When George P. Shultz took office as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state in 1982, his first trip out of the country was to Canada. His second was to Mexico.

“Foreign policy starts with your neighborhood,” he told me in an interview here in the Canadian capital last week. “I have always believed that and Ronald Reagan believed that very firmly. In many ways he had [the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement] in his mind. He paid a lot of attention to both Mexico and Canada, as I did.”

Mr. Shultz, now a co-chair of the North American Forum—which pulls together members of the business and government community for an annual pow-wow—is still paying a lot of attention to the American neighborhood.

These days that means taking seriously the problem of drug-trafficking violence on the Mexican border. “It’s gotten to the point that . . . you’ve got to be worried about what’s happening to Mexico, and you’ve got to realize that the money that’s financing all that comes from the United States in terms of the profits from the illegal drugs. It’s not healthy for us, let alone Mexico, to have this violence taking place.”

Mr. Shultz carries weight on this issue, in part because he has been thinking about it critically for decades and listening to our neighbors’ viewpoints. He has long harbored skepticism about interdiction as a solution to drug abuse in the U.S. Those doubts were prescient.

In 1988, Mr. Shultz recalls, he traveled to Mexico for the inauguration of President Carlos Salinas. After the ceremony they had a private conversation. “He said to me that he understood it was important for Mexico to do what it could to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. But he wanted me to know that the funds to support all that traffic came from the United States to Mexico.” Mr. Shultz says that around the same time he heard a very similar refrain from the president of Colombia, Virgilio Barco.

Mr. Salinas also warned the secretary that Americans should realize they are not immune: “This problem will spill across. Drug gangs will eventually be in the United States.”

Story continued at the Wall Street Journal

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