The U.S. military blew up a speedboat in international waters near Venezuela on Sept. 2, killing all 11 people on board. President Donald Trump claimed that the boat was operated by Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, smuggling drugs. Trump has repeatedly shown that his word isn’t trustworthy, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt, it’s an unprecedented action for a U.S. president, asserting powers far beyond those utilized in the war on terror.
Unlike even the most controversial drone strikes, this attack fired on a nonthreatening target in a nonhostile environment on purpose, when other means, such as capture, were easily doable.
The drone campaign against al Qaeda and associated terrorists was authorized by the U.S. Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Presidents stretched that authorization for the use of military force to include other terrorist groups—such as the Islamic State, which didn’t exist in 2001—but not drug cartels.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration designated as terrorists Tren de Aragua and another Venezuelan group, Cartel de los Soles, absurdly calling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the leader of both. Maybe this Supreme Court will eventually decide that Trump can define “terrorist” to mean whatever he wants, but Congress did not authorize this—and there has been no precipitating event, such as a terrorist attack from Venezuela.
When the Bush administration created the legal classification “enemy combatant” to target al Qaeda, it was responding to a real legal ambiguity. The Geneva Conventions and other international law distinguish between civilians and state military personnel, but al Qaeda is neither. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had declared war on the United States and its allies, conducted acts of war against U.S. targets, and planned more, so they weren’t civilians. But they weren’t members of a state military, either, nor were their operations confined to a single geographic area.
With drug traffickers, there’s no ambiguity. They’re not making war on the United States—they’re breaking U.S. laws to make illicit money. That’s just crime. The government can and should work to counter trafficking, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. Under both domestic and international law, the right response was interdiction: stop the boat, board it, search, confiscate, and arrest.
The United States is already good at that. The Coast Guard puts out videos of successful operations, such as this one, showing officers boarding an in-motion submersible, or this video, where the U.S. forces stop a boat near Venezuela with warning shots from a helicopter. One relatively small craft in open water is well within their abilities.
Interdiction rather than airstrike is not just legally required; it’s also better morally and strategically. By boarding the boat, investigators can confirm or disprove suspicions. If narcotics traffickers are on board, or even terrorists, then arresting them means that they can be interrogated for intelligence and potentially convinced to flip on their superiors. Putting them on trial upholds principles of due process and innocent until proven guilty, increasing the likelihood that informants trust the United States enough to cooperate, and showing the world that the United States is a rule-of-law society.
Except, the Trump administration appears intent on the opposite—as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it, “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” Members of the administration not only gave the likely illegal order; they also bragged about the strike after. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio posted video of the explosion on X. Trump posted it on multiple websites. Neither presented evidence that the boat contained any drugs, let alone weapons.
After the attack, U.S. Defense Department officials were reportedly still working on what legal authority to tell the public—which means that they conducted the strike without one.
Here’s how Vice President J.D. Vance tried justifying it: “The legal authority … is that there are people who are bringing—literal terrorists—who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.”
They’re not literal terrorists. Drug traffickers use violence to advance their criminal enterprise, not to advance a political ideology, and therefore require different countermeasures.
It’s possible that they weren’t drug traffickers, either. Eleven is a lot of people for a drug-smuggling speedboat—they usually minimize personnel to leave more space for drugs—suggesting that it may have been carrying migrants, or that those people were there for some other purpose. Trump officials have been caught repeatedly lying that innocent people are violent gang members, such as with Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Vance didn’t even try to claim a legal rationale for bombing that boat at that time. Rather, he effectively asserted that the existence of drug smuggling anywhere authorizes the president to kill anyone he wants to, whether or not they pose an imminent threat, no matter any law or treaty. It’s a leap beyond anything that the United States claimed in the war on terror.
Some U.S. drone strikes have hit exclusively civilian targets, tragically killing innocent people, but those were mistakes. U.S. officials didn’t brag afterward; they conducted internal reviews; identified bad intelligence and confirmation bias; and in some cases, adjusted rules of engagement.
In 2013, U.S. drone strikes in Yemen killed 16 people in wedding processionals, mistaking them for al Qaeda convoys. Afterward, the Yemeni government compensated victims’ families.
In 2021, as the United States was withdrawing from Afghanistan, a drone strike hit a civilian vehicle, killing 10 people, including children. An Islamic State-Khorasan suicide bombing had recently killed more than 180 people near the Kabul airport, U.S. intelligence suspected more attacks, and drone operators wrongly thought that a man loading water containers into a car was loading explosives. U.S. officials acknowledged error, apologized, and offered compensation to the victims’ families.
That doesn’t bring anyone back to life, nor does it absolve the United States of responsibility, but at least it treats the incidents as bad—and both were in territory hostile to U.S. forces where there had been recent attacks.
In 2011, a U.S. drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen. That attack was on purpose; the first, and to my knowledge only, time that a U.S. drone strike knowingly targeted a U.S. citizen. It’s a controversial case because there’s no doubt that Awlaki was an active senior member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He openly advocated terrorist attacks against the United States; recruited the “underwear bomber,” who tried to blow up a plane at the Detroit airport; and via, email correspondence, encouraged the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, who killed 13 people in Texas.
I didn’t shed a tear for Awlaki, but no president should be able to decide on their own that American citizens can be stripped of constitutional rights. Awlaki should have been tried in absentia.
But despite the serious concerns about a president ordering the death of a U.S. citizen without trial, the United States at least identified Awlaki before firing, and he posed a national security threat. He was in a part of Yemen where al Qaeda was active, raising the risk that attempting arrest would cause a firefight that killed American personnel and many civilians, like the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia.
Trump’s Caribbean strike had none of that. The United States fired without identifying any individual on the boat, in an area where the U.S. military operates freely, when an arrest operation was low risk. Trump’s choice to launch a missile and brag about it afterward, even if primarily intended as domestic propaganda, is an aggressive and thoughtless signal to the world, setting a dangerous precedent that could blow back on Americans.