For most of the last century, American foreign policy has been dominated by concerns far from our shores: the Axis powers, the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and, more recently, China. But the second Trump White House will have to contend with looming national security problems that are much closer to home. For the first time in decades, U.S.-Mexico relations seem likely to take a front seat — and for good reason.
A longtime friend, Mexico also presents a growing array of security and economic challenges to the United States. The Trump administration seems to have a keen appreciation of this fact.
Indeed, one feature of the initial slate of announced national security appointees is their focus on Latin America. As Ryan Berg, the director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, observed: “The new State Department will be full of high-level Latin Americanists.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former Florida senator, has years of policy experience with the region. Chris Landau, the nominee for deputy secretary of state, earned plaudits for his service as ambassador to Mexico. As Berg pointed out on X, it is “unprecedented” for the top two officials at the State Department to be Latin American experts. One would have to go back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, a noted writer on the region, to find the last time that Latin Americanists held comparable sway.
Several other top nominees have spent their entire careers accumulating practical experience on the border. The new border czar, Tom Homan, spent decades as a U.S. Border Patrol officer, working the line in some of the toughest areas imaginable. It would be hard to overstate the difference, both in experience and outlook, between Homan and the border czar he replaced, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
These appointments indicate that the new administration will be looking south.
“The United States can no longer afford to engage in strategic neglect of its own shared neighborhood,” Berg warned in a recent CSIS report. He’s right. As the Washington Examiner observed in June 2023, U.S. influence has dramatically deteriorated in the southern hemisphere — the result of both neglect and complacency. During the Cold War, Washington understood the importance of protecting our interests in the region. But the last few decades have seen American influence atrophy.
One of the gravest challenges is right on our doorstep.
The U.S.-Mexico relationship has been in a state of undeclared crisis. Indeed, the Trump administration will confront a host of problems that have steadily accumulated in recent years. The challenges are vast and range from the economic to threats to the homeland.
The porous border is arguably the greatest immediate security challenge facing the U.S. Indeed, two decades after 9/11, the failure to secure the border has made us vulnerable to sabotage and terrorist attacks.
There has been a dramatic increase in illegal immigrants coming across the border — and that increase includes people from oceans away. In 2023, for the first time ever, a majority of illegal immigrants originated from beyond Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. This increase includes those from other nations in the hemisphere, including Cuba, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, among others, but it also includes those from African nations, China, India, and huge swaths of the Middle East. Suffice it to say: These are not easy, or cheap, trips to make.
The increase has imposed tremendous costs on American communities, both at the border and beyond. Taxpayers have been footing the bill for their government’s failure to ensure American sovereignty. But there’s an important security component as well. In addition to migrant gangs and increased activity from drug cartels, the open border is a gift to our enemies, from Beijing to Tehran and beyond.
In a May 11, 2024, hearing, then-Rep. Dan Bishop, who was the chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, pointed out that “illegal encounters of Chinese nationals at our southwest border are 20 times higher” under the Biden administration than the first Trump and Obama administrations. The “dramatic increase,” Bishop observed, “calls for intense scrutiny — especially as Border Patrol agents have been instructed to decrease vetting in order to process them into the country faster.” He added, “A wide-open border presents a ripe opportunity for the [Chinese Communist Party] to undermine our national security.”
The Defense Department has declared China to be the sole “pacing challenge.” Beijing is our most capable adversary. A surge in Chinese nationals, many of them military-age males, coming across the border should deeply concern the public.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had sabotage teams placed in the U.S. Documents smuggled by Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to the West with his files in 1992, revealed that the Soviet spy agency had planned acts of sabotage and disruption on American soil if the two superpowers went to war. Military bases, missile sites, radar installations, and oil pipelines were among the prospective targets. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, KGB operatives ran hotels and gas stations, among other ventures, near the U.S.-Mexico border. They also had weapons caches stashed throughout the country.
