DON GONYEA, HOST:
When it comes to fighting opioids, designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations does a lot more harm than good. That's according to Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution. She directs the think tanks program on the fentanyl epidemic in North America and is an expert on international organized crime. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, she argues that terrorism designations and tariffs, both central to President Trump's plan to slow the flow of opioids, would be disastrous. But she also says that threatening the use of such methods could be useful. Vanda Felbab-Brown joins me now. Welcome.
VANDA FELBAB-BROWN: Thank you, Don. It's a pleasure to be with you on the show.
GONYEA: You write about the two tools the Trump administration is using to deal with illicit opioids coming into the U.S., tariffs and designating cartels as these foreign terrorist organizations. Briefly, can you explain your No. 1 concern with each approach? Let's start with the tariffs.
FELBAB-BROWN: Absolutely. So the Trump administration really moved U.S. drug policy into absolutely new domains when it linked it to tariffs and applied very vast tariffs to U.S. neighbors and core U.S. ally Canada, as well as to Mexico and to China. And the risk, of course, is that the tariffs will have a negative economic consequences for each of the country, including the United States themselves. At the same time, if the tariffs are not removed, if there is compliance with the counternarcotics demands that the Trump administration has issued, they become meaningless. They just hurt the economy.
GONYEA: And then let's look at the other piece of that, the use of the foreign terrorist organization designation. What's your concern there?
FELBAB-BROWN: Well, the problem with FTO - the FTO designation is that it really does not provide many expansive law enforcement tools that are not there in the first place, but it comes with very expansive, extensive and vague material support clauses. Those are material support clauses that state by U.S. laws that any kind of material support, as little as a cup of water can be prosecuted under U.S. laws. And there are some exceptions to U.S., but they don't always hold up in U.S. courts and, for that matter, in international courts.
GONYEA: Just to underscore that point regarding the terrorist organization designation, it sounds like you're saying, too, it would be bad because cartels are often actually involved with a wide array of legal businesses. What's the issue there?
FELBAB-BROWN: Absolutely. So these days, drug trafficking organizations do not solely traffic in drugs or, for that matter, are not solely engaged in illegal activities. Certainly in Mexico, they have reached unprecedented level of power. And extortion of legal economic activities is a common day occurrence by just about all of the criminal actors in Mexico. And worse than that, the Mexican cartels are even directly trying to take over parts of legal economies. This is true in agriculture, in fisheries, in mining, all kinds of extractives - in trucking. They not just extort the companies. They, in fact, owe parts of the enterprises. Now, this is very bad. It's bad for Mexico, and it's certainly bad for the United States, and making a concerted effort to roll back their activity from legal economies is crucial.
GONYEA: To put it in the simplest terms possible, an above-the-board, let's say, an American company may be doing business with a business they think is legal but has some ties to the cartel somewhere, and that would put that initial company, that American company, at risk.
FELBAB-BROWN: Absolutely. So the material support clauses require knowingly providing material support. But U.S. actors, whether individuals or companies, are required to do due diligence. And so there is only so much leeway that they can argue that they did not know that their counterpart with whom they dealt in Mexico was paying, for example, extortion fees or had parts of the business infiltrated by the cartels.
GONYEA: Traditionally, diplomacy and law enforcement cooperation have been the norm in dealing with this issue. Certainly, there are people who say, why not try this different approach? How do you respond to that kind of a statement?
FELBAB-BROWN: Well, the difficulty of trying something that is so disruptive to relations is that it is difficult to unwind. So you can apply tariffs, and you can eventually back away from them because the other country applies countertariffs. And this is indeed a situation where we are with China. President Trump also issued a 10% fentanyl-linked tariff on China. China did not budge, did not offer more extensive law enforcement assistance so far. Instead, it applied countertariffs at 15%. And so eventually we will likely see bargaining between the two countries that might well result in the suspension and weakening of the counternarcotics cooperation that did take place in 2024 after a long, several-year pause. And we will be sort of back at at the starting point, at line zero, in restarting cooperation, and we have wasted time.
GONYEA: That was Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution. You can read her piece, "The New War On Drugs," in Foreign Affairs. Thank you so much for joining us.
FELBAB-BROWN: Thank you for having me.
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