US drones over Mexico and President Scheinbaum’s firm but cautious approach to the Trump Administration

Kyle Kulinski in this segment focuses on how Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum is approach dealing with the new Trump II Administration. (1) Her name is German but she pronounces it “shayn-bom,” which I understand is the Yiddish pronunciation. She’s not only Mexico’s first woman President and its first Jewish President, as well.

He reports on Scheinbaum’s response to the military threats from the Trump Administration, which has involved declaring drug cartels in Mexico to be “terrorist organizations,” which the US can then use as an excuse for military action in Mexico, aka, invading Mexico. So that is a clear military threat toward Mexico. But so far in their first few weeks in office, the US is coordinating with Mexican forces. They recently started flying US drones over Mexico – which is a military threatening act – but Mexico at the moment is cooperating with those actions. Sheinbaum herself has said she formally requested the flights. (2) That could be a face-saving measure. But it is also Sheinbaum’s way of saying this cannot be done without Mexico’s permission.

For an idea of how touchy even that can be, we can recall Colin Powell’s infamous presentation to the United Nations in 2003, where he held up a bottle of powder and warned that the fearsome world power Iraq could use their drones to drop anthrax powder over the US:

“Iraq has been working on a variety of UAVs for more than a decade. This is just illustrative of what a UAV would look like,” Powell said, showing a photograph of a small unarmed drone. “This effort has included attempts to modify for unmanned flight the MiG-21 and with greater success an aircraft called the L-29. However, Iraq is now concentrating not on these airplanes, but on developing and testing smaller UAVs, such as this.” He went on, “Iraq could use these small UAVs which have a wingspan of only a few meters to deliver biological agents to its neighbours or if transported, to other countries, including the United States.” (3)

In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush warned:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes. [my emphasis] (4)

The deadly menace of Iraq’s Drones of Doom turned out to have been, uh, somewhat exaggerated:

The prospect of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles spraying chemical and biological agents over densely populated areas over the United States was widely reported in the media. But soon after the invasion of Iraq, as the tall stories of Iraq’s WMD arsenal began to fall apart, Powell’s and Bush’s claims about the scale and sophistication of Iraq’s drone program proved to be wildly exaggerated. In their speeches, Powell and Bush had neglected to mention that the capabilities of Iraqi drones had been a matter of debate in U.S. intelligence circles, according to the Associated Press. The Air Force, it was later revealed, had maintained that Iraqi drones were not capable of posing any real threat to the U.S., or even to the countries bordering Iraq. “We didn’t see there was a very large chance they [UAVs] would be used to attack the continental United States,” Bob Boyd, director of the Air Force Intelligence Analysis Agency, told the Associated Press, also noting that it was unlikely that Iraq was planning to use its drones to deliver chemical weapons, since there was little crossover between the two programs.

Indeed, in the final days before the invasion, Iraqi officials had displayed one of the military’s drones in an apparent effort to refute claims that these systems had any of the capabilities that U.S. officials claimed they had. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the drone had “‘God is Great’ written in Arabic along the fuselage and on each wing, with a red permanent marker.” The aircraft’s wings were apparently held together “with tin foil and duct tape, and two wooden propellers bolted to engines far smaller than those of a lawn mower.” (5)

But that was good enough for the Cheney-Bush Administration to launch an illegal “preventive” war against Iraq, which was pretty generally a disaster. And had the strategic effect of strengthening Iran, because the new Shia-dominated Iraqi government wanted good relations with Iran, unlike the secular Saddam Hussein regime which we ousted – along with its anthrax tin-foil-and-duct-tape Drones Of Anthrax Doom.

So, yeah, Mexico has legitimate reason to worry about the Trump Administration flying military drones over its territory without permission. Even without inventing doomsday fantasies. And, of course, weaponized drones were relatively new in 2003. They are now a major element in military operations, as the Russia-Ukraine War has illustrated. The currently-paused Gaza War has also featured Israel’s use of drones for targeted assassinations. The US, of course, has also used them for that purpose.

Brian Finucane recently reminded us of how Peace President Trump has been approaching Mexico this year in the context of his peaceful military strikes during his first term:

With President Trump once again the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, military action against drug trafficking organizations in Mexico is all too plausible—including because of his administration’s recent designation of a number of drug trafficking organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and revelations of increased U.S. aerial surveillance of drug labs in Mexico. ...

Trump’s track record on the use of force is relevant here. Although adverse to large-scale foreign military deployments in his first term, the United States under his leadership engaged in new conflicts and expanded and intensified existing ones. Trump’s prior administration turned frequently to airstrikes against terrorists (including escalating the U.S. air wars in Somalia and Afghanistan); raids by special operations forces; and crowing over the killing of “high-value targets” such as Islamic State leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi who he claimed “died like a dog.” During his first term, Trump also ordered actions other presidents eschewed. For example, he directed attacks against Syria in retaliation for its use of chemical weapons in 2017 and 2018—something President Obama had refrained from in 2013 and which likely violated international, if not also domestic law.

Further, Trump also authorized the controversial drone strike in 2020 against Iranian general Qassem Soleimani—who both the Bush and Obama administrations had abstained from attacking due to serious concerns over Iranian retaliation, particularly given the U.S. military footprint within striking distance for Tehran and allied paramilitary groups. The prior designation of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) (in which Soleimani was a senior commander) as an FTO seemed to have greased the skids bureaucratically to using other, more kinetic counterterrorism tools. Significantly, Trump appears not to have fully appreciated the risks of Iranian retaliation. He seemed taken aback by Iran’s unprecedent ballistic missile barrage at U.S. troops in Iraq—and immediately sought to deescalate the situation, including by downplaying the traumatic brain injuries Iran inflicted on U.S. troops as “headaches.” [my emphasis] (6)

Notes:

(1) Trump TORCHED By Mexico’s Left-Wing President. Secular Talk YouTube channel 02/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/DUfVyuIdbY4?si=IT3o9m_CPrgOnmPp> (Accessed: 2025-26-02).

(2) Mexico's president says her government requested US surveillance drone flights. Associated Press YouTube channel 02/19/2025. <https://youtu.be/ZiPS0MMnZFo?si=Xyhrs1075kbWR_7d> (Accessed: 2025-26-02).

(3) Michel, Arthur Holland (2025): History Lesson: Iraq’s Foil-clad Drones. Drone Center 03/13/2015. <https://dronecenter.bard.edu/history-lesson-iraqs-foil-clad-drones/> (Accessed: 2025-26-02).

(4) President Delivers “State of the Union.” White House Archives January 2003. (Speech date: 01/28/2023).<https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html> (Accessed: 2025-26-02).

(5) Michel (2025), op. cit.

(6) Finucane, Brian (2025): U.S. Military Action in Mexico: Almost Certainly Illegal, Definitely Counterproductive. Just Security 02/20/2025. <https://www.justsecurity.org/107850/us-military-mexico-illegal/> (Accessed: 2025-26-02).