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CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM’S IMPOSSIBLE DILEMMA  
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Nick Miroff
December 24, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ The threat of U.S. strikes on cartels could upend a century of
delicate relations with Mexico. _

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, (Credit: Maritza Ríos for the
Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México)

 

The first 13 recipients of the Pentagon’s new Mexican Border Defense
Medal squeezed into the Oval Office last week, standing at attention
around the Resolute Desk. The awards, issued to soldiers and Marines
assisting President Donald Trump’s border crackdown, were replicas
of military medals given out more than 100 years ago, when American
warships shelled the port of Veracruz and General John J. Pershing led
U.S. troops into Chihuahua. That was the last time the United States
attacked its southern neighbor. The new medals, Trump told the troops,
were “a big deal.”

The White House used the ceremony
[[link removed]] to announce a bigger
deal: Trump’s designation of the synthetic opioid fentanyl as a
“weapon of mass destruction.” The illegal fentanyl tablets sold on
American streets are made primarily in clandestine laboratories in
Mexico and smuggled across the U.S. border by Mexican trafficking
organizations. Now the Trump administration was comparing the drug to
a nuclear or chemical threat aimed at the United States.

Fentanyl’s record of mass destruction is not in doubt. U.S. health
data show
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that the drug caused about 400,000 fatal overdoses during the past
decade, the deadliest mass-addiction crisis in U.S. history. But in
calling fentanyl a “weapon,” Trump appeared to further endorse the
once-fringe view that Mexico’s drug cartels are not profit-seeking
Mafias but terrorist organizations, analogous to groups such as the
Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and therefore worthy of a military
response. “There’s no doubt that America’s adversaries are
trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want
to kill Americans,” Trump declared. “If this were a war, that
would be one of the worst wars.” He has threatened air strikes on
cartel sites inside Mexico, labeling its traffickers foreign terrorist
organizations.

Trump’s invocation of war and his revival
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of a medal from a long-buried era of American military intervention in
Mexico leave Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in a bind. She has to
appease Trump enough to avoid air strikes while firmly standing up for
Mexican sovereignty and maintaining her own domestic political
support. Now in the second year of her six-year term, she has won
widespread praise at home for her coolheaded handling of Trump so far:
She has kept trade flowing and tariffs manageable while defusing calls
for air strikes on Mexico from MAGA elements who view the country as
more of an enemy than an ally. Whether Sheinbaum can hold that balance
under increased pressure from the White House will be her key
challenge for 2026.

Itraveled to Mexico City this month and spoke with members of
Sheinbaum’s administration, who view the coming year with
trepidation. Mexico is preparing to co-host the FIFA World Cup with
the United States and Canada at the same time that the three countries
are conducting a formal review of the United States–Mexico–Canada
trade agreement, reached seven years ago after Trump ripped up its
predecessor, NAFTA. Security coordination for the tournament has put
more attention on Mexico’s crime problems amid the trade
negotiations.

“We have a president on the Mexican side who is more interested,
much more interested, in cooperating than her predecessor was,”
Roberta Jacobson, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told me,
referring to former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “I
think she has done an amazing job navigating that minefield.” But
treating fentanyl as a terror weapon and traffickers as terrorists
converts what has been mostly a public-health and law-enforcement
issue into a national-security threat, opening the door to a broader
U.S.-military response.

Sheinbaum has drawn a red line at U.S. strikes on Mexican soil and
said flatly last month that they “would not happen.” Her
government has set other firm limits on what it considers to be
nonnegotiable matters, rejecting the possibility of joint operations
that would allow armed U.S. forces to embed with Mexican troops, as
the United States has done in Colombia and other drug-war theaters.
U.S. and Mexican officials I spoke with told me that Sheinbaum has
been willing to expand cooperation on almost everything else.

U.S. and Mexican diplomats spent years developing an approach to
bilateral relations that sought to compartmentalize traditional
sources of tension—trade, migration, water rights, drugs—so that
they would not affect other areas. But Trump ditched that framework
during his first term, when he threatened to crash the Mexican economy
with crippling tariffs as a way to force Mexico to crack down on
Central American migrants headed north.

