Just like the ever-submissive and obedient American vassals of NATO and the European Union at the last Munich Security Conference, overwhelmed by the heterodox provocations of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J. D. Vance, and what happened on February 28th in the Oval Office to Joe Biden’s pet, the Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky, who after overestimating his capabilities ended up being shouted at, humiliated and thrown in front of the television cameras by the White House tenant himself, the Trump administration also seems to have applied aspects of John Boyd’s “OODA loop” to the government of the Fourth Transformation (4T), headed by Claudia Sheinbaum.
According to former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, Donald Trump’s strategic thinking seems to be guided by what John Boyd, former US Air Force fighter pilot, called “entering the decision-making cycle” of the enemy. A sequence he broke down into four phases: observe, orient, decide, act (OODA). The key aspect of that combat strategy is the cycle: it is not a single exercise, but a series of connected actions, each feeding off the other. You take an action and observe the enemy’s reaction. You orient yourself on the reaction and decide which option is best before acting. The enemy reacts and the cycle repeats. Until the enemy dies. Ritter says: “The goal is not to let up once you have entered combat and you must keep the enemy reacting to your actions until you have them where you want them.”
In Munich, Hegseth and Vance staged the classic adaptation of the OODA loop to destroy enemies in NATO and the EU, whom Trump sees as an extension of the same deep state elites who conspired, unsuccessfully, for more than a decade to purge him from the American political scene. Ergo, they are not allies but enemies. And as Ritter concludes, “there is now a different American master who has decided that Europe is no longer useful as a tool.” Regarding the abrupt outcome of the heated discussion between Trump and Vance with Zelensky, according to the new rough ways of the imperial presidency, the famous phrase attributed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt could be applied to refer to the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García: “Maybe he is a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch”; although, paraphrasing Carlos Quijano, at the fall of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, one could now say: Zelensky to the lions, either because he is no longer useful to Trump or, worse, because he has become a burden or a liability for the US, like Reza Pahlevi, Ferdinand Marcos or Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in their time.
With obvious nuances and differences in treatment, the OODA cycle: action-reaction, has already yielded results in the Trump/Sheinbaum bilateral relationship. But it is worth recalling some precedents. Since the 1970s, the United States has used drug trafficking and the “War on Drugs” as tools of destabilization in countries that produce illicit substances. Since then, also, from a repressive prohibitionist approach, different heads of the White House have managed to impose the transnationalization of militarized anti-drug policies, penetrating and controlling parts of the security apparatus of the target countries – Colombia and Mexico, in particular – re-legitimizing the domestic role of the armed forces and militarized police forces as armies of occupation in their own countries, under the parameters of the old National Security doctrine, with an axis on the “internal enemy” and the “subversive threat.”
The noose of foreign debt had led Mexico to a situation of absolute political and economic subordination to the United States, which was accentuated in 1994 with the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the “third link” was missing: the military one, which after the meeting of defense ministers of the Americas in Williamsburg, Virginia, in July 1995, marked the beginning of a new role for the armed forces in the fight against drug trafficking and the defense of the territorial unity of Mexico according to the Pentagon’s patterns. During his visit to Military Camp No. 1 of the Secretariat of National Defense, on October 23, the head of the Pentagon, William Perry, ratified that the interests of “shared national security” were the “third link” and from then on, the structural collaboration of the armies of both countries has been cemented under the hegemonic logic of “America for the Americans,” within the framework of a vertical integration and limited sovereignty.
The Trump administration’s now characterization of Mexican criminal economic cartels as “international terrorist organizations,” as well as the leaks to The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN of the cartels’ operations, the covert operations of the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Homeland Security in Mexican airspace through drone flights and MQ-9 Reaper (Predator B) spy planes, Lockheed U-2, RC-135 Rivet Joint, the crown jewel of US Air Force espionage and Boeings P-8 Poseidon for maritime reconnaissance and patrol, were part of a coercive softening scheme under the influence of the OODA strategy: action-reaction, which together with the blackmail of tariffs, ended up cornering the government of the 4T, which to try to avoid a greater evil, gave Trump, in the name of the “national security” of Mexico and the United States (sic), Rafael Caro Quintero and 28 other high-profile imprisoned traffickers.
Strictly speaking, the close “coordination and collaboration” between the armed forces of both countries, notions ratified by President Sheinbaum and the Secretary of Defense, General Ricardo Trevilla, was sealed in 2020 during the fourth Roundtable on Bilateral Military Cooperation, which consolidated what is known as the Mutual Strategic Vision; a military “interdependence” based on “operational compatibility” between the Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA), the Ministry of the Navy (SEMAR) and the Northern Command of the Pentagon, which 30 years after the Williamsburg meeting, given the abysmal political-economic-military asymmetry, has Mexico where the Trump administration wanted it. Paraphrasing Caitlin Johnstone, “The United States has no allies, only hostages.” And Ambassador Ronald Johnson has yet to arrive…
Original article by Carlos Fazio at Rebelión, March 6, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.