The new Cold War is between countries and super-cartels

Mexico’s drug cartels are so tenacious, so powerful, that under intense pressure, they forge diamonds rather than crumble.

Amid years of bloody turf wars, new tariffs aimed at hitting the global narcotics market and thousands more combat troops at the border, cartels are feeling the pressure. 

The result? Two of the most notorious cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation, have begrudgingly decided to unite and conquer in an unprecedented alliance.

This seismic shift in global organized crime demands that the U.S. urgently rethink its approach. Because this “super-cartel” won’t just be a criminal syndicate trafficking migrants and drugs: It will operate more like a rogue state.

Separately, cartels were already responsible for more than 30,000 deaths annually. Together, they now command fentanyl supply chains, digital surveillance networks and a loyal, militarized workforce across more than 100 countries. A union dramatically escalates their capacity for violence, trafficking and political influence. 

Yet U.S. policy continues to treat cartels like street gangs.

President Trump’s recent move to designate them as terrorist organizations made headlines, as did his talk of military action. But threats won't solve this crisis. Trump must take the cartels and their insidious grip on power seriously. We’ve watched “Breaking Bad”; there’s no neat ending to the story.

Heavy-handed U.S. military incursions risk triggering exactly what cartels thrive on: chaos. We know from 2019’s failed attempt to capture El Chapo’s son that when provoked, cartels roll out armored vehicles, rocket launchers, grenades and machine guns, taking hostages, triggering riots and paralyzing entire cities within hours.

And the wider “War on Drugs” has been an abject failure. It triggered a 900 percent increase in cartel activity, while annual forced disappearances in Mexico soared from 18 to over 3,000 in just six years. Prioritizing combat over community, and coercion over cooperation, left a generation caught between bullets and silence.

If we’re now calling cartels terrorists, we must also respond as we did when facing another non-state threat with global reach and paramilitary power: ISIS. 

ISIS wasn’t defeated by drone strikes alone. It took a coalition strategy that combined financial disruption, partnerships with Syrian and Iraqi ground forces, community stabilization and the counter-radicalization of vulnerable youth. 

And this last point is especially relevant. 

Cartels are Mexico’s fifth-largest employer, and they’re recruiting children and teens to sustain their brutal empires. Some estimates suggest that as many as 460,000 young Mexicans are involved in organized crime. 

Some are enticed by the promise of money or protection, others by fear or force. But in many cases, it’s simply because they have no alternatives — no schools, no jobs, no future. 

This is a humanitarian, developmental and moral emergency. And it mirrors the same dynamics that allow violent extremist groups to flourish.

In the fight against ISIS, U.S. military forces played a decisive role, but just as crucial were the grassroots actors who undermined the group’s ideology from the ground up.

In the U.S., community networks quietly blunted ISIS’s influence: rejecting its doctrine from the pulpit, fostering interfaith solidarity and helping law enforcement support at-risk youth.

In Dallas, local Muslims hosted workshops for parents and teens on resisting extremist propaganda, while its imams delivered sermons condemning ISIS as un-Islamic and promoting civic engagement as the antidote to alienation.

On a global level, the Muslim World League, the world’s largest Islamic non-governmental organization, publicly and repeatedly condemned ISIS as heretical, stripping the group of any claim to religious legitimacy. 

Under Sheikh Mohammad Al-Issa’s leadership, the Muslim World League convened 1,200 scholars from 139 countries to endorse the 2019 Makkah Charter — a historic rejection of terrorism, extremism and sectarianism. Al-Issa even carried this message to global leaders at the European Parliament, denouncing terrorism and urging international cooperation to counter radicalization. 

This same lesson must be used to defeat cartel violence today. Already, a 2023 study found that the most effective way to weaken cartels is to disrupt their ability to recruit. That means investing in education, empowering local leadership and engaging faith leaders, teachers and NGOs to offer youth real alternatives to crime. 

We can also begin to out-organize, out-resource and out-strategize the cartels by treating them like the geopolitical actors they’ve become. That means supporting and training vetted local security forces in Mexico and disrupting the cartels' financial ecosystems, including through tougher enforcement on U.S.-based money laundering and weapons smuggling.

It also means investing in local governance in cartel-dominated areas and expanding intelligence-sharing beyond Drug Enforcement Agency operations to a broader, civilian-led interagency framework focused on transnational threats.

There’s nothing wrong with the Trump administration wanting to take the lead on tackling the cartels, but it can’t succeed unilaterally, nor by treating Mexico as a failed state.  

Luckily, we have just reached a moment where there is goodwill to be capitalized upon. Mexico recently sent civil protection and firefighting units to Texas to support the state’s flood recovery efforts. That same collaborative spirit can help forge a new cross-border alliance rooted in mutual interest and shared sovereignty.

No doubt, for the U.S., this is the new Cold War. But this time it’s being waged between networks, not nations. And the cartels are stepping from back alleys into boardrooms, switching from well-trodden cocaine routes to cyber networks.

When it comes to dealing with the new super-cartels, we need a strategy built on shared intelligence, economic development, social protection and joint security. Walls and weapons can only go so far.

Paulina Velasco is a dual Mexican-American citizen and political strategist with over 15 years of experience leading large-scale advocacy and communications campaigns across California. A former investment officer for the Malaysian consulate in Los Angeles, she has also served on the Azuza Human Rights Commission and the San Diego County Environmental Commission.