By bombing drug traffickers and invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump honors the just war imperative to protect the U.S. from hemispheric perils.
P resident Donald Trump has authorized air strikes targeting Venezuelan drug traffickers, resulting in the elimination of eleven traffickers. This action, far from the reckless aggression critics decry, represents a principled application of American power against non-state actors who threaten our national security and the stability of our hemisphere.
As the Maduro communist regime continues to profit from these cartels, the United States must exercise its right to use force to neutralize regional threats that endanger our borders and prosperity. Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against the Tren de Aragua gang — which it designated a foreign terrorist organization operating at the direction of Venezuela’s communist regime — provides a robust legal framework to apprehend and remove these predatory aliens from our soil. Americans should applaud this approach and urge President Trump to press forward with lethal force against the Tren de Aragua gang, the Cartel de los Soles, and the Venezuelan communist regime itself, while fully enforcing the Alien Enemies Act to eradicate these threats at home and utilizing the War Powers Resolution abroad.
Venezuela’s descent into narco-state chaos under socialist rule is no secret. The regime’s complicity in transnational drug trafficking has flooded American streets with poison, fueling addiction, violence, and the deaths of U.S. citizens. Trump’s administration has rightly identified these traffickers not merely as criminals but as modern-day pirates and guerrillas — lawless combatants waging war on U.S. society. Tren de Aragua exemplifies the Venezuelan regime’s state-sponsored criminality as an extension of that regime’s communist agenda.
Under customary international law, the U.S. has the right to target and eliminate such enemies without due process or territorial sovereignty when they operate as hostis humani generis, or “enemies of all mankind.” Pirates, historically, enjoyed no protection from the laws of war. Any nation could seize and execute them on the high seas, a principle codified in treaties and upheld as universal custom. Today’s Venezuelan narco-traffickers fit this archetype precisely. They include the brutal Tren de Aragua operatives spreading terror across the Americas — active in at least 19 U.S. states through murders, kidnappings, and trafficking — and the regime-backed Cartel de los Soles embedding drug lords within the Venezuelan military.
They are not entitled to the constitutional rights reserved for American citizens or even lawful combatants. They are outlaws whose very existence justifies lethal force in self-defense. President Trump should double down on these strikes. He should expand them to dismantle these narco-terrorist networks entirely and, where necessary, target regime enablers who shield them.
This legal foundation rests on the principles of just war theory. It is a framework that has guided ethical statecraft, independent of supranational bodies.
Eric Patterson, a leading scholar on the just war tradition and author of works applying its tenets to contemporary threats like terrorism (and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation), argues that legitimate political authorities — such as the U.S. government — possess the moral and legal prerogative to use force against non-state actors who pose existential dangers.
In his analysis of just war thinking and terrorism, Patterson emphasizes that terrorists, like pirates or guerrillas, forfeit the protections of belligerency by rejecting the rules of engagement that define lawful war. They do not wear uniforms, adhere to the Geneva Conventions, or distinguish between civilians and military targets. They thus invite the full spectrum of defensive measures, including preemptive and sustained strikes, and merit none of the U.S. constitutional safeguards like Miranda rights or habeas corpus.
Patterson’s work underscores that proportionality in just war does not mean timidity. It means calibrated, ongoing force to neutralize the threat. This is what Trump achieved in the recent Venezuelan operation. The same approach should be applied henceforth against the Cartel de los Soles’ high-level operatives and Tren de Aragua’s international cells.
The tradition’s jus ad bellum criteria — just cause, right intention, and legitimate authority — are squarely met here. The cause is self-defense against an armed attack via drugs that kill more Americans annually than have many conventional wars. The intention is to protect innocents and dismantle a communist-enabled syndicate. And the authority resides with the elected executive as commander in chief. Scholars examining the applicability of just war to irregular forces argue that guerrillas and traffickers, by directly participating in hostilities — smuggling weapons, assassinating rivals, and corrupting institutions — lose civilian protections and may be lawfully targeted.
To withhold escalating force would be to abandon the victims of communism’s legacy, from Havana’s export of revolution to Caracas’s narco-fiefdoms. Americans should call on President Trump to escalate his administration’s lethal campaign. Further steps might include drone strikes on Tren de Aragua leaders in hiding, precision bombings of Cartel de los Soles command centers, and targeted operations against Maduro’s inner circle that props up this criminal empire. To do so would uphold our sovereign right to secure the hemisphere against these proximate dangers.
Critics howl about constitutionality and escalation, but they miss the point. This is not an invasion but a surgical — and now, a potentially expanding — response to an ongoing assault. The War Powers Resolution permits such limited actions by the executive to repel sudden attacks or threats from abroad, and historical precedents — from the Barbary pirates to interventions safeguarding the Monroe Doctrine — affirm the U.S. prerogative to act decisively against enemies in our own backyard.
Trump’s strike sets a vital precedent. Narco-dictators and their trafficker allies will face the full weight of American justice, not diplomacy’s empty gestures. But one strike is not enough; it must be the opening salvo in a broader offensive focused on our immediate sphere of security, synchronized with rigorous enforcement of the Alien Enemies Act to deport hostile Venezuelans from our homeland.
The Victims of Communism Foundation has long reminded the world of the human cost of communism. The Maduro regime enables this scourge, mirroring the oppressions that claimed more than 100 million lives in the 20th century. President Trump, by bombing these traffickers, honors the just war imperative to protect the U.S. from hemispheric perils. I urge him to continue and intensify this effort: unleash lethal force relentlessly against Tren de Aragua, Cartel de los Soles, and the Venezuelan communist regime until they are eradicated as threats to our security. America — and freedom — demand no less. The time to act is now.