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Yes, though anyone who ironically proposes a special military operation deserves one. (This is a joke, but do be kind to your friend.)
More to the point- your friend is raising relevant points, and you are raising bad geopolitical analogies. There are contexts where it is not war to conduct strikes in a neighboring country's territory, but these are generally limited to very specific contexts- namely imminent threats of which 'routine drug smuggling' generally does not qualify. If you do so anyway, there are many, many, many ways it can go badly, particularly if the sovereign state doesn't give you permission. Given how many things in diplomacy rest of voluntary cooperation, there are many ways for an unwanting state to make their neighbor's life difficult, even without armed resistance, and in the modern era there are also easy ways for that to go very, very costly. (See- drones.) This doesn't even touch how foreign state actors could partake and interfere- such as smuggling weapons (see- drones) to cartels for use against the Americans.
There are a number of reasons an armed intervention would be a bad idea, but let's focus on why it's not a good idea: it's not 1917, Mexico is not in a civil war, the cartels are not Pancho Villa doing cross-border raids into the US, and the Pancho Villa expedition failed anyways.
Thank you for the pushback, even though I'm not convinced.
I know you're more of an expert on armed forces and geopolitics than I am, would love to heart some scenarios.
But it feels like as far as neighborliness goes, Mexico has been hitting defect pretty insistently. It ain't no Mr. Rogers. Well actually we've always been fucking you over slowly seems like a weak argument.
This sort of behavior from a neighbor that's the junior partner seems intolerable. It would never be accepted by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, or any sane country.
It would be a pretty mask off moment for those foreign state actors. Russia/Iran/NK are sorta busy. China would rather bide its time and build up for a few more years, and it would focus on Taiwan anyways. Maybe some South American countries would consider getting involved?
I guess the real disconnect is that I think if it does escalate to combat between one or more cartels and the US, the cartels would capitulate in less than 60 days, making it a fait accompli.
Yes, I know, four day operation to Kyiv and all, but we're not threatening their nationhood or trying to grab clay. If they're at all businessmen they'll realize that we can make them bleed and lose treasure very hard very fast. If the individual cartels test each other out and have areas of control and neutral zones, does not pushing back on their expansion mean you're just rolling over?
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico. Drones costing a few hundred to thousand dollars blow them up. Rinse and repeat until the American taxpayer gets tired of seeing the celebratory videos on the internet while foreigners simultaneously mock them and highlight every American-caused casualty as an atrocity.
Assuming you are an American- please show some self-awareness when accusing who of fucking over who, particularly when you are advocating an act of war against a neighbor.
I repeat the earlier point: you are making poor geopolitical analogies.
Or rather- when Russia decided it wouldn't tolerate a sovereign neighbor doing sovereign policy things, it led to one of the biggest blunders of post-WW2 Russian strategic policy, costing over a million casualties and the loss of significant global power and standing. When China wouldn't tolerate Vietnam's behavior, it invaded the north and had such an embarrassing lack of success that Vietnam has sparked not just a detente, but budding partnership, with China's main strategic rival.
These were both terribly stupid policies by the 'senior' partner, neither of which actually got what they wanted as a result.
The other countries have been less incompetent, and so have generally let their disgruntlement with troublesome neighbors remain disgruntlements rather than casus belli.
That would indeed be a real disconnect, and one that strongly suggests a lack of attention to the experiences of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The Americans have not been able to make organized criminal groups inside the US 'capitulate' in 60 years. The US lasted about 20 years in Afghanistan, and considerably less in Mogadishu against worse-equipped criminal warlords. The idea that you would be able to totally defeat inernational cartels in 60 days by occuping a fraction of a country, in a country that you do not speak the language of, over a border zone you have never been able to seal, is not serious.
And even if you can initially disrupt, what then? Say you somehow clear them from area X in 60 day, but on day 61 you go home. What do you think happens on day 62? Or day 63? Or [however many days you stay]+1? What- besides grabbing clay and building forts to compel indefinite military threats- is your compliance plan?
And you think this achieves anything... why?
