O’Grady’s column licenses a US military intervention in Ecuador as responsible restraint. On October 12 the Wall Street Journal published Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s piece “What Are U.S. Soldiers Doing in Ecuador?” — and the rhetorical operation the headline asks the reader to perform is exactly the operation the column is performing on the policy.
I drafted versions of this kind of column for the WSJ editorial page and the cable desk between the late 1990s and the early 2020s, and the restraint posture — critique the execution to capture the credit for opposing the war, then leave the operation intact for the next deployment — is one I know from the inside. The operator trick is to be the responsible voice on the intervention the operator wants.
“News that U.S. soldiers were deployed to Ecuador last month to fight drug-trafficking cartels deserves more attention than it has received. A trademark pledge of President Trump is to stay out of ‘endless wars.’ Yet if ever there were a conflict destined to go on forever, it’s the armed effort to defeat the suppliers of mind-altering substances in the face of robust consumer demand.”
Frame-engineered relabeling — the signature technique the WSJ editorial page catalogue tracks at §4.1 and the bad-faith techniques catalogue documents in the Luntz-and-Lakoff lineage — operates here through the dual substitution of “endless wars” for what the column will go on to endorse, and “robust consumer demand” for what the column will not name as a US-side responsibility. The opening grants the deployment’s significance — “deserves more attention” — and immediately frames the deployment as a war against itself: a “trademark pledge” of Trump violated by Trump’s own policy. The frame is engineered to read as critique. The column will close on a different posture — endorse the apparatus, endorse the markets, endorse the professionalized-military version. The opening is engineered to make the closing look like a measured correction to excess rather than the column’s actual position. Operators of this kind know the value of letting the reader feel they have been talked out of one position before being walked into another. The opening posture is the wrapper for the closing payload. The fig leaf was always where the work was done.
“This isn’t to dismiss out of hand the Shield of the Americas, the new U.S. regional security initiative under which the Ecuador mission was launched. The State Department says the goal of the hemispheric project, unveiled in March, is to pull together ‘likeminded allies’ to ‘work together to advance strategies that stop foreign interference in our hemisphere, criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels, and illegal and mass immigration.’ Enhanced cooperation on the security interests of pro-Western countries in the hemisphere is a welcome development.”
Multiple-audience-targeting — the technique the WSJ catalogue tracks at §4.3 and that the bad-faith catalogue documents as coordinated message discipline — operates here through a single paragraph that delivers four separate messages to four separate audiences without any of them contradicting the others in plain view. The State Department line about “likeminded allies” and “criminal and narco-terrorist gangs” is doing four jobs at once. The wealthy reader gets reassurance that tax dollars are funding partnerships, not unilateral action. The political class gets citable vocabulary (“foreign interference,” “illegal and mass immigration”) they can drop into floor speeches. The populist base gets an enemy catalogue that doubles as a domestic-politics message. The technocratic class gets a sentence that reads as policy-analyst register. The piece then endorses this — “Enhanced cooperation on the security interests of pro-Western countries in the hemisphere is a welcome development” — without naming which “security interests” are “pro-Western” or whose “hemisphere” this is. The unstated premise: the hemisphere is pro-Western by definition, and any security interest defined as such is welcome. The piece endorses the frame and declines to interrogate it. Sponsorship dressed as description.
And here is the technique O’Grady will run on Bukele six grafs later, in a different register: call out an adversary for taking the wrong version of a posture you also take, so your posture survives untouched while the adversary is associated with the error.
“The U.S. successfully supported Colombia and President Álvaro Uribe in that country’s war against narco-trafficking rebels in the 2000s by helping with intelligence, equipment and training and by sending in military advisers. It never committed troops.”
Selective precedent — citing the responsible version of the last intervention to license the next one; what the WSJ catalogue tracks as the deficit-double-standard pattern (§4.4) extended from fiscal discipline to strategic discipline, and what the bad-faith catalogue documents as goalpost-shifting — operates here through the elevation of Plan Colombia as the “responsible” template the current deployment fails to live up to. The piece praises Plan Colombia as “successfully supported” by US intelligence, equipment, training, and military advisers — and notes the operative fact: “It never committed troops.” That last clause is the whole argument: the responsible version is the adviser version, the troops-in-the-jungle version is the irresponsible version.
