By: Noah Rothman – nationalreview.com – September 4, 2025

A metaphor no more.

We are going to wage combat against drug cartels that are flooding American streets and killing Americans,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday night. America’s “war on drugs,” he revealed, was a metaphor no more. Indeed, open hostilities had already begun. Earlier that evening, the firepower U.S. Southern Command has been amassing in the Caribbean Sea over the last several weeks struck what American authorities described as a drug boat originating in Venezuela and believed to be bound for “Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” Rubio added. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up.”

One senior American official summed up the new doctrine to which the president appealed. “The president’s overall perspective is that, if there is a terrorist threat to the homeland of the United States, he trusts the military to take that threat out,” the official told Axios, “whether it’s a drug boat off the coast of Venezuela or an al-Qaeda terrorist in the Middle East.”

Wars are messy things — easier to get into than out of — but the Trump administration is likely to find that the court of public opinion will be warm to the president’s strategic goal in this campaign. Latin American drug traffickers are not popular. It’s the tactics designed to secure that goal that tend to rankle, especially if victory proves more elusive than the war planners and politicians initially suggest. And of all the military campaigns that are likely to end in stalemate, it’s a literal war on drugs.

The predicate for the operation that reportedly killed eleven people the administration claims to have been drug traffickers is the Venezuelan regime’s illicit support for narcotics distributors.In that regard, Nicolás Maduro’s lawless socialist state is a regional menace. Democratic and Republican presidential administrations acknowledge the regime’s active support for “narco-terrorism,” to say nothing of the Maduro cadre’s support for anti-American state and non-state actors across the globe.

This administration has been building a case against Caracas for some time. It attempted to justify its deportation policies on the basis that the U.S. was in a de facto state of war with Venezuela because Caracas maintained operational control over the Tren de Aragua gang. The administration’s assertion did not withstand legal scrutiny, but their contention is not inconceivable given Maduro’s maintenance of the Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”) and his use of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels to traffic drugs into North America. In addition to building up forces in the region, the Trump administration has mounted a diplomatic campaign aimed at getting Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors to recognize its criminality.

The president and his subordinates are right: The regime will continue to destabilize the region so long as it is in power. That is why the logic of a kinetic war on the drugs that emanate from Venezuela invariably will lead to escalation.

The problem with a drug war are the trade’s twin pillars — supply and demand. The demand is not going away. Many have tried to use the power and influence of the state to compel Americans to abandon their taste for illegal intoxicants. All have failed. So, the administration is going after the suppliers. They and their sponsors will adapt to these attacks, shift tactics, and perhaps even attempt to retaliate. Even if those efforts come up short, there will be drug boats so long as there are suppliers and a market for their goods.

Invariably, then, American military planners will be compelled to target suppliers closer and closer to their sources. Those options are surely already available to the president. If those sources cannot be disrupted because of their support from the regime, regime targets must be next. So, up the escalatory ladder we go.

The president, his allies, and maybe even the Office of Legal Counsel might believe they do not need a legal basis to apply force against “terrorists” in the Caribbean, but Congress — particularly one controlled by the president’s opposition — may. Brian Finucane’s indispensable analysis in Just Security judiciously demonstrates that, while the State Department has designated Tren de Aragua a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), that does not “by itself convey authority to use force.”

There is no reasonable interpretation of the 2002 authorization of the use of force against al-Qaeda as well as its affiliates and allies that would apply to every FTO on the planet. Indeed, “if U.S. forces are targeting individuals who are civilians — not qualifying as combatants/fighters or directly participating in hostilities — this raises the specter of accountability under the War Crimes Act.”

This is deeply troubling on its merits, to say nothing of the secondary but nevertheless real consideration that the president’s opponents could seek to criminalize this operation and prosecute those who participated in it. And the courts may not disagree with that interpretation of U.S. law. Simply declaring that what has previously been a law enforcement problem is now a matter for the U.S. military does not trump statute. Nor will it mollify America’s partners in Latin America who have bitterly protested the summary neutralization of civilians the White House simply says — we cannot even say “alleged” because that implies process — were “terrorists.”

The president’s domestic supporters will be tempted to dismiss these concerns because many who raise them are hysterical. The only reason why I was privy to one wild-eyed critic of the administration whose savvy grasp of Republican politics attributed this strike to Trump’s effort to appease “MAGA Neocons” (two peas in a pod, those two) is because MSNBC host Chris Hayes apparently found his view compelling enough to retweet. Likewise, the Bluesky set is alive with outrage over the “mass murder of people on a tiny Venezuelan boat.” But more circumspect critics of the strike observe that interdicting these vessels, which the U.S. Coast Guard does routinely, and which could have been done in this case by Rubio’s own admission, have asked a question that may not have a compelling legal answer.

The strike does have a compelling hot-blooded rationale. At long last, we’re putting the screws to the drug traffickers who have used American law to shield them from rougher justice. That’s an easy sentiment to sympathize with. But the strategic flaws in Trump’s approach are revealed by America’s refusal to apply military force to other rogue drug-trafficking regimes like North Korea and Cuba. The drugs are a weapon, perhaps even a tool of statecraft, but the tool’s wielder is the real threat.

The good news is that the administration does not need a legal predicate for the use of force against Venezuela to isolate and weaken its regime — the collapse of which is what will beget a brighter future for Venezuelans and their neighbors. The president will need unambiguous legal authority if it seeks to expand the definition of threats to American national security to include the domestic American market for narcotics. If they can’t neutralize the users, they will have to neutralize the dealers. But those boats are only full of middlemen. Going after the real hierarchy will prove logically unavoidable if this campaign proceeds as its executors insist it will. Now that would be a real war.

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Source: The Strategic and Legal Flaws in Trump’s Literal War on Drugs | National Review