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share. Life is cheap, and the cartel's losses are not your own- instead, the cartel's loss is a chance for your own gang to take out rivals and maneuver yourself for a bigger cut of the American drug-purchasing money. As long as there are americans willing to pay tons of money to buy the drugs, then there is a lot of money to be made selling despite the risks. That other people in the business lose out isn't an issue, it's an opportunity- especially if you can use the American intervention as a way to knock out rivals / settle scores / make way for yourself.
No, it does not.
Yeah, seeing just the non-secret developments in new drone and satellite technologies makes this completely non-credible for me.
Is this about the Zetas? I don't want to relitigate shit from the 1800s about how America is a bad neighbor. Please let me know when and how the United States has fucked over Mexico to the tune of trillions of dollars of cumulative economic damage, enriching themselves in the process.
Your analogies look bad to me too. Criminal groups inside the US have a lot of legal protections. They, of course, act with impunity, and their bosses can retreat to Mexico and go neener neener, you can't hit me.
Afghanistan is 7,300 miles away, Mexico we share a border with. Afghanistan was also a while ago, we have learned lots of lessons, we have much better technology. Will this stupid comparison never die?
You also seem to think no American citizens speak Spanish and are tired of drugs and cartels fucking up their communities.
My plan is that the cartel bosses that continue to not play nice with the United States will keep dying. Sooner rather than later they will learn to order their thugs to wind down certain operations. Maybe just a few to start. @FCfromSSC puts it much eloquently below.
In exchange, maybe they can receive certain protections, and be guided to switch to economically productive governance.
These autonomous rivals living in Morelia or Gonzalez or Durango or wherever all seem to know exactly who their boss is. Let's make sure the ones near the border know that their boss' boss is American.
What does it mean, if anything, allowing you and your neighbors to be abused by some of the most objectively evil criminal enterprises in existence?
What does it mean about the sovereignty of Mexico that it's been infiltrated by and protects these psychopathic paramilitary gangs as they flood their neighbors with the most evil drugs?
And that judgement from those developments are why your friend is right to take issue with your proposal.
The most significant point of the developments in new drone and satellite technologies is that the benefits of drone and satellite technologies are no longer a near-monopoly of the American government. Commercial satellite technology gives anyone with internet access imagery on par with what the American government fought not just the first iraq war with, but the iraqi insurgency. Commercial drone technology has introduced an ongoing revolution in military affairs, as the ability to have a militarily effective airpower is no longer something only states can afford to procure. Twenty years ago, the US military's greatest fear was land-based IEDs, and that was a considerable challenge even when the only drone strike fear was of friendly fire.
The fact that Americans have significant satellite and drone technologies isn't what is decisive anymore. The fact that all parties have satellite and drone technologies are what makes it far harder. I fully expect it to take a mauling for American public opinion to catch up with that fact that the Russians aren't uniquely bad or vulnerable to drone warfare, but I would prefer they learn from the Russian example in this respect.
If you need to ask, you are demonstrating the lack of awareness- on top of the rather unsubtle dodge of that time of a conquest of a third of Mexico including one of the most economically productive regions of north america.
I question how many of the lessons of Afghanistan were learned by anyone who dismisses a conflict of nearly 20 of the last 25 years as 'a while ago' and irrelevant.
Based on your proposal so far, I am going to make a very measured guess that you have either never read the Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency before, or the source document behind it, or else you found much to disagree with them both.
You seemed to have missed FC's satire. -Edit- Correction- It seems to not have been satire. I will leave the rest of this post as is, but acknowledge my misunderstanding of his intent.
Or did you think 'massacring dozens via drone strike' followed by 'release video evidence on 4chan while claiming it was totally jihadis' was a serious proposal from FC, when delivered with language like 'sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar'?
Moreover, I return to the point that you do not have a good model of cartel bosses. I will attempt to provide a metaphor via a stick comic by Rich Burlew. [Spoilers for Order of the Stick- which is dated, but still quite good.]
In the webcomic Order of the Stick, one of our protagonists, a chaotic-good bard named Elan, learns that his recently-discovered/long-lost father, the subtly named Tarquin, no relation to that one, is actually a lawful-evil tyrant in the equally subtly named Empire of Blood, which is nominally ruled by an evil red dragon. The discovery that his father is actually evil comes after the further unsubtle act of burning a bunch of prisoners alive as part of a birthday gift.