There is little reason to think that the Chinese Communist Party would operate any differently. Indeed, the operating assumption should be that it would imitate its KGB forefathers, many of whom went undiscovered for decades. Chinese industrial espionage and influence operations have attracted welcome, if belated, attention from the U.S. and its allies. But the risk of sabotage has largely been ignored. In recent years, Chinese nationals, some of them on student and worker visas, have even been caught filming military and defense-related installations. As the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan recently observed, “American air defenses are full of holes for Chinese drones to exploit.”
For example, in December 2024, the Justice Department accused Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese citizen and U.S. resident, of flying a drone and taking pictures of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Zhou was arrested at San Francisco International Airport, where he was boarding a flight to China. It’s worth underscoring that this was a person whose presence in the U.S. was known. One shudders to think of those who are truly off the grid and unknown to authorities.
A recent incident highlights the possible danger. On Jan. 4, 2025, a self-identified member of Russia’s Wagner Group, a transnational criminal organization of mercenaries that does the Kremlin’s bidding, was detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas. Timur Praliev had multiple passports, cash, and a drone on him.
The public is right to worry about the possibility of hostile foreign nationals coming across our border to commit espionage or sabotage. Washington can ill afford to leave the door open to our enemies.
Nor is Beijing the only concern. Terrorist groups and transnational criminal enterprises have taken advantage of the situation as well. Members of the violent Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, among others, have steadily expanded their presence in America. And in May 2024, an illegal border crosser, a Jordanian national, attempted to access the Quantico military base in Virginia. Through July of fiscal 2024, 422 people on the federal terrorist screening dataset were encountered trying to enter America’s borders. A Homeland Threat Assessment published in October 2024 warned that “over the next year, we expect some individuals with terrorism ties and some criminal actors will continue their efforts to exploit migration flows and the complex border security environment to enter the United States.” Accordingly, the Department of Homeland Security said the threat environment would “remain high.”
These are very real security concerns. They are not imagined or exaggerated, as some critics allege. And they are a direct result of a porous border. Polls clearly show that a majority of Americans want a secure border with Mexico, and they are right to expect as much. After all, border security is one of the most elemental responsibilities of government.
There are other significant problems in the U.S.-Mexico relationship as well.
Fentanyl has wreaked havoc on communities, killing thousands of our countrymen. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, more than 1,500 Americans die every week from some type of opioid. CFR observed that the majority of “illegal fentanyl supplies being produced in China and Mexico [are] being smuggled into the United States.” In 2021, the overall death toll was 80,411 — more than 10 times the number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, CFR noted. According to one study from the Mayo Clinic and Yale University, fentanyl deaths nearly tripled between 2016 and 2021.
The U.S.-Mexico border remains the primary entry point for the synthetic drug. The rise of fentanyl has changed the landscape of Mexico’s powerful drug cartels and, with it, Mexico itself. While a growing number of Americans have died, the power of the cartels has grown, leading to greater political corruption and assassinations.
Mexico itself is in a crisis. For example, from September 2023 to May 2024, no fewer than 34 candidates or aspiring candidates for office were assassinated. The country’s institutions are under attack. And those who seek to shine a light on the problem do so at their own risk. A growing number of journalists have also been murdered. Indeed, in 2023, for the sixth year in a row, more than 30,000 people were murdered in Mexico, “marking the most violent period in the country’s recent history,” reporter Diego Mendoza observed. By some estimates, cartels are now Mexico’s fifth-largest employer.
This explosion of murder and assassination is unfolding on our very doorstep. And far too many officials in Mexico seem unable, or unwilling, to stop it. Simply put, it is not sustainable and is a security challenge of its own.
There are other growing points of tension with Mexico. The trade imbalance with Mexico has grown even more lopsided. This, too, must be addressed, and there is every sign that the Trump administration intends to do just that.
Trump has warned that he will employ America’s substantial economic leverage against Mexico should the country fail to work to address these problems. In response, the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, threatened that for every tariff that is passed, “there will be a response in kind.” The relationship between the two nations is likely to become even more intemperate.