Mexican officials suspect that Trump’s talk of terrorism and WMDs is
a way to gain leverage in the upcoming trade negotiations. Migration
and security are at the top of Trump’s agenda, one adviser to
Sheinbaum told me, “but the economic issue is always what’s really
behind it.”

In the trade talks, the United States is seeking
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Chinese investment and influence in Mexico, to broaden liberalization
of Mexico’s energy sector, and to advance a range of other
manufacturing-, labor-, and farming-related goals. Mexico surpassed
China in 2023 to become the top exporter
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to the United States, a result of the nearshoring boom led by U.S.
manufacturers moving operations out of China. More than 80 percent
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exports—cars, appliances, fresh produce—now go to the United
States, leaving Mexico more dependent than ever on its northern
neighbor, and subject to Trump’s whims.

Trump threatened Sheinbaum with more tariffs again this month to force
Mexico to send more water from its reservoirs to farmers and ranchers
in Texas. Sheinbaum moved quickly to appease him
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“He’s not someone you can confront head-on, because he responds
with more force,” the adviser told me. Sheibnaum, he said, “has
been very clear about Mexico’s position without getting into a
conflict.”

The adviser added, “This next year is going to be challenging for
Mexico.”

Raúl Benítez Manaut, an expert on U.S.-Mexico security cooperation
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told me that the CIA,
the U.S. military, Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, and
other American agencies have been operating in Mexico with far more
latitude than Mexican authorities would like to publicly acknowledge.
Polling shows
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that many Mexicans, especially in the business community, would
welcome a more muscular American role in their country, but this
remains especially taboo for some members of Sheinbaum’s leftist
Morena party. “She has to say certain things, for political
necessity, to keep her base happy,” Benítez Manaut said. “Not
unlike Trump.”

Benítez Manaut said that there would be major risks to air
strikes—with or without Mexico’s consent—targeting illegal
fentanyl production. The cartels have been moving their labs into
cities because rural sites can be detected more easily by satellites,
sensors, and other tools, he said. They believe that the government
would be too worried about collateral damage to carry out a strike in
an urban area. And any U.S. operation on Mexican soil would have to be
very careful to “avoid hitting civilians,” Benítez Manaut said:
“If someone innocent dies—a child, or a cleaning lady—it would
be a shitstorm.”

On December 6, a pickup truck packed with explosives blew up outside
the police station in Coahuayana, a small town in the state of
Michoacán, one of the country’s bloodiest cartel battlegrounds. The
blast shredded vehicles, knocked down trees, and killed six people,
including three officers. Video footage of the site showed a charred
blast radius strewn with debris that stretched for a block.

In Mexico, the bomb [[link removed]]
revived fears that drug-trafficking groups, if squeezed too hard,
could begin to act like terrorist organizations in retaliation against
the Mexican government. A bombing attack outside a World Cup venue
would devastate Mexico and Sheinbaum’s government. The senior
Mexican officials I spoke with told me that they are eagerly
cooperating with the United States to share intelligence to avoid
disaster.

Mexico’s drug smugglers are under pressure. Trump claims that there
has been a huge slowdown in drug trafficking at sea since the U.S.
began striking alleged smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and the
eastern Pacific. The cartels are already contending with the loss of
revenue from human smuggling and extortion payments along the
U.S.-Mexico border as a result of Trump’s border crackdown. In
October, handwritten cartel banners known as _narcomantas_ appeared
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in the tourist resorts of Baja California threatening to kill
Americans—signs that suggested a degree of desperation. Fentanyl,
which is smuggled mostly by human couriers and vehicles through
official crossings along the U.S. border, remains a major profit
source for the cartels.

Trump is the first U.S. president to treat drugs as mass-casualty
weapons and cartels as terror groups, applying the tools of
America’s response to the 9/11 terror attacks to the vexing
addiction crisis of the past decade. In an effort to draw more
attention to soaring drug-overdose rates, public-health advocates
calculated that more Americans were dying from opioids than from
foreign wars or terror attacks. But the U.S. government had never
before used these rhetorical comparisons to create justifications for
military attacks.