Being the good-aligned and narratively-savvy bard he is, our protagonist attempts to rationally convince his father to stop because, per the tropes of fiction they both subscribe to, the hero always wins and the evil overlord always loses, and thus his father's doom is assured if he chooses to be the evil overlord. Clearly it would be irrational to take a doomed position that will end with his certain defeat (and death).
Tarquin makes the counter-argument that, you know, you can't just be so negative all the time, and you should be more optimistic.
In this metaphor, your plan works on the premise that if a few more of them die to righteous American paladins/airstrikes, they will be replaced by people who will change their minds, when drug cartels are filled with people who get into the business knowing it is both lucrative and likely to get them killed, and accepted that long ago.
You are not introducing a risk of death to these people- they have been killing eachother over blood-money spoils for decades, and death by americans is no different than death by other gangs / ambitious subordinates / Mexican actors / etc. You may believe you are willing to kill a lot more than 'a few,' but the number of people willing to risk death for money- particularly the sort of money that Americans are willing to give for that risk- far outweighs the American political capacity to run open-ended interventions.
Lad, you just praised the eloquence of a modest proposal to massacre people by drone strikes and post it online with implausible deniability.
Not only is this attempt at a carrot undercut by the threat, the Americans are not the most bloodthirsty/intimidating people in this scenario.
That you have a very limited awareness of the span of objective evils and criminal enterprises in existence, and are quite willing to conduct your own evils on the basis of moral relativity.
It also means that you probably have a worldview which views the evilness of the enemy as the determining factor of the wisdom of a policy to attack them. This is not an uncommon instinct, but the neocons were discredited not because their targets were not evil, but because the consequences of their advocated invasions were not only bad, but predictably so.
The neocons dismissed these warnings because they knew better / had learned the lessons of history / were going to do something about the evils and they didn't find any warnings against their moral cause to be credible.
Bad consequences are being predicted.
It means that Americans should probably stop paying so much for drugs that it funds black markets dedicated to meeting American demand.
The American drug problem is not a result of the sovereignty of Mexico, which is primarily a transit point rather than a source anyway. It is a result of market forces of supply and demand, specifically the American demand for drugs. If you remember your economics, you should also remember that prices are both a signal and an incentive for suppliers to meet that demand.
What do you think the incentive will be as a result of your incursion? Will you be making the price go up for people already willing to risk death for money, or will you be making the prince-incentive go up for people already willing to risk death for money?
He replied before I edited in the ISIS false flag part on a whim. Also, that was not satire. Posting such a video seems like an obviously good idea, since the morale effect is the entire point. Claiming responsibility does not, and sowing confusion seems like it would be effectively free with no appreciable downsides.
Come now, of course it's offering protection, and in a way the principles involved would be entirely familiar with.
It is not obvious to me why we can't or shouldn't be, or why refraining from being so is a net-positive. That is not to say that we should begin filming Funky Towns or cribbing from ancient Chinese law enforcement techniques. It is to say that we have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs, that terror and horror come in many flavors and can in fact trade off with each other, and that this is a class of people who have pretty clearly placed themselves beyond most forms of moral concern.
I made a similar claim, so I'll butt in here. I think I have a fairly robust understanding of objective evils and criminal enterprises, but stand to be corrected. As for conducting our own evils, killing pirates, bandits, or other forms of hostis humani generis does not seem to me to be evil. The juice may not be worth the squeeze, but it is in fact very good juice if you can get it.
The neocons were discredited because they attempted nation-building. If our interactions with Iraq and Afghanistan had been conducted as punitive raids rather than indefinite occupations, it seems to me that things might have gone rather differently. Note that this is not the argument sometimes floated that the indefinite occupation could have worked if we'd just been willing to be more brutal. Rather, it is the argument that if your goals are limited to the things violence can achieve, violence can in fact achieve them.
I'd be interested in the bad consequences you'd predict, but I have an inkling that they might be the same bad consequences I would predict, and that you might have some reticence in discussing them publicly. Or maybe I'm way off base.
That sounds like a very hard thing to accomplish. Suppose the goal isn't to halt the flow of drugs, or even to get there to not be Cartels any more. Suppose the goal is more modest: introduce a significant incentive against notable acts of brutality. Maybe you don't run the splatter drones all the time. Maybe you just watch and wait most of the time, and then when they "make a statement" of sufficient repugnance, you "make a statement" right back, with zero prior warning or follow-on attribution, not even wreckage to identify the mechanism, zero communication of any kind beyond the bare fact of the resulting corpses.
