When America’s enemies look at a map of the United States, they cannot but see through the inverse funnel that is Mexico.  With each passing mile northward from the narrowest point of its border with Guatemala, most of the Mexican funnel bends towards Texas.  The opportunity from the south to penetrate the land to the north opens up like the horizon itself. To friendlier eyes, the same terrain forms a natural market of trade separated only by artificial barriers.  It is as if the two countries should be one.

But it is easy to see why the Germans in World War I wanted to open up a front with Mexico against the United States and why the 1968 student protests in Mexico City that were thought to be Soviet-inspired were put down with murderous impunity.  Mexico, like America’s HispanicLatino population, is an evident strategic-geopolitical asset.

And now in The New York Times yesterday comes Israel’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon warning about the new threat that Mexico via Texas could pose to the United States from a nuclear-armed Iran.  Building upon its funding of a new television network in Latin America to counter American influence in the hemisphere, Iran is said to be contemplating cultivating the lords of the drug netherworld.  To think the drug lords would cooperate with the Iranians to bring in a device or something as threatening is almost not believable.

But if Israel can recruit Iranians within their country to carry out assassinations and commit sabotage against their government’s attempts to assemble a nuclear bomb, then Iran presumably could develop sordid ties with the illicit drug networks that work the spine of the funnel to get narcotics into the drug-consuming country the United States has become.

With signs pointing to an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations this year, the flow of events there from is fairly known.  Any attack by Israel on Iran will implicate the United States and inflame world opinion.  And any expansion of American involvement could draw in the military at a time the country is near insolvency, with HispanicLatino soldiers again having to go to war.  HispanicLatinos have long been absent from direct input into the country’s major foreign policy decisions that have set the nation’s relationships with other peoples into the near future.  However limited HispanicLatino influence, there is little wiggle room on Iranian nuclear capability.

The need to continue to pressure the Israelis and the Palestinians to resolve their disagreements that have metastasized into intransigent conflict that nurtures terrorists is as evident as the need for Iran to be contained.  Iran is not an easy issue for the Israelis or anyone.  A strike on Iran by Israel would complicate matters greatly; a nuclear-armed Iran would complicate matters much more.

However far-fetched the idea that a nuclear bomb could be slipped into Mexico and slid into Texas, who would have ever thought that Iranian television would begin broadcasting in Latin America? Or that another set of crazies would crash two planes into the World Trade Center?  And, perhaps in a near-empty Holiday Inn in Monterrey made so by the fear that has gripped that city already, Iranian operatives might be getting ready to reach out to the networks atop the funnel.

The Israeli perspective suggests that we will not have to wait until Iran has a nuclear bomb to worry about it using the drug networks to inject a new dynamic into Mexico and then Texas – compounding the already-critical geopolitical value of Mexico and Texas.

Feel free to forward these blogs that deal with business topics on Mondays, politics on Wednesdays and social and personal and professional development on Fridays.  Additional thoughts are published invariably on Tuesdays or Thursdays.