U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term has been typified by unorthodox moves that have stretched the limits of presidential power. But the escalating war against alleged drug boats that his administration has launched in the Caribbean stands out as a particularly unusual development—and there are open questions about the legality, effectiveness, and broader aims of the operation.
Since early September, the United States has conducted seven strikes against alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela and two in the Pacific, killing at least 37 people. The Trump administration said that the strikes are targeting dangerous “narcoterrorists,” while accusing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of heading a drug cartel, but it has offered little to no solid evidence to back this up. The operation, which undermines Trump’s campaign pledge for “no new wars” in his second term, has raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill.
Amid widespread doubts over the administration’s rationale for the strikes, there’s growing concern that the operation is part of an effort to raise pressure on Maduro and catalyze regime change in the South American country.
With so many unknowns swirling around the complicated situation, Foreign Policy spoke to several experts to get their perspectives on some of the biggest questions about the recent strikes—including the legality, Trump’s endgame, and the potential consequences for the United States.
Are these strikes legal?
Many legal experts have said that the U.S. strikes violate both domestic and international law.
Under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the president is generally considered to have broad authority to use military force to protect national security. Trump has designated a number of Latin American cartels as terrorist organizations and asserted that the United States is acting in “self-defense” against such groups.
However, experts and rights groups said this does not give him the legal authority to treat them as enemy combatants and use lethal force against them.
In September, a group of United Nations experts condemned Trump’s actions and underscored that international law doesn’t “allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers,” adding that criminal activities “should be disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.”
Earlier this month, Trump told Congress that the United States is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. But the administration’s assertion that the alleged drug smuggling boats posed a national security threat serious enough to need a military response—the basis of its legal justification for the strikes—is undermined by several factors.
While there is no denying that illicit drugs are a problem in the United States, with substances like fentanyl killing tens of thousands of Americans per year, the trafficking of such narcotics does not constitute an armed attack on a country under international law. Moreover, Venezuela is not a major source of the illicit drugs that the administration claims to be concerned about (more on that below).
Congress has also not declared war on Venezuela nor approved an authorization for use of military force against drug cartels. Earlier this month, a war powers resolution—pushed by Democratic lawmakers—that aimed to block Trump from continuing to conduct strikes in the Caribbean failed in the Senate. Only two Republicans supported the measure. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), one of the resolution’s sponsors, told FP last month that Trump’s actions in the Caribbean were “dangerous” and “lawless.”
Trump is far from the first U.S. president to use military force without congressional approval and to face criticism for it. Former President Joe Biden, for example, faced pushback in Congress over strikes he ordered in Yemen. But ordering the military to target and kill alleged drug traffickers pushes the United States into uncharted territory.
“The legal open-endedness” of this operation should “be a big concern to everyone,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on conflict and counternarcotics, given the situation’s potential to set a precedent for actions to be taken against other countries, such as Mexico, or even domestically.
What is Trump’s endgame?
On the surface, the operation appears to be at a strange intersection of the war on terror and the war on drugs. The stated purpose of the recent strikes is to combat narcoterrorists and stop dangerous drugs from reaching the United States. “Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people and the destruction of families,” Trump said on Oct. 5.
But Venezuela does not supply the fentanyl wreaking havoc in the United States and is also not as big a player in the production and smuggling of cocaine as other Latin American countries. Most of the illegal drugs entering the United States, especially fentanyl, come by land through Mexico or via the Pacific—not through the Caribbean. This is why experts said the U.S. strikes near Venezuela are unlikely to put a significant dent in the problem that the Trump administration claims to be addressing.
If this operation is “really intended to block the flow of drugs into the United States, then we’ve got the wrong target,” said Ken Roberts, a professor of government at Cornell University who specializes in Latin American politics. “It’s not fentanyl that is coming up from Venezuela, which is the most destructive of the drugs in the United States.”
Typically, counternarcotics operations are conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard, who disable and board vessels rather than destroying them, which eliminates the possibility of gathering evidence that could help investigators better understand cartel operations. These are among the many reasons that experts are convinced that the recent strikes, combined with the wider buildup of U.S. military assets in the Caribbean, are part of a ploy to raise pressure on Maduro and see him removed from power.
