Criminal Governance and Strategic Competition: Redefining Irregular Warfare in Mexico

The designation of major Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) signals more than a policy escalation. It reflects an emerging doctrinal reinterpretation of irregular warfare. What is unfolding is not counterterrorism applied indiscriminately to criminals, but a growing recognition in Washington that certain transnational criminal networks function as coercive campaigners—actors capable of shaping state behavior, eroding governance capacity, and generating strategically exploitable terrain in an era of intensifying great-power competition. This analysis seeks to explain these doctrinal developments and their implications for both countries.

By criminal governance, this article refers to systems in which criminal organizations regulate territory, behavior, markets, and access to justice in ways that systematically displace formal state authority without seeking regime change. Mexican cartels do not pursue ideology. Yet they shape political decision-making, constrain state authority, and exercise territorial control in ways that rival the effects historically associated with insurgents and terrorists. The distinction lies in intent; the effect is political. The issue is not what cartels are. It is what they do to state power.

The core theoretical claim is simple: irregular warfare is increasingly defined by political effect rather than actor typology. From Washington’s perspective, when organized crime systematically conditions how a state governs strategically relevant space, it becomes an irregular competition problem—even if it is profit-driven.

This shift exposes a widening gap between pressure and strategy. After years of declining bilateral cooperation, Washington has applied sustained pressure that has produced visible short-term responses. Yet tactical compliance masks a deeper problem: neither capital has articulated a shared theory of success. Without one, escalation risks substituting for strategy, and cooperation risks remaining fragile and crisis-driven.

Successive Applications of Political Logic

US irregular warfare doctrine has evolved through three distinct turns, each shaped by different adversaries but connected by a single insight: irregular threats are political problems that cannot be resolved by military means alone.

The first turn, counterinsurgency, addressed armed movements challenging political authority through population-centric strategies. Tactical gains proved reversible without coherent political solutions restoring state legitimacy. Iraq demonstrated this lesson starkly: kinetic success without governance reform remained ephemeral.

The second turn, counterterrorism, targeted clandestine networks employing symbolic violence without seeking territorial control. Doctrine centered on intelligence-driven targeting, leadership decapitation, and financial disruption. Yet counterterrorism reinforced counterinsurgency’s lesson: degrading networks could not eliminate the conditions that sustained recruitment—marginalization, repression, governance failure. Killing adversaries without political repair generated cyclical conflict.

The third turn departs from categorical thinking. It focuses on political effect rather than actor identity. Organized crime becomes an irregular warfare concern when its business model requires systematically contesting state authority over strategic terrain—ports, border crossings, financial systems, intelligence channels, and key transit corridors. Mexican cartels seek profit, not power, yet their operational requirements generate political effects that constrain state behavior. The issue is not ideology. It is governance displacement.

Unlike insurgents, criminal organizations do not seek to replace the state. They coexist with institutions while constraining them, producing hybrid orders in which formal authority persists but operates within limits imposed by non-state actors. Governance emerges not from ambition but necessity: criminal enterprises operating at scale require stability, dispute resolution, and population compliance.

Some critics will argue that this interpretation risks securitizing organized crime and conflating governance failure with warfare. That caution is important. Cartels remain fundamentally economic actors. Yet when their activities systematically shape state decision-making, constrain security forces, and displace authority over critical infrastructure, the strategic effects become indistinguishable from those of irregular political competitors. The analytical move is not to label crime as war, but to recognize when crime generates political effects that demand strategic response.

The revised Department of Defense definition of irregular warfare, adopted in late 2025, reflects this emerging reinterpretation. Irregular warfare now emphasizes sustained campaigns employing indirect, asymmetric, or non-attributable means during competition as well as conflict. The emphasis has shifted from who the adversary is to how state behavior is conditioned. Mexico has become a case study for this evolution. Understanding how US doctrine arrived at this recognition requires examining its evolution through three distinct applications of political logic to irregular threats.

Why Cooperation Collapsed

The FTO designation cannot be understood apart from declining US-Mexico security cooperation. From 2008 to 2012, the Mérida Initiative represented the high-water mark of bilateral engagement. Intelligence-sharing and joint operations degraded cartel leadership. The subsequent corruption conviction of Genaro García Luna(Mexico’s Public Security Secretary and principal architect of the Mérida Initiative) in 2023 and the 2020 arrest of Salvador Cienfuegos (Defense Minister under Peña Nieto)—both key US-Mexico security partners—fundamentally altered trust dynamics between the capitals.

That framework collapsed under the López Obrador administration (2018–2024), which curtailed US law enforcement access while adopting a less confrontational posture. The 2019 Culiacán episode—when Mexican forces released a captured cartel leader after violent retaliation—symbolized the limits of state authority under coercive pressure. By 2025, Washington concluded that existing cooperation mechanisms no longer constrained risk adequately.

Recent pressure has generated short-term gains—expanded deployments, renewed intelligence coordination—but tactical responsiveness without strategic alignment remains fragile. Neither government has defined a measurable political end state.

Cartels as Coercive Campaigners

Cartels enter the irregular problem set not because they are terrorists, but because they function as coercive campaigners.

First, they shape state choice. Selective violence and institutional penetration constrain where and how authorities act. Culiacán demonstrated real-time conditioning of military decisions by cartel coercion.

Second, they displace governance over strategic terrain. Where they control ports, border crossings, and transit corridors, they regulate movement and markets, impose informal order, and extract rents. State presence persists formally but operates within negotiated limits. These zones are not fully ungoverned; they are governed differently.

Third, corruption generates systemic vulnerabilities. Compromised units, leaked operations, and coerced officials create persistent intelligence blind spots. At scale, corruption becomes an access problem exploitable by external actors seeking leverage. This vulnerability becomes particularly significant when viewed through the lens of strategic competition, where criminal governance creates opportunities for state-level adversaries to achieve strategic objectives indirectly.

