Wargaming Scenario: MAGA Versus The Cartels
The tabletop exercise everyone in Washington must read.
You might’ve heard that Trump just signed an executive order directing the US military to conduct operations against cartels in Latin America.1
What you almost certainly didn’t hear is that this exact scenario was gamed out months ago, and it revealed disastrous consequences.
In February, Win Without War, one of the few but mighty sites for progressive foreign policy in Washington, organized a tabletop exercise (TTX) to help anticipate the hidden costs and risks of the Trump administration bombing cartels in Mexico.
TTXs are a low-maintenance type of wargame, and this is precisely their greatest value proposition. I teach a course on how to use scenario development and “war”-gaming as analytical methods.2 In the same way that it’s easy to conduct a bad statistical analysis, build a bad dataset, or run a bad opinion survey, the wargame is a tool that can be—and often is—misused. When I worked in the system, I spent several years as a strategist running and participating in dozens of wargames. Some were legit; most were trying to generate an excuse to buy more missiles or bomb a place we had no business bombing.
But Win Without War’s game represents the ideal of the game as a form of analysis with practical use. Knowing the risks of military action—which game simulations vivify—a competent policy machine can take steps to reduce them. Knowing the true costs of action, a rational decision-maker can decide if the game is really worth the candle…and if his motives have nothing to do with the good of his nation, the public will see that.
The Win Without War game also employed a number of best practices in their design. They had:
A diverse array of subject matter experts;
A control cell with experiencing in wargaming;
An explicit purpose that made the game the best analytical method;
A plausible justification for the game given Project 2025 and GOP comments about bombing cartels in 2024;
A plausible “road to war” scenario narrative; and
Clarity about their intended audience (members of Congress and congressional staff).
Military operations always produce negative outcomes of one sort or another, but some consequences are much worse than others…and the cartel scenario proved to be an impossibly bad outcome. Here are some of the results:
A lot of Mexican civilians died or became internally displaced persons; US labor suffered; the US economy shrank; American citizens in Latin America became targets of cartel violence; and the securitization of drug trafficking led to the further erosion of democracy in the US.
In addition to flagging a dizzying diversity of costs associated with military action, the game was meant to test how effective drone attacks and special-operations forces raids would be at achieving the Trump administration’s purported goals:
Curb the flow of fentanyl in the US;
Reduce immigration from Latin America;
Reduce the political influence of cartels.
The US military campaign not only failed to achieve any of these goals; it increased the political influence of certain cartels and generated an entirely new problem for the US:
Waging war in Latin America is sheer folly. You might draw that conclusion by knowing something about the history of America’s last drug war, or maybe if you watched Traffic. But now members of Congress and their staff have been briefed on With Without War’s game. They’re armed with recommendations based on the game’s results. And the public has the briefing too.
If Americans lived in a democracy, this should be enough to stop catastrophe.
I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I have to stress how insane it is that Trump has also put out a $50 million bounty for the arrest of Nicolas Maduro, former president of Venezuela, on the basis of nothing other than the mere accusation that he was a drug trafficker.
