Artisanal fishers collective, La Guaira, Venezuela. Photo: Roger Harris.
A US military strike on May 4 killed two mariners in an alleged “narco boat” campaign which now has a cumulative death toll of at least 188. The pace of extrajudicial executions is ramping up, according to The Guardian. But why?
The serial murders could be, as the Trump administration claims, a genuine counter-narcotics operation. Or Mr. Trump and company may be conducting a demonstration exercise of executive power. Alternatively, the “kinetic strikes” may reflect more domestic concerns or perhaps foreign policy issues. Another possibility is that the administration is intentionally cultivating an image of unpredictability associated with “madman theory” of deterrence. We interrogate those explanations.
Counter-narcotics rationale
When small boats were first being blown out of the water off the coast of Venezuela last September, stopping the epidemic of fentanyl deaths was presented as a national-security emergency.
This claim was despite failure of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s reports from 2017 through 2025 to list Venezuela as a fentanyl producer or trafficker. This was backed by comprehensive studies from the United Nations. Almost all the fentanyl enters the US from land routes according to the US State Department.
The White House initially warned that these small outboard motorboats would actually make the 1,370-mile oceanic journey to attack the homeland. Consequently, overwhelming military force was necessitated to deter them. The largest armada ever was deployed in the Caribbean: an aircraft carrier, a nuclear submarine, a number of battleships, stealth bombers, etc.
Later, the War Department signaled that the naval deployment would be “enduring” regardless of the drug interdiction mission, suggesting that was not the purpose of “bringing a howitzer to a knife fight” in the first place. Strikes, some two-thirds of them to date, were extended to the eastern Pacific.
The US subsequently invaded Venezuela on January 3, kidnapping its president and first lady. On May 1, Trump threatened that the US Navy may “take on Cuba.” This is without drug interdiction as the central pretense.
Shifting legal justifications
The administration did not initially articulate a detailed legal doctrine after the first lethal strike in September. The broad rubric of the president’s responsibility to defend the homeland was proffered as if the US was being attacked rather than the other way around. In this initial stage, the rhetoric echoed the “war on drugs” with only a vague legal rationale.
Early polling by the Harris organization surprisingly showed initial public support for the strikes. Democratic Party discomfort centered mainly on procedural issues regarding secrecy and constitutional war powers authority within a larger bipartisan consensus over expanding national-security tools and legitimizing militarized counternarcotics policy.
Soon, the Trump administration’s discourse transitioned to “narco-terrorism.” SOUTHCOM statements began referring to traffickers as” “Designated Terrorist Organizations” and “unlawful combatants.” This legal maneuver was needed because simple criminal behavior such as drug trafficking cannot legally justify extralegal executions. Increasingly the administration cited cartel violence as something comparable to warfare in order to move beyond criminal law.
The administration’s new legal category to justify arbitrary use of naked military force without arrests or trials came on October 1. Trump notified Congress that the US was engaged in a “non-international armed conflict.” Accordingly, alleged combatants could be lethally targeted, eliminating customary due process.
This was backed by a classified Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion, which transforms ordinary criminals into “terrorists” or “enemy combatants.” With this legal sleight of hand, strikes were normalized as wartime actions rather than exceptional interdictions. To this day, the OLC document remains secret.
By late 2025, the justification was further expanded to constitute collective self-defense in a regional war. Much to the protests of their heads of state, the US president asserted his prerogative to intervene in Columbia and Mexico to solve their drug problems. This argument of preserving regional stability – while actually achieving the opposite – bolsters the claimed legal justification by pretending that Washington not only acts in its own interest but also of neighboring states.
By 2026, the strikes became institutionalized as routine hemispheric conflict against “narco-terrorists,” shifting a law-enforcement framework toward a war framework. The old “war on drugs” was morphed into the “war on terror.”
Domestic political symbolism
Another interpretation is the strikes are aimed at domestic audiences. The attacks in Latin America are thus confounded with domestic concerns over insecure borders and the punishment of perceived enemies. Fox News posted this comment after the latest extrajudicial murders: “They’re like gnats. Stupidly annoying but.. removable!”
Missiles attacks on small boats demonstrates the administration taking dramatic action against supposed threats. The imagery communicates strength and decisiveness. This explains the unusual practice of displaying videos. Never mind that Trump’s bragging of success should have led to the cessation of strikes rather than ramping them up.
A method to the madness
Washington capriciously flaunts its lawlessness. Defying logic is the apparent inconsistency between (1) claiming the strikes “almost totally stopped” maritime trafficking while simultaneously (2) escalating rhetoric about the existential danger they pose requiring expanded force.
This suggests that there may be a method in Trump’s madness. The obvious contradiction implies that the objective is not merely operational success but continual demonstration of unconstrained authority. The guard rails are down.
Unlike previous administrations that justified US imperial actions as “democracy promotion,” “responsibility to protect,” and upholding “international law,” Trump unapologetically assumes the posture that the “rules-based order” is one where the hegemon makes the rules and the rest follow his orders.
Impunity is paraded rather than hidden. The administration’s secrecy and shifting legal theories are consistent with a mission prioritizing political and psychological effects. The message to Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, or Mexico’s Claudia Scheinbaum is deviation from Washington’s dictates carries high risks.
Corporate media
Trump’s egregiousness presents a challenge for the usual follow-the-flag corporate press. Initially their coverage expressed shock over the strikes with mild questioning of its legal basis relating to constitutional authority and lack of due process.
By late 2025, press coverage shifted from treating the strikes as novel to accepting them as routine. Around the same time, what passes as the “liberal” media – such as The Washington Post, Reuters, AP, and Politico – began to more strongly question the legal basis of the strikes but not the strategic objectives.
More recently, press coverage of the strikes might be characterized as acceptance through regularization. This reflects audience fatigue and the broader post-9/11 normalization of targeted killing practices.
Hemispheric force projection
The evidence suggests that the strikes serve multiple purposes: operational interdiction, political symbolism, deterrence signaling, and above all demonstration of US imperial might. The strikes reflect a broader and growing trend by the imperial power to conduct cross-border operations against non-state actors without formal declarations of war.
This shift is tied to Pentagon doctrines emphasizing ‘great-power competition,’ ‘integrated deterrence,’ and persistent hemispheric ‘force projection’ against both state and non-state actors. Related is the declamation by War Secretary Pete Hegseth of a “Greater North America,” a US-defined security zone extending from Greenland to the Equator.
Meanwhile, The Guardian reports: “cocaine production is at a record high and global drug prices are at historic lows.”