Felbab-Brown said it’s “extremely unlikely” that the recent strikes targeting alleged drug boats would affect death rates from drug overdoses in the United States or the flow of drugs into the country. “It might change the routes and the methods, but unlikely the volume,” she said, which “makes it more and more likely” that the narcoterrorism label and targeting of boats off the coast of Venezuela is “really servicing a different objective, namely, that of toppling or trying to topple the Maduro regime.”
Maduro, an authoritarian and sharp critic of the United States, has long been in the crosshairs of Trump and his top advisors—especially U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is reportedly the driving force behind the push for regime change within the administration. There are other advisors in the Trump administration who might favor a different approach, Jorge Heine, a former Chilean ambassador to China, said, but Rubio “is arguing for regime change.” And from what Heine can gather so far, the top U.S. diplomat “has been winning the argument.”
In a statement provided to FP in response to a request for comment on whether Rubio is pushing for regime change in Venezuela, U.S. State Department spokesperson Thomas Pigott said, “Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans. The U.S. is engaged in a counter-drug cartel operation and any claim that we are focused on anything other than this targeted effort is completely false.”
As part of its aggressive approach to immigration and deportations, the Trump administration has zeroed in on Venezuela and accused Maduro of emptying his country’s prisons into the United States. The administration has offered a $50 million reward for information that can lead to Maduro’s arrest over alleged violations of U.S. narcotics laws.
“The administration is hoping that the strikes on the alleged drug boats, as well as the buildup of military forces near Venezuela, will either lead to Maduro resigning himself, or the indirect step being the Venezuelan military will abandon the Maduro regime, and then Maduro will be forced to resign,” Felbab-Brown said.
Though Trump has denied that he’s pushing for regime change in Caracas, he also recently said that he thinks “Venezuela is feeling the heat” from the U.S. presence in the region. The “strikes on the boats in the Caribbean are just one element” of the pressure that Trump is trying to impose on Maduro, Felbab-Brown said.
Last week, Trump said that he had approved covert CIA operations in Venezuela and signaled that the United States could soon strike targets inside the country, though he hasn’t said if he’s ordered such actions yet. Experts view all this as increasing evidence that regime change is the Trump administration’s true agenda.
What’s the risk of blowback for the United States?
There’s already a long and painful history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America, the consequences of which are still being felt to this day. But some experts are concerned that the Trump administration is poised to take steps that go beyond even some of the most aggressive actions taken by the United States in the region during the Cold War.
“This is drawing on some of the worst aspects of the Cold War and getting one step further,” said Heine, who emphasized how strange it was for Trump to publicly acknowledge that he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. “Obviously, this is going down extremely badly in the region.”
The recent strikes are contributing to rising tensions with Colombia—a country generally viewed as a top U.S. ally in South America. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the boat destroyed in the seventh strike, which occurred on Oct. 17, was associated with a Colombian rebel group called the National Liberation Army. Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the United States of murdering a fisherman from his country in a different strike in mid-September. Trump responded by referring to Petro as an “illegal drug leader.”
But due to the disjointed politics of Latin America at present, experts are unsure whether there will be broader or unified pushback to the United States over its actions toward Venezuela.
“The region is highly divided,” Heine said, also underscoring that Maduro is a bit of an outsider without many friends. But what the United States is doing could still end up benefiting its adversaries such as China, he warned, amid a great-power competition that’s seeing the two countries vie for the hearts and minds of people and governments around the world. China has already established a “strong presence” in Latin America, and it’s “very odd” that the Trump administration is risking antagonizing so many countries in such an important region, Heine said.
There are also concerns that Trump’s behavior could give leaders around the world cover to violate the sovereignty of other countries and undermine the rule of law.
Trump appears to be of the view that the world has geographic and political spheres and that “the Western Hemisphere is ours to manage,” Roberts said. This apparent revival of the Monroe Doctrine by Trump breathes new life into “a mentality that was very prevalent” during the Cold War, “and it would be troublesome for a lot of people to see the United States sliding back into that way of thinking about the world,” he added.
Despite the myriad of concerns surrounding the U.S. strikes near Venezuela and the potential for the situation to spiral out of control, the White House is standing by its approach.
“On the campaign trail, President Trump promised to take on the cartels—and he has taken unprecedented action to stop the scourge of narcoterrorism that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans. All of these decisive strikes have been against designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores, and the President will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement to FP.
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