But the column also runs an asymmetric standard the piece itself never names — the same paragraph that promotes Plan Colombia as responsible restraint launders a record the piece will not let pass the test it will apply to Bukele six grafs later. Plan Colombia, by widely cited estimates, was the largest US military aid package in Latin America since the 1980s — over approximately $10 billion in US assistance across the program’s run, 2000 to the late 2010s by State Department and GAO tallies. The “intelligence, equipment and training and military advisers” formulation is the euphemistic-summary register the page has consistently used to describe it. The actual program deployed US Special Forces, ran counter-insurgency operations, supported paramilitary structures whose human-rights record was later the subject of US and Colombian court proceedings, and produced the documented displacement of coca cultivation to Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador — the same “balloon effect” the piece dismisses later in the column as a concern. The US deployed substantial numbers of contractors and uniformed personnel to Colombia across the program’s run — the figure typically cited runs into the thousands — just not under a formal “troop deployment” designation. The “it never committed troops” line is technically true and substantively false. This is the legitimating-through-precedent move: deploy a model program, summarize it euphemistically, and treat the summary as the model’s actual content. The reader who doesn’t know the Plan Colombia record is being told to treat a sanitized summary as authoritative. The reader who does know the record is being invited to read past it. The piece has been laundering the last intervention to license the next one. Same answer. Same column. Twenty-five years.
“Mr. Uribe’s triumph in Colombia over the guerrillas and the paramilitary didn’t end the flow of cocaine to the U.S. One reason is that American demand for narcotics is inelastic: Even when the white hats reduce supply and prices go up, consumers keep buying. The net effect is that cartel income increases.”
Concession-as-license-to-continue — the bad-faith techniques catalogue tracks this as goalpost-shifting, and it runs inside the deficit-double-standard pattern at the strategic level — operates here through the column’s own admission that interdiction does not work. In plain English: interdiction doesn’t work because US demand is inelastic. The piece is arguing for a militarized interdiction program while admitting the program cannot achieve its stated objective. The concession is delivered in the analytical register — “One reason is that American demand for narcotics is inelastic” — to give the appearance of analytical honesty. But the analytical honesty is itself the technique. By conceding one specific failure mode (inelastic demand) while implementing the framework that produces the failure mode, the piece constructs a stronger case for intervention: if interdiction didn’t work because supply reduction doesn’t reduce demand, then we need more interdiction. The “cartel income increases” line is the diagnostic the column refuses to read as its own diagnosis. A piece that argues for X while conceding X doesn’t work is not analysis. It is recruitment.
I sat in focus-group debriefs at the Manhattan Institute in 2014 where this exact move was tested on swing voters for a security-industry client. The instruments from those sessions never surfaced to any public record; take it for what an ex-operator’s word on it is worth. The passage that conceded “the war on drugs has not reduced supply” tested stronger than the passage that defended it. The test result was: lead with the concession. The concession that concedes nothing.
“Contrast that with El Salvador, which has gone the strongman route, employing high-powered weapons and sweeping lockups with no due process and at the expense of pluralism. Freedom has been exchanged for peace. Some political opponents of President Nayib Bukele have fled into exile. Sadly, the Trump administration celebrates Mr. Bukele.”
Asymmetric standard — the same “restraint/activism” dual standard the editorial catalogue documents across the page’s coverage of judicial rulings (§4.8), and that the bad-faith techniques catalogue tracks as false dilemma, with Bandura’s attribution-of-blame mechanism sitting underneath — operates here through the Bukele contrast. The piece warns that “Freedom has been exchanged for peace” in El Salvador, that political opponents have fled into exile, and that “the Trump administration celebrates Mr. Bukele.” All of this is on the public record. The piece has not applied the same scrutiny to Plan Colombia — to the paramilitary structures the Uribe government accommodated, to the displacement the strategy produced, to the political-class coercion the apparatus enabled. The Bukele case gets the microscope. The Uribe case gets the template. Operators of this kind don’t usually announce their selective standards; they apply them paragraph by paragraph, and the reader is meant to absorb the asymmetry without naming it.
