Trump's new plan to attack cartels with military force

CHICAGO (WLS) -- The U.S. is at war with Iran. There are new warnings from the FBI on possible Iranian retaliatory attacks to the U.S. homeland.

Now, President Donald Trump is calling for the use of more lethal military force, this time on transnational drug cartels. But as cartel experts tell the I-Team, if the president is unable to leverage "coercive diplomacy," history shows there could be much more bloodshed ahead.

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He calls it the Shield of the Americas.

"The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all," Trump said.

It is a military coalition led by the U.S. with more than a dozen Latin American countries to combat drug cartels in the western hemisphere.

University of Chicago political science professor and author Benjamin Lessing has spent years studying the cartel wars and quantifying the outcomes of military intervention against cartels.

"My sort of limited optimism around this flows from the fact that we need to move from a brute force approach to fighting the drug war to a more coercive approach that is, at present, sort of politically toxic and possibly unthinkable. But Trump is a specialist in making the politically unthinkable thinkable, and he's also a specialist in the coercive use of force," Lessing said.

Notably absent from the coalition is Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has consistently rejected any U.S. military intervention in her country despite ongoing threats from Trump.

"The Mexican cartels are fueling and orchestrating much of the bloodshed and chaos in this hemisphere, and the United States government will do whatever is necessary to defend our national security," Trump said.

Lessing said he hopes this coalition will refrain from taking on all cartels with brute military force and a lack of strategy that could have disastrous consequences, telling the I-Team brute force "essentially creates a world where the way to succeed in the drug business is to accumulate military force, and so over the long run you get a drug trade that's more militarized, more violent, more brazen."

In the early 2000s, when Mexico mounted a concerted military attack on cartels, they fought back, splintered and only the most brutal, violent, and well-armed survived, spawning what he calls the most powerful current cartel: CJNG, Lessing told the I-Team. It was led, until his recent death, by "El Mencho," who was killed by Mexican special forces.

What Lessing suggests is the more prudent course: coercive diplomacy and focused deterrence.

"The coercive strategy that most immediately strikes me as one that would appeal to Trump, would benefit the American people, and could potentially work, is one that deliberately punishes cartels for trafficking fentanyl and but does not apply that additional punishment when they're only trafficking marijuana and cocaine," he said.

He said that would give cartels a binary choice: Play by new rules and police themselves or face obliteration.

"That will intend to push them towards a more peaceful and less violent and less damaging approach," he said.

Lessing tells the I-Team having the U.S. as a central decision maker on how and when to take action against cartels may be beneficial to some of the smaller countries who have signed on to this coalition that have less of a military apparatus to apply pressure on bad actors.