Who is Wile E. Coyote? Power, influence and the war on drugs

Abstract

Thucydides said that 'Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must'. Such is the characterization by many scholars of the US dominance of Mexico. We challenge this claim in explaining a puzzle: why American unilateralism in the 'war on drugs' results in symbolic and material gains for Mexico as it shifts the United States from a unilateral to a cooperative policy. We examine five major cases over the last five decades and identify a dynamic cycle that begins with unilateral US action and ends with bilateral agreements, where mechanisms for clear communication are created, and resource transfers take place. Although we recognize that our claims are both contingent and context-dependent, a clear pattern emerges: Like the Roadrunner, Mexico has triumphed again.

It’s not the size, it’s the relationship: from ‘small states’ to asymmetry

“…While we can talk about the United States and Mexico as having an asymmetrical relationship (Selee and Díaz-Cayeros, 2013), it makes little sense to call Mexico -a country of 113 million people with the world's eleventh-largest economy -'small.' As Aspinwall and Reich (2016) demonstrated in these pages, the material power differential does not always produce the expected outcome. Despite that, asymmetry remains an indelible feature of the relationship; one party is preponderant, while the other is comparably deficient in specified, relevant resources.…”