Trump has said at least 17 times since September that “land
strikes” against drug-production sites and other targets will
commence “soon,” according to a recent CNN
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tally. The strikes so far have hit targets at sea near Venezuela. But
Trump has said that action will not be limited to Venezuela.
“We’re going to start hitting them on land, which is a lot easier
to do,” the president said during the Oval Office ceremony, calling
traffickers “a direct military threat to the United States of
America” who are “trying to drug-out our country” in similar
fashion to the way China’s imperial power was undermined by
British-backed opium traders in the 19th century.

Mexico’s security cooperation with the United States fell to a low
point under López Obrador, who lashed out at the Drug Enforcement
Administration after U.S. agents arrested
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a Mexican general and former defense minister at Los Angeles
International Airport and accused him of working with traffickers.
López Obrador’s denunciations tapped into long-standing resentments
toward the DEA as a meddlesome presence that wiretapped whomever it
wanted, cut deals with cartel bosses, and interfered in Mexican
politics. He ordered Mexico’s military to shun the agency.

A senior Mexican official and a senior U.S. official told me
separately that cooperation has improved dramatically under Sheinbaum
and that U.S. agencies, even the DEA, have regained space. Secretary
of State Marco Rubio told
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reporters in September that “it is the closest security cooperation
we have ever had.” Mexico has extradited more than 50 cartel
suspects to the United States since February, including Rafael Caro
Quintero, one of the DEA’s most wanted men. Mexican authorities have
worked with the U.S. to seize more of the chemicals used to make
fentanyl and other synthetic drugs and to go after the companies,
mostly in China, that ship them.

The senior official in Sheinbaum’s government told me that “the
reality is that there’s a lot of cooperation” and that the Trump
administration has “been respectful so far about our red lines.”

Sheinbaum and her aides have learned to deal with Trump by separating
his political statements and social-media posts from the practical,
material matters of what the United States actually wants.

“I don’t think they will change their rhetoric, but as long as the
actual relationship is good and works between the boundaries on what
is acceptable for the two countries, we’re fine,” the senior
Mexican official told me.

[US Marine Corps troops as seen from San Diego in February 2025]

U.S. Marines on patrol in San Diego, California, in February, after
the Defense Department deployed 1,600 active-duty troops to the
U.S.-Mexico border area. (Carlos Moreno / NurPhoto / Getty Images)

The CIA and the U.S. military are working with Mexico’s military,
especially its elite marine-commando units, as the United States has
done for years, passing along intelligence from informants and
wiretaps on the whereabouts of cartel bosses and drug shipments. U.S.
drones and surveillance aircraft circle Mexico’s skies, hunting drug
labs. “The basis of that cooperation is: The U.S. can give us
intelligence, but the security forces operating in Mexican territory
need to be Mexican forces,” the senior Mexican official said.
Officials at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City declined my interview
request.

Mexico faces “constant pressure” from Trump officials, the senior
Mexican official said: “I don’t expect that to change, to be
honest. But I do believe that we have found common ground, and I do
believe that a lot of people in Washington understand the nuances, the
sensitivities, the complexities of the bilateral relation. And they
know that doing some sort of strike within Mexican territory, either
in the sea, the land, the air, whatever, would cross a line that it
would be very difficult to recover from.”

Mexico’s navy invited me to visit its command-and-control center in
Mexico City, where officials coordinate interdictions with the U.S.
Coast Guard and other agencies. The center’s commander, Rear Admiral
Máximo Rodríguez Villalobos, told me that cooperation between the
two countries is “as strong as ever.” Rodríguez Villalobos said
that the U.S. Coast Guard asked Mexico to respond to the site in
international waters, off Mexico’s Pacific Coast, where the U.S. had
attacked a suspected drug boat. “We reached the site, but we found
no one,” Rodríguez Villalobos said. “There was nothing left.”

In the 1990s, U.S. forces intervened in Colombia, helping its
government battle Marxist insurgents and take down drug lords such as
Pablo Escobar. I asked the rear admiral if he could envision Mexico
embracing a similar approach to Colombia’s as a way to avoid U.S.
unilateral action, with U.S. agents and troops carrying out joint
operations alongside Mexico’s security forces. “To arrive at the
point Colombia reached at that moment, I don’t see it,” he said.

