The Shield of the Americas || Mar. 11, 2026
Trump has launched a new regional security initiative called the Shield of the Americas. This partners with several Latin American leaders that Trump likes to target drug cartels throughout LATAM.
The U.S. would utilize special forces and intelligence teams to carry this out. While they could target cartel leaders, labs, and trafficking nodes, as long as there is demand in the North, the drug trade will persist.
Eliminating the industry would require massive troop commitments, resulting in significant political consequences. And even then, the drugs would find a way to keep flowing.
Comments (46)
So, how many these Latin American governments/politicians have been quietly propped up by cartels and see the USA military as a means to eradicate their competing cartels?
Why are the first 8 seconds of this video at a noticeably slower speech rate? Is the speech rate on all these videos sped up a little? Is Peter Zeihan not quite as fast a talker as I thought? :-)
Legalize and control cocaine just like marijuana but with rules and laws that are more appropriate for such items. I mean in early 2000s when I was in high school there were 10s of students selling marijuana in school, now after it’s legalized, there are no Marijuana dealers, and also once you legalize something it will become less wanted, “what is forbidden is desired”, it’s just humans love to do illegal things, it has its own feel-thug feel-cool BS, it has its own adrenaline rush. we already have Adderral and other amphetamine-based cocaine like pills that produce similar effects. Legalize it and make money on it, I haven’t gone to any city where marijuana is legal and anyone still is trying to sell it on the street. Huge percentage oof cocaine sold on the street is not even cocaine low concentration of it maybe, they add B12, laxatives and licodaine and other more dangerous stuff than cocaine itself. That’s how you kill dealers, legalize it, do we have Tobacco and alcohol dealers? and why not
How much of “going after the cartels“… Is trying to stop drug trade -vs- Trump and his billionaires are just trying to make sure that the cartels give them a cut???
We're going to need a lot more SPs... because none of our other enemies are going away!
Quechua? Yeah that one. I love Mundaine. I feel like it has global potential. Mundaine Para El Mundo! Fudge! I forgot. I’m not the marketing guy.
The usual ass-backwards strategy. Peter is right; go after the demand. As long as there is demand, there will always, always, always be supply.
The same is true of alcoholics or people giving themselves emphysema with cigarettes. You cannot legislate dead-weight out of existence. By trying to do so you bring on something far worse: black markets and the violence that comes with them.
Shield of the Americas is basically Monroe Doctrine 2.0 being sold as a war on drug cartels but it's more like "No Chinese influence/investments allowed" in the western hemisphere.
Thanks Peter and team.
Suggesting that the key to cutting demand in the US for drugs is best solved by a Just Say, No strategy is naive. If you do think this is the right way to go please explain how that could happen in a country of three hundred and thirty million people.
It can be done but it takes a lot more than a cheesy ad campaign. Cultural shifts have been effected before.
we can do drug test, all people have to do drugtest everday! 20% would go to Jail, thats 68 miljon people! but alcohol , also a drug, is legal! "they" say that legalizing marjiuana is the best way to get a balance; we can in a few years start to evaluate the states and canada, Portugal and Germany that have legalized Marijuana; did the criminality get smaller, the overdoses?
We're not going to establish bases in "friendly" countries to weed out their own drugs...we're going to use them to stage attacks on "unfriendly" countries. In regards to Mexico, I can imagine we operate a dmz of sorts 20mi inside Mexico's border, serving a dual purpose of allowing forces to hit targets at will when necessary and block illegal migration simultaneously. As far as pz's analogy of Afghanistan and the heroin trade exploding when we occupied it, that's because CIA was managing it purposefully, because we were trafficking it into Russia, essentially doing the same thing that China was dealing with providing cheap fentanyl precursors for the US.
Bayer, Novartis, Lilly.
i wonder if ISIS, Al-Qaida, Boko Haram and the Houthis also believe that the War on Terror is over.
Check their twitter and then let us know
Drugs have won the war on drugs, this is beyond evident at this point. You want to actually destroy the cartels, legalize and regulate.
Okay... eventually. But first, target practice
Stop trying to save people from themselves. Legalize drugs. Legalize self-harm. Legalize suicide. It's not the government's job to force people to live when they don't want to. The government's job is to protect us from each other, not ourselves. You could claim that drugs make people more dangerous, but that danger is dwarfed by the danger of living with cartels...and cartels will only go away when we legalize.
Druggies become dead-weights on society. It affects everyone.
So many opportunities to improve: Legalize drugs - Increases tax revenue, reduces crime, reduces quality issues, shifts power dynamic Abolish Income Tax - Consumption tax is easier to enforce at a much lower cost, it is easy to understand and aligns tax revenue with use, loopholes vanish, lobbying becomes more difficult. Tax code is a net drag on productivity and an inefficient use of human capital. Expand healthcare savings - Remove the limitations and rules around health savings, get rid of health insurance in general (where else do you insert a hostile entity to broker services and payments?), make services costs transparent (we shouldn't have 75 different pricing sheets for the same service), stop malpractice insurance (tort reform in general). Eliminate campaign contributions - SuperPACs and campaign financing in general is horribly corrupt and produces crappy outcomes for us all. For and by large special interests is our reality today. IQ not ID verification for voters - Not realistic but it sure would be nice if everyone could vote easily and be required to validate that they pay taxes and have some basic understanding of the issues at hand. Make immigration easy - Everyone gets vetted, a traceable phone, and a tax ID. If you break the law or are stopped and you don't have your issued phone and tax ID you are booted. Stop entitlement programs - Only ppl that cannot work should not work all others should be required to work for their benefits. The benefits should be just enough to get by and they should not include any sweets. Expand education - With the amount of information available today this should be easy and we should be able to validate competency at a fraction of the cost. Primary schools are more about baby sitting and cultural adoption/imprinting than anything else. We can do much better at a lower cost...
