On Friday, President Donald Trump announced a third fatal U.S. strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat. The operation, which killed what Trump called three “male narcoterrorists,” follows two U.S. strikes earlier this month also on alleged Venezuelan drug boats. The attacks are not just likely illegal and unconstitutional—Congress has done nothing to authorize the use of such military force—but a deeply flawed way to tackle drug smuggling in the Western Hemisphere.
The strikes have come with a fair bit of hyperbole from the White House. Trump has warned Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who in 2020 was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on drug-trafficking charges and now has a $50 million bounty on his head, to stop sending drugs and members of the Tren de Aragua gang into the U.S.
Trump isn’t throwing out empty threats. The U.S. has eight warships based in the Caribbean—many off the coast of Venezuela—and 10 F-35 fighter jets stationed in Puerto Rico. And with draft legislation that would authorize Trump to wage war on anyone he deems a “narcoterrorist,” Washington may be on the cusp of a larger-scale militarization that looks ominously similar to former President George W. Bush’s global war on terror. Such an approach would plunge the U.S. into another expensive, unending conflict, this time largely in its own hemisphere.
The Trump Administration’s aim seems clear enough: leverage U.S. military power to deter Latin America’s drug cartels from sending their products north. Yet that approach would be a mistake because it’s unlikely to make any real dent on the illicit drug trade.
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First, experts say that Venezuela plays a minor role in the drug trade. While Colombian criminal groups have used the country as a transit point in the past, Venezuela isn’t the preferred route for the region’s drug traffickers. Indeed, a 2024 DEA report said that some 90% of the cocaine that reaches the U.S. comes from Mexico via Colombia.
The focus on Venezuela is also bound to further complicate relations between Washington and Caracas as a whole. Some may ask why this is relevant; they have, after all, viewed each other as adversaries for years. The Trump Administration considers Maduro an illegitimate president who steals elections and floods the U.S. with cocaine, and has since Trump’s first term implemented a maximum pressure strategy on the Venezuelan leader. Maduro, in turn, castigates Washington as an imperial power seeking “regime change for oil.”
Yet the bad blood notwithstanding, there are times when the U.S. and Venezuela have opted to engage in discussions. Trump is no different in this respect. During the first eight months of his second term, Trump has dispatched Richard Grenell, his special envoy, to Caracas to talk with Maduro on everything from energy and deportation schemes to the status of Americans imprisoned in Venezuela. In some cases, those meetings have resulted in breakthroughs. In January, Grenell flew back from Venezuela with six American detainees. In March, Maduro agreed to accept Venezuelan migrants deported from the U.S. Four months later, another prisoner release was hammered out, in which 10 U.S. citizens and permanent residents were freed in exchange for about 250 Venezuelan migrants who the Trump Administration sent to El Salvador.
But Maduro has little reason to continue cooperating with Trump if he believes Washington is fixated on overthrowing his regime. Maduro certainly has no intention of becoming the next Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator who was napped by the U.S. during its 1989 invasion and sentenced to 40 years on drug-trafficking and other charges. The harder the Trump Administration tries to pin the drug trafficking issue on Maduro, the less incentive he has to cooperate on other matters like migration, which Trump cares a lot about.
As history shows, no nation can kill their way out of the drug problem. Various governments have prefaced their entire anti-drug campaigns on military force before and have consistently failed. For example, the Mexican government declared war on the cartels in 2006 and tasked the military with prosecuting counter-drug operations, only to see those very same cartels get even more violent in their response. The country has registered more than 460,000 homicides since then, with the annual toll climbing above 30,000 every year since 2017. The 2024 election campaign was Mexico’s most violent in modern history, with more than three dozen candidates assassinated and many others dropping out over threats to their safety.
Colombia is often heralded as a success story. But the picture is murkier. While the Colombian security forces are perhaps the most capable in Latin America courtesy of the $12 billion in U.S. security support allocated under the now defunct Plan Colombia program, Colombia has registered a significant increase in coca cultivation in recent years—a trend that occurred even while Plan Colombia was in effect. Indeed, the State Department has once again identified it as a major illicit drugs hub.
Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats on the high seas is unlikely to succeed where previous military-centric efforts have failed. Even if the Trump Administration considerably ramps up such attacks, there will be at best a short-term blip as traffickers learn to deal with the new reality. As long demand is strong and the U.S. remains the world’s top market, these criminal outfits will have billions of dollars’ worth of reasons to continue their operations, no matter the risk.
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