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Trump is turning the ‘war on drugs’ from metaphor into an actual war

Beyond the question of whether blowing up boats off Venezuela is legal, what’s the military objective?

By MAX BOOT

Washington Post
October 8, 2025

With less publicity and less pushback than the high-profile deployments of the National Guard to U.S. cities, the Trump administration has undertaken another legally dubious, and strategically problematic, use of military force: against narco-cartels in the Caribbean.

Since the beginning of September, the Defense Department has announced that it has blown up four suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, killing 21 people on board, most recently on Friday. Last week, the administration notified several congressional committees that President Donald Trump had decided that the drug cartels are engaged in “an armed attack against the United States” and that drug smugglers are “unlawful combatants” who can be killed on sight. Lawmakers from both parties, to say nothing of legal scholars both conservative and liberal, are highly skeptical of the administration’s justification for this use of force.