Yet, this is par for the course. From its inception, the U.S.-Mexico relationship has been characterized by periods of tension. And some consistent themes can be discerned.
Mexico achieved independence from Spain a mere four decades after the U.S. defeated the British empire at Yorktown. Both nations sought to be free from colonial rule. After a long and bloody fight, both had broken free from faraway empires. Mexico even adopted some of the language in its Declaration of Independence from its American predecessor.
Yet Mexico’s early years were riven with instability. The country had numerous military coups and more than 50 governments in its first three decades. One ruler, the famed Gen. Santa Anna, presided over no fewer than 11 of these governments — and at times, he would leave his duties to go to his large estate, gamble, and neglect the duties of his office.
There are a variety of reasons that can explain why Mexico’s foundational years were far more chaotic than its neighbor to the north. Geography, the legacy of Spanish rule, the lack of internal development, and foreign interference are just some of the many factors that contributed to Mexico’s troubled early decades. But one thing is clear: Lawlessness and chaos plagued the country from the start. And this proved to be a problem for both nations.
The U.S., among others, took advantage of the disorder, eventually leading to a war between the two. While largely forgotten by many Americans, the memories of that conflict are long and understandably bitter in Mexico. The U.S. won that war and became a continental power. But foreign interference in Mexico’s affairs didn’t stop.
France, perhaps the preeminent military power of the day, took advantage of the disarray. Under Napoleon III, the French collaborated with Mexico’s conservatives, installing Archduke Maximilian of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the throne. At the time, the U.S. was fighting its own civil war, giving Napoleon III an opportunity to recreate the empire of his uncle. The presence of French troops on Mexico’s soil was a violation of the decades-old Monroe Doctrine, and President Abraham Lincoln was urged to intervene.
Some American politicians argued that both North and South should call a truce and invade Mexico, arguing that national unity could be regained by expelling the European power from our border. Lincoln resisted these fantasies, but even after his death, Union Gens. Grant and Sherman initially believed they would be heading further south once they had defeated the Confederacy. Meanwhile, the liberal forces of Mexican leader Benito Juarez were victorious. Maximilian was executed by firing squad in 1867.
In the latter half of the 19th century, Mexican ruler Porfirio Diaz brought both stability and improved relations with the U.S. Diaz may have famously said, “Poor Mexico, so close to the United States, and so far from God,” but he was largely successful in his efforts to attract foreign investment. Yet Diaz’s failure to step aside after more than three decades in office led to another revolution and civil war in Mexico. After decades of comparative peace and goodwill, Mexico would again descend into more than a decade of internal strife, with consequences spilling across the border.
The U.S. would once again send troops into Mexico, first with President Woodrow Wilson’s foolish decision to deploy U.S. Marines to the port city of Veracruz and later with the so-called punitive expedition to capture outlaw and revolutionary Pancho Villa. Both military interventions failed to achieve their objectives. And yet again, the meddling of a growing foreign power would spark concern in Washington.
In what has to rank as one of the greatest diplomatic blunders of all time, German Ambassador Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret telegram to Germany’s ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, proposing that Mexico attack the U.S. in exchange for land lost during the U.S.-Mexico War. The British intercepted the telegram, eventually passing it on to the U.S., stirring outrage against Germany that contributed to America belatedly entering World War I.
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Even after the end of the Mexican Revolution, chaos in the country continued to draw in the U.S. In the late 1920s, for example, anticlerical sentiment by the revolutionary government led to the targeting of Catholic priests and property, prompting a successful U.S. effort to broker peace. Mexico also proved to be an important, if underrecognized, front for the intelligence contest between the Soviet Union and the U.S.
The U.S. and Mexico are bound by close cultural, familial, and economic ties. Born within decades of each other, the two nations have many shared goals and objectives. The great Mexican novelist Octavio Paz once observed that “a society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: Its memories are no less revealing than its aims.” The history of the U.S.-Mexican relationship tells us that present tensions are not unusual and that current problems are not insurmountable. The status quo, however, is not sustainable.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
