we are so proud of lures them and yet we seem surprised, shocked by that.

Aren’t we disinegenous or naive? We don’t want foreigners because they have not paid their dues as we think we have. It’s pretty simple.

It would help if we knew more about Mexico to understand how they can play in helping this situation. Simply sending any Secretary of State along with any Secretary of Homeland Security will engender polite meetings but change little. Mexicans don’t have the resources nor the political will to stop people they can no more absorb than we can. But our sheer ignorance of the place in an era of worrying so profoundly about threats emanating there is mind-boggling. It is neither a partisan issue nor an easy one but it is one where our actions belie our words.

We don’t know much about what scares us so much. Why are we so sure we can therefore fix it? ACC: will we inadvertently cause other problems by focusing on the migrant crisis? That could be even more dangerous.

Thank you for considering Mexico today. I appreciate your time. I welcome any of your thoughts as I ponder them and I recalibrate my own thinking. Weigh in, please, and thank you for thinking about what we seem to believe is our greatest threat right now.

Have a good weekend. It’s Groundhog’s Day.

Be well and be safe. FIN