A flat consumption tax is just easier to manage and we need to weigh the cost of managing the tax with benefit. No more carve outs and funny money games pls.
I can’t believe everyone is missing out on the perfect solution to this problem of drugs in the USA. Just MAGA by building the border wall twice as tall and have it patrolled by the mighty American beagles. (America First of course). Problem solved. Now does anyone know how to remove beagle slobber?
Drug trade will fade as we get older. And the next will be a better synthetic that is far cheaper. Cartel problems are also going to go away as we shut down the human smuggling trade. Then the governance problem will have to be solved by those who live there. And those cartels are going to shrink fast.
There is no stopping the genius of humans to mess with our biology. Fenty isn't even new. The choice is to hack your biome in creative and helpful ways or seek chemical enlightenment. Alcohol burned through the gene pool with gin mills and a world awash in distilled spirits. We are the descendants of the survivors, and now with a wide world of chemicals and biohacks, the next generations will also be from those who were successful. Those who fail are buried along the way.
Wanna stop them? Legalize it and let big Pharma step in. Tax it and take away the competition. Its really that easy. The only question is at what cost?
I’ve done some reading on it and one of the biggest drivers of narcotic use in the United States is the fact that we do not have universal healthcare. Basically we will have a drug problem until we fix our healthcare system probably with like a French style system where it’s free at the point of service. Unfortunately, it looks like the Trump administration is aiming to reduce the amount of healthcare the average American can get so we should expect narcotic used to go up.
LOL! So who will be in charge of illegal drugs now. We’re not fools.
How did China fix its drug problem from the 18th century, how does Singapore fix it today? There is a clear and simple solution, we just need to have the will to act.
Agreed. But this is way more than Trump, left or right. Do we have the collective will to fix our collective problems. This is one of many of our “Tragedy of the Commons.”
Yep, until Americans quit snorting drugs there will always be cartels
Prohibition failed with Alcohol a century ago, and we keep expecting it to magically work for other drugs today. As long as there is strong demand, prohibition mostly changes who supplies the product — from regulated businesses to violent criminal networks. It rarely eliminates the market. The U.S. prohibition experiment showed this clearly. Consumption initially dropped, but black markets exploded, organized crime grew powerful, and the state lost tax revenue and control over quality. Eventually prohibition was repealed because regulating the market was more effective than pretending it didn’t exist. Today the same economic logic applies to drugs like Cocaine, THC, or Opioids. If millions of people want something, supply will emerge somewhere. Prohibition just ensures that supply is controlled by cartels instead of regulated institutions. That doesn’t mean drugs are harmless. It means prohibition mainly determines who profits and how dangerous the supply chain becomes. Regulation, taxation, quality control, and harm-reduction policies at least give governments tools to manage the risks — something prohibition largely forfeits. Latin America will not become peaceful as long as the United States insists on prohibition while the demand remains enormous. As long as the market exists but remains illegal, the profits will continue to finance cartels, corruption, and violence instead of regulated economies.
I would argue that getting people to stop taking drugs is impossible. History teaches us this. However, were we to decriminalize the drugs, regulate them, bring them out of the dark and into the light, the cartel profits would go away and their power greatly diminished.
I completely agree. Criminalization has not worked and will not work. I was a lawyer during the height of the drug war. It didn’t stop anything. It did put a generation of young black males in jail. De criminalize drugs and use the power of advertising to make them less palatable. All of us know what kind of horse carries a Budweiser, every boomer knows what kind of coffee is good to the last drop and there’s a certain lizard that sells insurance. Use that type of marketing to take away the allure of drugs. Make it safe for people to use if they insist and take all of the money out of the trade. Cut down demand, tax the supply, do away with a lot of street crimes, make our cities safer and spend the money that we used to spend on criminals to help people with rehab.
Please buy acoustic tiles for you recording space to cut down on the echo in your recording space.
Or get a lapel mic.
Great. A game of whack a mole on a hemispheric scale. That never goes wrong.
Trump is a fantasist. He is totally deluded about his capabilities and the nature of the real world. How someone like this ended up in such a position of power is truly amazing.
Maybe more applicable to 45. 47 hits different.
Tru.p does not care about trade, nor that sending in lots of troops would fail. All he wants to do is pretend he has the biggest dick around
When are the kids gonna grow up and just abuse their Vyvanse prescriptions instead of doing cocaine like the rest of us adults? Or better yet, when is Novo Nordisk gonna start slinging the 100% Legal Alternative #MundaneCocaine on Hims? If Incan farmers can cook up the stuff in the jungle, surely a global pharmaceutical company can give us a responsible alternative. Weren’t we supposed to have Soma by now?
LOL. Soylent Green on its way now to a store near you!
Our federal govt wants a piece of every pie. This is another way for the orange man to put his thumb on the scale. Pun intended.
The military option doesn't look reasonable. Go after the money , the profits; drain their accounts. Go after the financial institutions the cartels use.
This makes sense. "They" don't want to stop it as much as control it. My guess