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The Bukele and Duterte presidencies are the most recent pieces of evidence that a War on Drugs *can* be won if you don't have all of this ideological baggage weighing you down. America is too libertarian in all the wrong ways and too authoritarian in all the wrong ways. Everything is twisted.

Fighting properly thus has too many adverse side effects from a liberal democratic perspective: the increased potential of human rights violations, extrajudicial killings, and other things that are a big no-no in entrenched liberal democracies. (Here, I mean any country that enthusiastically believes itself to be one: the Philippines and El Salvador are also liberal democracies, but they don't take this ideology and political system as seriously and are more willing to deviate into 'populism'.)

Essentially, liberal democracy prefers a drug epidemic over these side effects, since the former is simply viewed as a public health problem or, if individualized, simply an individual responsibility problem, whereas the latter is viewed as a government overreach problem or a human rights problem. Anyone sufficiently close to liberalism will clearly view perpetuating the drug epidemic as a lesser of evils compared to embracing authoritarianism on this issue.

But these wars need to be sustained for a long time, possibly even indefinitely. As soon as Duterte was replaced by the fool Marcos Jr., so much of that progress was undone. Six years of reduction was effectively erased in one or two years. It has already been a case of one step forward, two steps back. Maybe it will be three or four steps back by the end of the current administration. Drug addiction and murders have been surging.

If the Duterte administration is any indication, in one or two years after Bukele leaves office those figures will almost certainly shoot back up again. The International Criminal Court and others will come after him as well.

And because Bukele won't, and probably can't, kill them all, they'll simply wait until that time, even though the most enduring short-term fix, the one has the longest effect, is to simply eradicate them all. And yet imagine what a future, more liberal president might do: probably release all the MS-13 and other scum from containment soon after assuming office. Something like one in six Salvadorans already live outside of El Salvador. If Whites had any sense, the most realistic foreign policy option they have regarding the Salvadorans is to simply ensure that Bukele or some like-minded 'strongman' leader continues to rule that cesspool indefinitely, someone who ensures that the scum are never released. The approval ratings suggest that the popularity of his governance style is immense, i.e. never polling below 80% and often polling above 90%, and Salvadorans would actually welcome such an intervention.