Ideally in this scenario, they wouldn't do either. The goal wouldn't be to kill the market, which you are correct to say would be impossible, but rather to modify the behavior of those participating in the market. Sure, they're willing to accept death for a chance at the good life; but maybe they can be persuaded that the sweet spot is actually a bit back from "public torture murder".
Underneath the theorycrafting and righteous vengeance and repartee, though, there's a more substantive concern: I don't think it's a good idea to foster the creation of a society where corruption and brutality are accepted facts of life. When I look at history, there's a pattern I think I see, where things go bad, evil is ascendent, and all the good people either die, leave, or are corrupted themselves. The results of this pattern appear to me to be very bad in the long term, and I worry quite a bit that this is what we have done to Mexico.
I acknowledge my mistake of your intent, and will simply adjust by noting I consider this a terrible idea. Providing global audiences, including competitors, skeptics, and wavering audiences, documentary evidence of American war crimes is quite appreciable downsides for American efforts globally, particularly when trying to hide behind false-flag islamic terrorism in a region that notably has a lack of it (because the cartels have a history of not tolerating it).
And yet, it fails the basic protection racket credibility requirements that American counter-insurgency/counter-crime efforts abroad have run into for decades: everyone knows that the Americans will leave, and when they do the people they pushed back will return. A protection racket fundamentally does not work if the protectors are assured to leave.
Hence why it is critical that any intervention be with the consent / support of the local government, and not in contemptuous indifference to their position, as the OP took.
And this is without the issue of the intervention being framed on principles that the intervention is supposed to mitigate, not perpetuate. The propaganda of 'American gangsters are moving in' practically writes itself.
You do not have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs.
Even if you just want to compare raw revenue (DoD funding vs. illegal american drug purchase estimates), you are not even looking at two orders of magnitude (2024 estimates being something on the measure of a 840 billion DoD budget versus a US illegal drug market in the 10s of billions- i.e. 1 order of magnitude). If you want to subdivide collective cartel costs between competing factions and dynamics, you also need to provide the same sort of proportional consideration to the US resourcing effort- i.e. what the actual cost-scale for an intervention is supposed to be.
For a basis of comparison- the US costs in Japan and Korea from 2016 to 2019 were less than 40 billion USD, or 40,000,000, 000. For the cartels to have resources a dozen orders of magnitude less than the resources the US uses over multiple years as part of treaty commitments, the Cartels would need to spend less than $1.
Somehow I doubt that represents Cartel spending... or that the new, supposedly intervention-shy administration will spend magnitudes more money on a (supposedly short!) Mexican intervention than years of overseas security spending.
Am I beating up on this obvious turn of phase? Yes. But I am doing this to pivot to the point that you don't need same-order-of-magnitude resourcing to make something terribly costly, which is part of the ongoing technology revolution of military affairs.
Drones themselves are an asymmetric cost-benefit weapon: you can buy 55,000 $2k drones for the cost of one $110 million F-35. It doesn't matter if you can't buy 1 F-35 or 55,000 drones- it matters if you can buy one drone that can destroy a $110 million asset, and then repeat as needed.
Which is absolutely in reach of targets whose signature ability is "having supply chains to move good worth billions of dollars to and through the United States."
There is a reason that one of the main counter-drone defenses on the Ukraine frontlines is 'don't be worth the cost of expending the munition' rather than 'shoot down the drone.' The US relationship with cartels isn't just 'the US could apply far more violence'- it is also that the Cartels could apply far more violence. It's not worth it to them to pick a fight unnecessarily, but if the US is the one to instigate a fight...
Trying to tear down a cartel in a specific operating zone is increasing, not decreasing, criminal incentives for 'public torture murder.'
Cartel violence in Mexico is often highest where there is not a dominant cartel. The violence is generally about the Cartels competing with each other, not with the state or the public. A spike of cartel violence is typically a result of a push into another gang's territory. Where a cartel is dominant, particularly the Sinaloa cartel, such public violence is neither necessary or sought.
