Mexico, the US and an Unrestrained Trump?

The relationship between Mexico and the United States is complicated because it’s asymmetrical.

The relationship between Mexico and the United States is complicated because it’s asymmetrical. So much so that, according to some former U.S. officials, sometimes the most extreme actions are dismissed because of legal objections and domestic political reasons.

One basis for the bilateral relationship is that, for national security reasons, the U.S. wishes to avoid actions that would lead to the destabilization of Mexico, given the economic and political consequences of a crisis in a neighboring country.

But what if there was an American government that didn’t care?

That’s one message in the book “A Sacred Oath,” by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who claims that if Donald Trump did not order the bombing of illegal drug laboratories in Mexico, or the sending of 250,000 troops to the border to prevent the arrival of Central American immigrants, it was because of the objections of his collaborators.

As for being capable of bombing illegal laboratories in Mexico, they could have and can do it, Esper wrote. But that is illegal and is not done to friendly countries; the troops on the border would have been a domestic political and legal problem.

But with only a little more than two years before the next presidential election in the United States, the Mexican government might wonder what it would be like to live, or coexist, with a country where it seems to have fewer and fewer friends, and a regime where conspiracies and immediate political frustrations guide decision-making.

According to current estimates, it’s possible that the Republican Party will win the midterm elections in November, when control of Congress is at stake, as well as the presidential election in 2024.

The problem is that this is a Republican Party dominated by conspiracy theorists. Those who, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, talk about “invasions” of undocumented immigrants, that the Mexican administration does not control its territory and that a large cabal of pedophiles made up of Democrats and liberals is based in the nonexistent basement of a Washington pizzeria.

Or about election fraud with no evidence.

The predominance of conspiracy theories among Republicans is largely due to Donald Trump, who managed to amalgamate around himself already existing trends and seeks to return to power with the same notions of nationalism, xenophobia and racism.

It is the same man who, in addition to inquiring about the possibility of bombing drug laboratories in Mexico, began the construction of a fence on the border and pressured the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to use the military to stop the caravans of Central American immigrants and to accept that thousands of presumed asylum seekers in the United States should be crammed in together on the Mexican side.

Many actions of the Trump administration were stopped by collaborators with a clear vision of legal, legislative and political situations, but a second Trump — or Trumpist — administration may not have that restraint.