I received a response to the last dispatch, which - I'll leave it at, it got me thinking. I have other things I want to write, but I need to get this out of my head first.

The first thing I want to say is, actual history was not really my purpose, which is part of why I was so carelessly snarky describing the various encounters among soldiers from the United States, the Republic of Texas (so called), and Mexico. My point was, a statement from the president of the United States lauding the virtues of the U.S. Army in 1845, while perhaps of minimal interest to the U.S. media and public, created greater shock waves here - understandably, if you consider the past.

My correspondent raised two general themes in their response. The first was whether the Mexican-American War is best viewed as the United States vs. Mexico, or better viewed as two groups of Europeans going at each other over who would have the right to trample the indigenous populations of North America.

Which is a fair point. The Mexican War of Independence, which started in 1810 and continued until 1821, was sparked, at least in part, by the Spanish Crown seizing property from various landowners who had borrowed money from their local Catholic churches to buy their farms.(1) The Crown needed the money to pay expenses incurred during the Napoleonic Wars. This sat well with neither the farmers nor the local priests, among them Miguel Hidalgo, who issued his Grito de Dolores on [checks date] September 16 of 1810. A war, then, between former English subjects and former Spanish subjects, just a quarter-century after Nelson sank the Armada at Trafalgar, might fairly be viewed as a spin-off of the European conflict.

And, neither England nor Spain nor the United States nor Mexico had a legitimate claim to lands occupied by others for millennia. As I commented in the previous post, history is written by the victors, and the usual versions of that history, whether in English or Spanish, don't particularly concern themselves with the folks already living in the territory ceded by Mexico.

I did start to ponder whether those indigenous residents of what is now the southwestern United States might have been better off under Mexican rule or U.S. rule. This is nothing better than a thought experiment at this point, of course. One can't really say the Spanish were nice to the natives they found, especially the ones who wouldn't convert to Catholicism. But the fact that the majority of the residents of New Spain or Mexico, then and now, were and are Mestizo indicates that the Spanish didn't pursue policies of removal and extermination, the way the English settlers and U.S. government did. I would argue native Americans couldn't really have fared worse under the Mexican government. But, we are talking about a huge fork in the historical timeline, and for better or worse the world only went down one of those paths.

The other theme in the response to my post circled, somewhat elliptically, drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States. "Something must be done," they said. Reading between many lines, the reader's perspective seemed to be that the implied threats in Donald Trump's statement were an appropriate measure to kick the Mexican government into action.

Let's allow for a moment that the Mexican government does need to be prodded to do something, and further, ignore all the complexities masked by the phrase "the Mexican government." (Mexico, like the United States, is a federal republic, with a national government, state governments, municipal governments, etc. An army, a federal police force, state police forces, municipal police forces, district attorneys at various levels, executives and legislative bodies at various levels - you get the idea, because you know how this works up north.) My question is, does reminding Mexico that the United States invaded once and might feel the need to invade again seem likely to advance the cause here?

I have no idea. It's not obvious that it will. The initial response, which it was my purpose to describe, was the President digging in her heels. To whatever extent Trump wanted to catalyze a cooperative effort - also not obvious - it would appear, on the surface, that he made that harder to achieve.

Maybe the thinking(2) was, the threat of invasion will spur Sheinbaum into launching her own war on drugs. And maybe it will. But a savvy political operator, which Sheinbaum is and most of the White House crew are not, would recognize that initiating such a program would make her look like a puppet. Again: I don't see how his statement succeeded, if this was the goal.

Finally, if I were trying to convince someone to act on a shared problem, I would want - human nature being what it is and all - I would want to be able to show I was doing everything I could on my part. I would do my best to maintain effective border security, rather than reassigning border patrol guards to arrest five-year-olds in Minneapolis. I would implement and expand drug treatment and addiction counseling programs, rather than cutting the healthcare funding that pays for them. I wouldn't operate a pay-for-pardons scheme to line my pockets by letting convicted drug traffickers walk free. I would enact laws to reduce the number of arms being sold to anyone who can see over a counter, so that they wouldn't end up in the hands of the cartels I was claiming were the problem. And I would make a serious effort to build an economy that offered opportunity to people in small towns and in marginalized populations, because I would recognize that the drug trade is driven not by supply but by demand, and the surest way to reduce demand for dangerous drugs is offer people a positive expectation for their future.

Failing to do those things just gives to the person I'm trying to spur to action a raft of opportunities to tell me to pull the plank out of my own eye.

(1) This is, again, the version of history retold by Enrique Krauze in Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico 1810-1996 (an excellent example of the super-academic double-colon title).

(2) As a former boss of mine would say, "There's your first mistake."