This would be particularly exploitable since the best way to tear down a dominant cartel is... to tell the American intervention force that's bombing cartels where your cartel rivals are. Thus the Americans will do the hard work for you, reducing power disparities and opening the way for public torture murder.
And your view on the historical patterns of when the 'Don't just stand there- do something!' instinct in the face of bad things is mixed with policy proposals to attack outsiders because internal reforms are dismissed as 'too hard'?
Setting aside that corruption and brutality are facts of life, and that this proposed intervention would involve plenty of both, the alternative to Pancho Villa Buggaloo is not 'do nothing and be apathetic.' There are alternative forms of action, and if you identify a lack of virtue in the context then you have identified an alternative method to work on. Just because they are hard / incremental / unlikely to succeed in the short term does not mean they do not work over time. No society starts 'virtuous'- rather, cultivation of virtue is something cultivated over generations, over countless setbacks, often with the help of others and over the hinderance of others.
And this is without the ethnocentricism of framing the issue as what 'we' have done to Mexico. The Americans have plenty of things to be responsible for, none more than the drug trade demand, but you do not have a monopoly on moral responsibility for other people's evils. Mexicans are as much individuals with their own moral agency as Americans, even if they have members who do things you'd really rather they not.
In the released video, maybe add a short video snippet of the victims of their crimes. Or don't release anything, maybe legends will spread of the ghosts of cartel victims taking out entire bases.
Any news stories about American gangs invading would die down quick enough. Obviously the stories of Mexican gangsters moving into the United States don't upset them too much.
But yes, if the Mexico-US border is such that there need to be gangsters running it, then those gangsters should understand that there are certain limits to what behavior can be tolerated. If that is unacceptable, they decide to go to mat for fentanyl and reorganize to insurgent activity and accept Chinese military support and we lose, then it's better to get this metaphorical American Century of Humiliation started already than keep pretending.
Yes, this would be ideal. Will it happen? Maybe the government declares an emergency following a newly surfaced/resurfaced video of cartel violence and forms an agency nominally under the president's control, that would be kinda cool. Maybe some respected or shadowy Mexican agency or the army just takes credit? Just spitballing here
I think the mistake was quantitative rather than qualitative. The overmatch is still brutal. Would spending $20 bln on an anticartel op or two not be a drop in the bucket? Let's see how far that can get us towards stamping out fentanyl moving in from Mexico. Maybe it's worth the investment. How much is continuing to push fentanyl on America worth it to the cartels? How much is stopping it worth it to us?
Yes, the US needs to work on itself too. Still, it's a low hanging fruit to insist that your neighbors stop breaking into your house to sell fentanyl. It's too profitable to stop? Let's make it unprofitable. No sorry tell your addicted sister to fix herself doesn't warm my heart.
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This is a bit much. Yes, I agree that cheap drones have really changed a lot of things. Everything about ground maneuver, mounted and dismounted, has changed due to the threat. Helicopters are probably already nearly obsolete in significantly-contested areas. But cheap drones are not yet even close to being capable of taking out F-35s.
This is all aside from whether F-35s can really deliver much value to the conceived type of fight against the cartels; I'll mostly stay out of that one; it's a very narrow statement about the ability of one specific type of asset to directly impact one other specific type of asset.
They absolutely are... when they are on the ground, as they are most of the time. Hence why the WSJ report on how the mystery drones last year forced the US Airforce to relocate the F-22 squadron from Langley Airbase during the first big mystery drone swarm event.
Drones are not only a credible threat to military equipment when the military equipment is in motion, but also- especially- when it is NOT in motion, or only in slow motion. Drones dropping payloads is one of the easiest modifications to make to a commercial off the shelf drone, and it doesn't take much to functionally ruin things far sturdier than aircraft.
This is why last year's 'drones are flying over airbases' was notable. A drone that can fly over an airbase without permission is a drone that can fly over (or into) an aircraft on the runway without permission, and thus destroy an aircraft without permission.
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You send stealthy long-loiter-time surveillance drones over mexico. You use them to ID organized Cartel activity, cross-referencing electronic intel from the NSA. When you locate a concentration of Cartel activity, a stealthy plane drops a container from 35,000 feet, which pops open at 30,000 feet and spills out a hundred small anti-personnel drones. These drones fly down to the target area and messily unalive selected targets in the strike zone, recording high-quality video of exactly who they splatter in the process. No hellfires, no demolished buildings; half-pound directional frag charges, with close range and wide-angle video record of exactly who was hit and what they were doing.