Strategic Enabling and the Permissive Environment

The third turn becomes most consequential in strategic competition. Criminal governance environments generate permissive conditions exploitable by capable state actors without requiring centralized coordination.

Chinese criminal networks operate extensively across the Americas, particularly in precursor chemical supply chains and money laundering systems linked to Mexican cartels. There is no evidence that Beijing directs these actors. Coordination is unnecessary. Structural interdependence creates opportunity. State actors can parasitically benefit from existing corruption pathways, logistical infrastructure, and operational deniability.

The fentanyl supply chain illustrates this dynamic. Chinese suppliers provide inputs; Mexican cartels manufacture finished products; the resulting addiction crisis imposes enormous costs on the United States. Neither actor must align with Chinese strategic objectives for asymmetric effects to materialize. The vulnerability lies in structure, not intent.

Chinese criminal actors are also active across illicit mining, wildlife trafficking, human smuggling, and illicit fishing—often blending licit and illicit commerce. Such hybrid ecosystems complicate enforcement, expand corruption vectors, and increase the strategic utility of deniable disruption.

In a high-end contingency scenario—not a prediction, but a structural possibility—Mexico could function as an involuntary enabling platform during geopolitical crisis. Cartel-linked financial networks might facilitate sanctions evasion. Control over ports and corridors could create exploitable chokepoints. Corruption networks could provide access pathways for espionage and influence operations. In such a scenario, strategic effects advance adversary objectives indirectly, complicating attribution and deterrence.

The concern is cumulative rather than conspiratorial. Fragmented exploitation by profit-driven actors can gradually degrade governance capacity in a region central to US security. Proximity magnifies the effect: decoupling strategies available against distant adversaries are unavailable in North America. Structural interdependence becomes a liability.

What Success Requires

The central failure of the current moment is not inaction but the absence of a shared theory of success that integrates governance restoration with strategic competition.

Success cannot mean cartel eradication so long as there is a demand from the largest illicit drug market in the world. Nor can it mean violence management alone, which normalizes criminal governance. Success must mean restoring effective state authority over strategic terrain: ensuring that formal Mexican state institutions exercise legitimate control over ports, borders, financial systems, and security forces. It must also mean denying adversaries exploitable permissive environments.

Yet the current US approach—centered on pressure and threats of military action—cannot be sustained long-term. While such tactics may secure short-term cooperation, they generate nationalist backlash in Mexico, undermine the legitimacy of cooperative officials, and fail to address root causes. The lesson from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism applies directly: coercion can create space; only governance reform produces durable outcomes. However, governance reform in Mexico cannot succeed as a unilateral effort, particularly given the transnational nature of cartel operations and the opportunities they create for external actors.

Reciprocity is essential. Mexican reform efforts require parallel US action addressing drug demand, weapons trafficking, financial network disruption, and comprehensive diplomatic engagement with China on precursor and laundering infrastructure. Without reciprocity, cooperation becomes politically unsustainable in Mexico City.

Political economy matters equally. Cartels thrive by filling economic voids in regions lacking formal employment, credit, and market access. This creates a legitimacy trap: populations may prefer criminal governance not from ideological affinity, but from economic necessity. Restoring state authority without addressing these conditions risks creating power vacuums that new criminal actors will exploit.

A viable framework requires phased, verifiable commitments with clear metrics that address both bilateral governance challenges and strategic competition vulnerabilities. Short-term priorities include restoring intelligence-sharing, deploying vetted units to strategic zones, destroying fentanyl labs, and prosecuting high-level corruption cases demonstrating institutional integrity. Additionally, immediate action is required to map and disrupt third-party exploitation of criminal infrastructure, particularly Chinese networks operating within cartel-controlled systems.

Medium-term objectives center on measurable reductions in cartel territorial control over strategic nodes, strengthened judicial capacity, and professionalized security forces with accountability mechanisms. Equally important is strengthening the institutions responsible for detecting and preventing foreign exploitation of criminal networks. This includes improving financial intelligence capabilities to trace illicit funds and coordinating enforcement against infrastructure that serves both legitimate commerce and criminal operations.

Long-term success requires institutional resilience—Mexican institutions capable of sustaining governance without external support, significant reductions in corruption and impunity, and population perceptions favoring state actors over criminal alternatives. From a strategic competition perspective, long-term success means Mexico becomes an inhospitable environment for adversary exploitation rather than an involuntary enabling platform.

For Mexican planners, sovereignty is strengthened through demonstrable capacity to govern strategic terrain. For US planners, pressure without partnership erodes legitimacy and invites backlash.

Conclusion

The debate over whether cartels are terrorists obscures a more significant development: an emerging reinterpretation of irregular warfare centered on political effect rather than ideological identity. Understanding this shift—whether one endorses it or not—is essential for both capitals.

The three doctrinal turns share a common lesson—irregular threats are political problems requiring political solutions. Mexican cartels do not seek regime change, but they systematically condition state behavior and displace authority over strategic terrain. More importantly, their erosion of governance capacity generates permissive environments that capable adversaries can exploit without direct attribution against the United States.

For practitioners of irregular warfare, the implication is clear. Escalation without political alignment will not restore authority; it will deepen strategic vulnerability. Designations and pressure may shape short-term behavior, but only reciprocal governance restoration can deny adversaries the permissive environments that criminal governance creates.

The larger issue is not classification, but governance. When criminal organizations shape how states operate over critical terrain, the political effects become strategic. Recognizing that dynamic does not require endorsing any particular doctrine. It requires confronting the uncomfortable reality that restoring authority—not relabeling adversaries—is the central challenge in irregular competition.

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