Mexico’s criminal gangs see their president’s attempt to appease them as a license to kill.

Members of the LeBaron clan were sprayed with bullets Monday as they traveled to their Mexican home compound, about 100 miles south of Arizona. Nine Americans, including six children, are dead.

The horrific massacre raised President Trump’s ire. He immediately tweeted America’s readiness to help launch a WAR in Mexico. “We merely await a call from your great new president!” he wrote.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador politely rejected the offer. A favorite of Latin America’s revolutionary left, AMLO, as he’s widely known, is no war consiglieri. It “does not work,” he said in a speech Wednesday, adding that Mexico’s past wars on drugs only “caused more violence.”

As horrific as the LeBaron massacre was, in Mexico it was just another Monday. Under AMLO, the cartel wars set new homicide records, exacting an average of 100 deaths a day and surpassing death tolls in America’s Mideast and Afghanistan wars at their worst years.

And after AMLO launched a “hugs, not bullets” strategy to deal with his country’s violence, little was left of the protection his predecessors afforded American citizens in Chihuahua a decade ago.

The socialist president hopes to negotiate with the cartels, rather than fight them. When confronting the gangs, if at all, troops are ordered to tread lightly.

Also, federal forces assigned to fight the gangs are diminished in numbers. In 2009, after gangs murdered two members of the LeBron clan, Mexican authorities sent troops to defend their Chihuahua compound. But since AMLO launched his appeasement strategy, only 2700 army troops remained to patrol the vast mountainous deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua states, where the Monday massacre occurred.

One reason for lack of gang-fighting personnel is also why Trump strangely adores Mexico’s leftist president: AMLO agreed to divert nearly a third of his federal troops from fighting cartels to barring Central American “caravans” from entering Mexico’s southern border. The cartels got stronger.

Worse: AMLO‘s strategy of “abrazos, no balazos,” or hugs, not bullets, encourages more mayhem — as in last month’s clumsy attempt to politely arrest the son of Mexico’s most well-known cartel leader, Joaquin “EL Chapo” Guzman, who now resides in a US federal prison.

After federal officials arrested the young Ovidio Guzman Lopez in Culiacan, Sinaloa (aka El Chapo’s drug kingdom), buddies of the drug princeling went on a shooting spree, killing and burning everything in sight. Admitting defeat, the federal troops let Guzman go.

That’s no way to beat the cartels that strangle any hope of Mexican progress.

A new idea in Washington — designate the cartels as terrorists to dry up their funds — isn’t much of a solution either, because the huge criminal profits are rarely kept in banks, where such designation is effective.

Mexicans, meanwhile, rightly blame America’s endless thirst for narcotics that fuel the cartel’s profits. Yet, a drug user’s weakness rarely diminishes the pusher’s guilt.

So what to do?

We may launch an American-led all-out military campaign that can eventually defeat the cartels — but not before turning it into a costly “endless war,” exacting numerous American casualties and likely losing public support in the process.

Or we can deprive cartels of profits by legalizing all drug use in America — as back when we ended prohibition. Good idea, but politically unrealistic for now.

Another option: continue what we’ve been doing all along. Since 2007, under a cooperation pact known as the Merida initiative, America has allotted nearly $2 billion to fight the drug wars in Mexico, providing arms, intelligence and training.

It hasn’t worked, but it could, with more money and arms (such as helicopters that were missing in the recent Sinaloa raid.) Further intel and training cooperation between America’s and Mexico’s cartel-fighting authorities — on both federal and local levels — and developing aggressive strategies, could perhaps begin to reverse the cartels’ fortunes.

But Trump, so far, is more eager to isolate Mexico with a big, beautiful wall than tighten cooperation with it. And AMLO, an America-skeptic his entire career, likes to cuddle Mexico’s real enemies more than fight them. That’s no recipe for success.