President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise: no new wars. But like most politicians, he hasn’t had a problem throwing those campaign mottos aside when it suits him.
The notion that Trump was a realist or a restrainer, the polar opposite of former President George W. Bush’s neoconservatism or former President Joe Biden‘s liberal internationalism, was always a mirage. Trump isn’t immune to dropping ordnance. Nine months into his second term, his administration has already unleashed two military engagements in the Middle East: the first a monthslong bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and the second a U.S. operation to destroy Iran‘s three major nuclear sites. Both could be charitably described as kicking the can down the road. The Houthis continue to threaten civilian shipping in the Red Sea and the Iranians aren’t any closer today to giving up on their nuclear enrichment program than they were before the U.S. bombs fell.
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Now we can add a new war to the mix: the war against narcotraffickers in Latin America.
Previous U.S. administrations since the dawn of Richard Nixon have described America’s counterdrug efforts as a “war,” but those efforts involved heavy-handed law enforcement and a stiff penal code. Trump, in contrast, is taking the word “war” literally by sending the U.S. Navy into the Caribbean, flirting with a regime change operation against Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, and destroying small vessels allegedly carrying drugs to the United States. Four vessels have already been taken out since September, the latest one on Oct. 3, and if Trump’s words are anything to go by, there are more strikes in the pipeline. The Trump administration is currently mulling the option of striking targets inside Venezuela as well.
To say there is a litany of problems with this militarized approach would be an understatement.
Taking the fight to drug cartels has been done in the past, including in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, all driven by the assumption that military pressure will, over time, result in drug trafficking organizations fracturing into irrelevance. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Mexico’s murder rate is slowly going down, but the numbers remain staggeringly high compared to what they were at the beginning of the century. Colombia used to be a success story, but it is now viewed as a failure; coca cultivation increased by more than 50% between 2022 and 2023, the dissolution of the FARC sparked new factions that are currently fighting among themselves (as well as the state), and the White House last month designated Colombia as a major drug-producing country. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s violence is so bad that the government is now essentially begging for U.S. troops to return to the country.
None of this even begins to account for the legal problems attached to Trump’s strategy against the cartels. A president using U.S. military force unilaterally, without the approval of Congress as the Constitution requires, is unfortunately the norm rather than the exception these days. But in past cases, Washington, D.C., could make a decent enough case that the country, or U.S. servicemembers deployed overseas, were under some sort of imminent attack that needed to be countered. Other actions, such as former President Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya, had the approval of the U.N. Security Council.
However, Trump’s legal rationale is almost comical. By the looks of it, the White House is basically telling us that the president has the right to wage war against any entity he wants, regardless of where it’s located, if he designates it as a foreign terrorist organization. Trump’s lawyers are also claiming that striking boats in the Southern Caribbean is merely an act of self-defense, a perfectly legitimate concept in international law, because tens of thousands of Americans are dying of overdoses every single year from the drugs these narcotraffickers are shipping to our shores.
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The holes in this argument could sink a ship. First, the interpretation sounds as if it were ginned up in a back room of a dive bar and has never been articulated before, presumably because the arguments behind it are so ludicrous that nobody would take it seriously. Even John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer who rationalized the torture program against detainees during the war on terrorism, doesn’t buy it. It’s not hard to see why: the president isn’t a king. Trump can’t order somebody’s death simply by calling them a terrorist. Drug traffickers may be the scum of the earth, but they aren’t terrorists using violence to achieve a political objective. To mix the two together, as the Trump administration is doing, has dangerous practical implications.
And what are they? Nothing short of military whack-a-mole across the entire Western Hemisphere. Let’s remember: Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua is not the only Latin American criminal group labeled by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. The list now includes Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif in Haiti, Los Choneros and Los Lobos in Ecuador, and a litany of cartels in Mexico. By Trump’s logic, the U.S. is now free to bomb any and all of these groups at whim, regardless of whether their governments support it. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the diplomatic fallout that could ensue.
Washington, D.C., could be on the verge of another forever war, this time in its own backyard.