You might not even need the planes; I bet we could rig a tomahawk or a reasonably stealthy cargo drone to deliver the payload. Make a supercut compilation of the footage, slap on an ISIS flag gif at the front and back, dub in a banging nasheed medley and sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar's at appropriate moments, then upload the videos to 4chan and shrug and Who, me? when anyone asks. That's how I'd aim to do it, were I God-Emperor.
This is the actual problem, but the Cartels are sufficiently odious that cutting the grass, in the Israeli parlance, holds considerable appeal. Realistically, the goal would not be to eliminate all narcotics cartels forever, but to add selective pressure against their worst excesses. Make it clear that when they, for example, haul a bunch of people off a bus and make them fight to the death with sledgehammers, they and their bosses stand a significant chance experiencing rapid unscheduled disassembly as a direct consequence.
Maybe it's still not worth the effort. I am a fairly committed non-interventionist, and there is certainly a strong non-interventionist argument to be made here. But these are in fact some of the most vile people on earth, the harm they cause is considerable, and they're right fucking there. Maybe we really do have to just put up with them indefinitely as they rape and murder and torture and poison and corrupt both our biggest neighbor and our own citizens. But then why the fuck does this argument not apply to China or Russia?
Who says it doesn't?
The Russians and the Chinese both put up with great deals of neighborly behavior they find unneighborly. The Chinese have what they consider an entire secessionist province with substantial foreign smuggling and arms trafficking as a neighbor, and the argument that no, they should not conquer said island is the basis of the most plausible global power war since the cold war. And the Russians have an entire military alliance dedicated to the argument that they should not get to do what they want to the people who dislike them who are right fucking there, and the last time the Russians decided to 'do something' about 'the most vile people' on earth (Nazis!), they are still in fighting that war to great personal detriment as many of their neighbors make the argument that, yes, this argument against intervention does apply to them.
The Taiwanese are either scared shitless and hoping for more status quo or resigned to an eventual Chinese takeover, maybe with a newer, shinier pinky promise about one country two systems. Taiwan would never dare to provoke the mainland by allowing any serious smuggling or arms trafficking. But I wonder, when they look at America, do they see a strong horse or a weak one?
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You've misunderstood me. I'm willing to at least contemplate the idea that there isn't really anything to be done about the cartels, that the present situation is roughly as good as we can expect and that we should just suck it up. What confuses me is when I'm then told that it's very important that we prosecute a proxy war with Russia on the other side of the world, and that we need to gear up for a Great Power confrontation with China. All the arguments for restraint and toleration of the Cartels likewise appear to me to apply even more so to China and Russia, who have nukes, actual armies, and significant nation-state resources backing them.
I'm not sure you're wrong, but I would really like to see your math.
What math are you confused on?
You are not fighting a direct war with Russia or China, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly. This proposal is a proposal to instigate a direct conflict with cartels, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly.
This is a cost / math consistency: do not instigate a direct conflict against those who can inflict consider costs and losses if engaged directly.
There are certainly other arguments that can be made on how to react to someone else's instigation of a conflict, but many of these are voided if made by the same people proposing direct conflict instigation (and are generally not my position regardless).
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I remember seeing a video of those military drone swarms in action a few years ago. Wish I could find it again
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Cartels in part benefit from overall size since the Mexican government has to generally play ball. If you could reduce the cartels 95% in 60 days then the Mexican government might actually be interested in not sharing power.
If.
Sure be laconic. But your whole post is also an if.
I’m not advocating going to war with the cartels but going after the cartels is obviously different from going after Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan.
Yes. The cartels are in many respects far more dangerous, with considerably greater asset potential than the Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan had access to before the US was negotiating its way out, and considerably greater ability to put those assets to use against American national interests, including within the United States itself.
The moment the cartels hit united states politicians or citizens will be an inflection point, for sure. It won't end well for them
When was the last time a terror attack or some other disaster truly unite Americans?
I honestly find it hard to remember...
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It won't end well for anyone, and ending well for the Americans is what is required for it to be a good idea for the Americans.
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