On Sep. 1, 2025, a U.S. Navy combat aircraft illegally sunk a ship in international waters off the coast of Venezuela in an airstrike. All 11 people on board were killed. The unlucky vessel was allegedly carrying drugs to Trinidad and Tobago, presumed to be for ultimate export to U.S. consumers. This missile strike was the first instance of a (known) U.S. air attack in Latin America since 1989, when the United States bombed several military targets as part of its invasion of Panama. It was also the first time our commander in chief has openly ordered the military to find and kill noncombatant citizens of another country as part of the war on drugs. This unprecedented aggression violates international law, has strained relations with our allies, and may lead the United States into a disastrous war: a land war with Venezuela.
The U.S. president broke news of this first boat strike on his own social media platform. In his post on Truth Social, Donald Trump boasted about the killings and claimed the boat was operated by Tren de Aragua “narcoterrorists.” A few months before this, an official in Trump’s newly rechristened Department of War, Joseph Humire, was discovered to have falsified reports of this gang’s activities in the United States. Several asylum seekers have also allegedly been deported as members of Tren de Aragua simply for being Venezuelan and having tattoos. As one of Trump’s biggest scapegoats, it is questionable that Tren de Aragua was the real target of this strike.
Throughout September and October of this year, the U.S. military went on to kill at least 68 more people across 11 strikes in the Caribbean and nine in the Pacific Ocean. Three separate strikes – claiming 13 lives quickly and leaving one survivor adrift in the ocean to die a slow death – were carried out on Oct. 27, the deadliest day of the bombing streak so far. Strikes have been carried out near the waters of Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico, bringing the United States close to unnecessary hostilities with several nation-states. Venezuela, the country closest to most of the strikes, has responded with panic to Trump’s unprecedented aggression. Venezuelan officials initially claimed that the attacks never happened or were AI-generated, and Venezuela’s president is now asking Russia and China for military aid to defend his borders. But the impact of these strikes goes beyond Venezuela. Two survivors of a strike on a semi-submersible in the Caribbean who were repatriated to their home countries (Ecuador and Colombia, respectively) have not been charged with any crime due to a lack of evidence. While semi-submersibles are typically associated with drug trafficking, any proof of whether or not the vessel was carrying drugs is now on the bottom of the ocean, and so these men, battered by U.S. missiles, walk free. Later, responding to U.S. claims that two other boats had been sunk because they were carrying narcotics, Colombian President Gustavo Petro countered that innocent citizens of his own country had been murdered. Following these incidents, and after being called an “illegal drug leader” by Trump, Petro recalled his ambassador to the United States for consultations in Bogotá. Colombia has long been a U.S. ally. These strikes are destroying diplomatic ties for no good reason.
Yet Trumpist sentiment (or party line) when it comes to these strikes is one of total enthusiasm. Whether they genuinely believe the killing of alleged drug traffickers without any trial is a just use of military force or are simply defending actions ordered by their political idol, numerous figures in the Trump administration and Congress have defended the sinkings of these vessels as valid and moral military operations. In doing so, they send the message that indirectly causing suffering to U.S. citizens deserves a death sentence: one that is swift, summary, and delivered from the sky. In his announcement of the Sep. 15 strike in the Caribbean, Trump summed up this line of reasoning nicely. In a putative warning to traffickers, he wrote in all caps, “IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” Notably, Trump uses the word “can” here – even if you have not yet committed a crime, our president holds that he has the right to kill you.
U.S. military personnel have been told to seek out and murder civilians before. In 1901, U.S. Army General Jacob Smith gave an illegal order during the “pacification” of the Philippine island of Samar. He told his soldiers to kill every civilian on the island who was “capable of bearing arms” and repeatedly defined this to mean anyone over the age of 10. Subsequent killings by Smith’s troops claimed the lives of an estimated 2,500 Filipino civilians and mark a truly disgraceful chapter in the history of the United States’ military, just like massacres at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, and My Lai. But, at least in the cases of Wounded Knee and My Lai, orders to slaughter civilians did not come from top generals. And they were never ordered by the president.
For top U.S. government officials to explicitly advocate for airstrikes with the same underlying rhetoric as the despicable orders given by Smith (kill civilians if they are judged to be a potential threat) is extremely worrying. Though it is currently being deployed on a small scale, the extrajudicial killing of any sort of noncombatant, even if they really are criminals who are guilty of a highly unpopular crime, is deplorable. And using these strikes as a pretext to launch land operations in a neutral country that does not want war with us is criminal.
But that is just what Trump wants to do.
Trump has said he is opposed to the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for its alleged “narcoterrorism.” Maduro, admittedly an authoritarian leader, may or may not have ties to drug trafficking. But lately, Trump has alluded to “looking at land” in Venezuela now that the seas are “under control.” The same day Trump said this, The New York Times revealed the U.S. president had authorized the CIA to undertake covert operations in Venezuela. And now, Trump’s administration (while discounting an invasion for now) is looking to strike Venezuelan military bases it alleges facilitate the export of drugs.
Novelist Tom Clancy, who was known for his Reaganite, hawkish views, outlined why military actions such as these would be disastrous for the United States in his 1989 thriller, Clear and Present Danger. In the book, a corrupt national security advisor pitches a harebrained scheme to a politically weak, unnamed president: covertly parachuting teams of Spanish-speaking U.S. Marines into Colombia to monitor cartel-affiliated airstrips there, thus enabling U.S. jets to intercept or shoot down drug-trafficking flights over the Caribbean. Eager to be seen as “solving the drug crisis,” the president accepts, and insertions begin a few months later. Due to a mess of bribery, blackmail, and mere accident, this operation eventually falls apart, with dire consequences for the Marines left stranded in Colombia. Many of these men die and for no good reason. The drug crisis continues, the president is voted out, and the national security advisor, disgraced, throws himself in front of a moving bus.
While the recent strikes on boats mirror only the interception prong of the covert operation in Clear and Present Danger, Trump’s future plans in Venezuela and the United States could reach or even eclipse the level of folly shown in the book. His assurances that he “doubts” the United States will go to war with Venezuela mean nothing when the man also says that Maduro’s days are numbered, and that he plans to order the military to extrajudicially kill people trafficking drugs into the United States overland. This means he might bring the boat strikes to our border and murder people on U.S. soil. Or he could wage an undeclared war on Venezuela: like our wars in Vietnam and Korea; like the “little war” he is waging on anonymous boats in the Caribbean; and like the doomed, pointless war on drugs, which was taken to its logical extreme in Clancy’s book. Conventional war with Venezuela, though unlikely, would be even worse than this.
So what was the impetus for the strikes in the Caribbean? A desire to project a “tough” image for the U.S. public? An attempt to solve the drug crisis, like the failure of the president in Clear and Present Danger? Or is it simply a segue into military action against Venezuela?
Why not all three? It is clear that Trump and his cronies have no regard for either international law or the law of this country. They have not even attempted to provide a legal basis for the boat killings. These strikes are illegal. They are inhuman. They may be designed to effect regime change, and yet their proponents apparently delight in them. Vice President JD Vance, in a moment of telling callousness, made a cruel “joke” that people should not “go fishing right now in that area of the world” while discussing the killings. This seemingly confirms that these attacks are, in fact, indiscriminate and arbitrary, and that perhaps the world’s most powerful military really did murder an unarmed Colombian fisherman in cold blood. To Vance, if nobody else, that admission is funny.
Featured Image Source: Netherlands Ministry of Defense