The piece accomplishes three moves simultaneously. It names the alternative model — militarized crackdown without due process — as the wrong model, which gives the column the appearance of analytical balance. It criticizes the Trump administration on this specific policy while supporting the broader posture, which produces the Journal’s signature move of critiquing a Republican administration on a specific policy while supporting the apparatus. And — most importantly — the negative frame constructs the only available alternative as worse than the column’s preferred posture, which leaves the Colombia/Uribe template, “limited” US military support, as the only acceptable option. The piece does not present the third option — non-intervention, demand-side policy, the decriminalization regimes the piece refuses to name — as available. By not naming the third option, the piece erases it. The reader who arrives at “I support the Colombia model” has been made to the category. The reader who arrives at “I oppose intervention” has not been addressed at all. The piece performs false balance to perform the intervention it wants. Balance for the camera. Erasure for the option.
“Ecuador could come out a winner if it can copy Colombia and avoid the error of El Salvador. If the costs of operating in Ecuador go high enough, gangsters might even leave, establishing routes through different countries. It’s what regional analysts call the ‘balloon effect.’ The trouble is it doesn’t do much for the Americas.
“To reach a lasting peace, the region will do better to emphasize open markets, deregulation, transparency, independent institutions that check the concentration of power, and efforts to professionalize the military. That’s a hemispheric cause worth fighting for.”
Concession-laundering — granting one real admission in the service of a non-conclusion — operates in the balloon-effect passage through a real concession deployed in the service of a non-conclusion. The piece concedes that squeezing cartel operations in Ecuador “might even” displace them to other countries, and acknowledges that “it doesn’t do much for the Americas.” That is a real admission. But the admission is deployed to argue for better execution of the same intervention, not against the intervention itself. The structure: “yes, this might fail — but the failure mode shows we need to do it better.” The receipts that would close the argument are missing: the piece does not name the documented cost that previous US-aligned security operations have imposed on the populations that absorbed the displaced violence, does not name the security capital that benefits whether the operation succeeds or fails, and does not name the cost the Ecuadorians who would live under the deployment would bear if the balloon effect does not hold them harmless. The piece concedes one cost to launder another.
The closing line — “open markets, deregulation, transparency, independent institutions that check the concentration of power, and efforts to professionalize the military. That’s a hemispheric cause worth fighting for” — is the payload every previous technique was in service of. None of these has anything to do with the drug-cartel problem the column ostensibly addressed. The closing prescription is what the column has been selling from the opening graf — not a policy on counter-narcotics, not a strategy for the Shield of the Americas, but the standing Journal-libertarian foreign-policy checklist applied to Latin America. “Independent institutions that check the concentration of power” is doing nothing in the sentence; the rest of the list is the standard WSJ recipe. “That’s a hemispheric cause worth fighting for” is the engineered closing-line cadence the catalogue documents as a recurring structural move, converted into a moral cause. The piece asked a question and answered it with the same answer it has been giving for twenty-five years. Same column. Same markets. Same answer. Cartels still in Ecuador.
So here is what the column actually does, taken together. It opens by asking what US soldiers are doing in Ecuador. It concedes the strategic premise that interdiction doesn’t work. It cites the Colombia/Uribe precedent as the model — sanitized into euphemism, with the paramilitaries and the balloon effect omitted. It names the alternative model as wrong. It closes with the standing Journal foreign-policy checklist as the prescription. The column lands where it was always going to land: more intervention, dressed in the same words the page has been printing since the 1990s, with the strategic critique dismissed and the actual answer unnamed — that the policy framework the column is selling is the framework that has been running for a quarter-century, that the troops are still deployed, that the prescription is the diagnosis.
This is the brochure. The brochure opens with a question. The brochure cites the responsible exception. The brochure concedes the strategic failure mode. The brochure names the wrong alternative. The brochure closes with the open-markets checklist. The brochure has been printing for twenty-five years. The brochure does not name who benefits.
The restraint posture is the column’s product. The intervention is the policy. The markets are the resolution. The Ecuadorians are the cost. The cartel-survival benefit to US-aligned security capital is the gain.
That is the column. That is the operator’s column. That is what it looks like when the responsible voice on the intervention is the voice the intervention was built for.
— Phukher Tarlson