The Border is Vanishing as Mexico Pushes North

Sep 10, 2012  Thedailybeast.com (Part III of III)

The blurring of America’s Southwestern frontier is becoming a geographical fact that all the security devices on the border cannot invalidate.

Nevertheless, while I admire Huntington’s ability to isolate and expose a fundamental dilemma that others in academia and the media are too polite to address, I do not completely agree with his conclusions. Huntington believes in a firm reliance on American nationalism in order to preserve its Anglo-Protestant culture and values in the face of the partial Latinoization of our society. I believe that while geography does not necessarily determine the future, it does set contours on what is achievable and what isn’t. And the organic connection between Mexico and America is simply too overwhelming. Huntington correctly derides cosmopolitanism (and imperialism too) as elite visions. But a certain measure of cosmopolitanism, Huntington to the contrary, is inevitable and not to be disparaged.

America, I believe, will emerge in the course of the 21st century as a civilization oriented from north to south, from Canada to Mexico, rather than as an east-to-west, racially lighter-skinned island in the temperate zone stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This multiracial assemblage will be one of sprawling suburban city-states, each nurturing its own economic relationships throughout the world, as technology continues to collapse distances. America, in my vision, would become the globe’s preeminent duty-free hot zone for business transactions, a favorite place of residence for the global elite. In the tradition of Rome, it will continue to use its immigration laws to asset-strip the world of its best and brightest and to further diversify an immigrant population that, as Huntington fears, is defined too much by Mexicans. Nationalism will be, perforce, diluted a bit, but not so much as to deprive America of its unique identity or to undermine its military.

But this vision requires a successful Mexico, not a failed state. If outgoing President Felipe Calderón and his successors can break the back of the drug cartels (a very difficult prospect, to say the least), then the United States will have achieved a strategic victory greater than any possible in the Middle East. A stable and prosperous Mexico, working in organic concert with the United States, would be an unbeatable combination in geopolitics.

A post-cartel Mexico combined with a stabilized and pro-U.S. Colombia (now almost a fact) would fuse together the Western Hemisphere’s largest, third-largest, and fourth-largest countries in terms of population, easing America’s continued sway over Latin America and the Greater Caribbean. In a word, Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich is correct when he suggests that fixing Mexico is more important than fixing Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as Bacevich claims, Mexico is a possible disaster, and our concentration on the Greater Middle East has diverted us from it. If the present course continues, it will lead to more immigration, legal and especially illegal, creating the scenario that Huntington fears. Calderón’s offensive against the drug lords has claimed 50,000 lives since 2006, with close to 4,000 victims in the first half of 2010 alone. Moreover, the cartels have graduated to military-style assaults, with complex traps set and escape routes closed off. “These are war fighting tactics they’re using,” concludes Javier Cruz Angulo, a Mexican security expert. “It’s gone way beyond the normal strategies of organized crime.” Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, writes: “If that trend persists, it is an extremely worrisome development for the health, perhaps even the viability, of the Mexican state.”

The weaponry used by the cartels is generally superior to that of the Mexican police and comparable to that of the Mexican military. Coupled with military-style tactics, the cartels can move, in Carpenter’s words, “from being mere criminal organizations to being a serious insurgency.” United Nations peacekeepers have deployed in places with less violence than Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. Already police officers and local politicians are resigning their posts for fear of assassination, and Mexican business and political elites are sending their families out of the country, even as there is sustained middle- and upper-middle-class flight to the United States.

Mexico is now at a crossroads: it is either in the early phase of finally taking on the cartels, or it is sinking into further disorder—or both. As of this writing, violence is dropping significantly, but that’s mainly because the cartels are consolidating their control. What the United States does could be pivotal. And yet the U.S. security establishment has been engaged in other notoriously corrupt and unstable societies half a world away—Iraq until 2011 and Afghanistan at least until 2014. Unlike those places, the record of U.S. military involvement in the Mexican border area is one of reasonable success. As Danelo points out, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States and Mexico reduced banditry on the border through binational cooperation. From 1881 to 1910, Mexican President Porfirio Díaz joined with American presidents to jointly patrol the border.

Mexican rurales rode with Texas Rangers in pursuing the Comanche. In Arizona, Mexican and American soldiers mounted joint campaigns against Apaches.

Today, the job of thwarting drug cartels in rugged and remote terrain is a job for the military, quietly assisting Mexican authorities and subordinate to them. But the legal framework for such cooperation barely exists. While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Adapted from The Revenge of Geography, by Robert D. Kaplan, published by Random House, Inc., and on sale from Sept. 11, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Robert D. Kaplan. By arrangement with Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.