Today, Colombia is producing near-record amounts of cocaine
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primarily for the U.S. market. The United States maintains security
agreements with Colombia, but in October, the Trump administration
decertified the country as a reliable drug-war partner for the first
time in nearly 30 years. Trump is now threatening to carry out strikes
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on suspected drug labs in Colombian territory and trading insults
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President Gustavo Petro.

U.S.-Mexico security cooperation reached a high point in the years
after the 2008 Mérida Initiative, when then–Mexican President
Felipe Calderón declared war on the country’s criminal groups.
U.S.-trained Mexican marines worked with the CIA and the DEA to target
cartel leaders in daring operations using U.S.-supplied Black Hawk
helicopters. The United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars
to help reform the Mexican judicial system as part of an effort to
prosecute suspected traffickers instead of killing them.

Back then, U.S. officials were the ones encouraging Mexico to gather
evidence and build prosecution cases. The work was difficult and often
frustrating to both nations, especially when cases were mishandled and
cartel suspects went free. Now it’s the U.S. government, under
Trump, that appears to favor lethal force over prosecution and
building institutions that could stand up to the cartels’ influence.
I asked the rear admiral if Mexico endorsed that approach and if he
thought it would be effective.

He considered his words carefully. “Every country has the right to
pursue its objectives as it sees fit,” he said.

At the western end of the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s stately
central artery, the Altar a la Patria, one of the country’s most
important civic shrines, rises above the tree line of Chapultepec
Park. The memorial consists of six white marble columns arranged in a
semicircle honoring the Niños Héroes (the “Boy Heroes”)—young
cadets killed in 1847 after they refused to surrender to invading
American troops. On a recent Sunday morning, bike riders and tourists
posed for snapshots under the looming monument while a man on roller
skates looped through the crowd, bopping to Shakira songs on his
portable speaker.

Mexico’s national identity is deeply entwined with this legacy of
U.S. conquest and imperial bullying. The United States took half of
Mexico’s land in the mid-19th century and periodically intervened in
the decades that followed to protect American interests. During the
past century of mostly good relations, U.S. politicians learned to
work with Mexico by navigating this history with tact and respect.

Arturo Sarukhán, who served as Mexico’s ambassador to the United
States under Calderón and who still lives in Washington, told me that
those urging Trump to strike Mexico “really want to send a
message” by taking a hammer to those sensitivities. Even a single
missile strike on a fentanyl lab could undo a century’s worth of
diplomacy.

Sheinbaum should redouble efforts to prevent such a scenario,
Sarukhán said, first by saying definitively that Mexico’s
cartels—not U.S. imperialism—are the greatest threat to her
country’s sovereignty. Such a declaration could relaunch security
collaboration with the United States along the lines of the Mérida
Initiative, he said, including a “boots on the ground” U.S.
presence working hand in hand with Mexican forces “under the control
of Mexico but in dual coordination with United States authorities.”

“That would be closer to the Colombia model they say they don’t
want to accept,” Sarukhán said. “But if you really want to defuse
the unilateral use of force, the declaration of organized-crime
organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, and now fentanyl as
a weapon of mass destruction, I don’t see any other way of defanging
those in the White House who are itching to drop a missile from a
drone onto a lab in Sinaloa.”

The World Cup, Sarukhán said, provides an opportunity for Sheinbaum
to manage potential political blowback, especially from her own party,
because “what you can do is sort of underscore that you’re
strengthening border security between Mexico, Canada, and the United
States” to protect the games.

That approach, with its emphasis on the regional security of North
America, would get the countries back to the framework that has aided
decades of economic integration—and to a relationship that most
flourishes when it’s not too fixated on the past.

_Nick Miroff_ [[link removed]]_ is a
staff writer at The Atlantic who covers immigration, the Department of
Homeland Security, and the U.S.-Mexico border. He can be reached on
Signal at NickMiroff.78_

 

* U.S.-Mexico relations
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* Trump
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* Mexican Drug Cartels
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* U.S. Bombing strategy
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* Claudia Sheinbaum
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