Why we need to take Trump's Drug War very seriously

Donald Trump has long been a fan of using the U.S. military to wage a more vigorous war against drug cartels in Latin America. He also shows signs of using that justification as a pretext to oust regimes considered hostile to other U.S. interests.

The most recent incident in the administration’s escalating antidrug campaign took place on October 3 when “Secretary of War” Mike Hegseth announced that U.S. naval forces had sunk yet another small boat off of the coast of Venezuela. It was one of four destroyed vessels and a total of 21 people killed since late September. The administration claims they were all trying to ship illegal drugs to the United States.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro said publicly Wednesday that one of the vessels was carrying Columbian citizens and that they were killed. Two administration officials confirmed to the New York Times that Colombians were on one of the boats blown out of the water. The White House called Petro’s claims “baseless” and “reprehensible.”

However, Trump’s enthusiasm for the military option in the war on drugs long predates this episode. Mike Esper, who served as secretary of defense during the final stages of Trump’s first term, relayed in his memoirs that the president had seriously explored the option of conducting missile strikes against suspected traffickers in Mexico. Esper recalled that his boss asked him at least twice in 2020 about the feasibility of launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and wipe out the cartels.

The president considered such a drastic step to be justified because Mexican leaders were “not in charge of their own country.”

Esper’s account is not the only evidence of Trump’s enthusiasm for the military option. After a 2019 incident in which cartel gunmen massacred a family of American Mormon ex-pats in northwest Mexico, Trump reacted with a tweet insisting that “this is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR (sic) on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!” He added: “If Mexico needs or requests help in cleaning out these monsters, the United States stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively.”

Just weeks after entering the White House for his first term, Trump adopted a similar stance in a session with then‐Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto — and did so in even less cordial terms. “We are willing to help you,” Trump stated. “But they [the cartels] have to be knocked out, and you have not done a good job of knocking them out.” The U.S. president assured his counterpart that he preferred to assist the Mexican military rather than take direct action, but it was clear that the more menacing alternative existed.

The option of using the U.S. military against drug traffickers in Latin America became a prominent theme of not only Trump but other Republican political leaders in 2023 and 2024. Not surprisingly, Trump quickly joined the lobbying campaign to attack the cartels. He explicitly embraced the proliferation of proposals from GOP members of Congress at that time to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF).

Other prominent Republicans, including former Attorney General William Barr and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nicki Haley (briefly a challenger to Trump for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024), embraced the idea of using U.S. military, even special forces, to go after the traffickers.

However, Trump no longer considers an AUMF even remotely necessary. He implicitly believes that the Executive may do virtually anything he deems necessary to defend the United States. Both undocumented immigrants and suspected drug runners fall into the category of being a national security threat in his opinion.

President Trump and his aides have shifted their primary focus from Mexico to Venezuela, however. Indeed, Trump seems reasonably content with Mexico City’s current level of cooperation with U.S. anti-drug efforts, despite his frequently inflammatory rhetoric on the topic during the 2024 election campaign. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Mexico’s president, Claudia Scheinbaum, concluded a new agreement to pursue the cartels more vigorously — consistent with respect for the sovereignty of both nations.

The Trump administration in turn has agreed to take steps to stem the flow of guns from the United States to the drug gangs based in Mexico. Given these developments, Washington’s pressure on Mexico has eased for the moment regarding the drug issue. The massive trade flow between the two nations may have something to do with the White House leaning more into diplomatic solutions here.

Venezuela, on the other hand, is now in Trump’s gunsights. Administration leaders have made it clear that they consider suspected traffickers to be the equivalent of terrorists and are therefore not entitled to meaningful due process protections. By adopting that view, they are building on ugly precedents set during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in which mere accusations of terrorist activity became the equivalent of definitive evidence.

There are growing indications that Trump may use the war on drugs and the war on terror as pretexts to have U.S. military forces overthrow the extreme left-wing government of Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolas Maduro. The existence of that regime has been a great annoyance to conservatives in the United States for years, and even moderate liberals are unenthusiastic about excusing, much less defending, Maduro’s corrupt, authoritarian rule.

The current U.S. administration likely is tempted to transform an ostensible anti-drug and anti-terrorist mission into a regime change crusade. In recent weeks, the United States reportedly has deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean that includes 4,500 Marines and sailors, several destroyers, an attack submarine, and 10 F-35 stealth fighters. Such a buildup of U.S. military firepower off of Venezuela’s shores is more than a little ominous.

Pursuing a regime change war using the façade of an anti-drug offensive would be unwise and potentially a disastrous blunder. Donald Trump has owed much of his political success to his promotion of an “America First” foreign policy. His rhetoric in support of such a policy always has exceeded the substance by a very wide margin, as his willingness to have the United States continue fueling the war in Ukraine clearly demonstrates.

However, one consistent central feature of Trump’s alleged America First policy has been condemnation of regime change wars and nation building crusades. A military intervention in Venezuela would entail both elements.

Granted, a U.S. effort to oust Maduro might succeed. An estimated 7.7 million people have fled Venezuela since the leftist revolutionaries led by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power. Venezuela is an economic dumpster fire, a situation not helped by Washington’s myopic policy of imposing sanctions on the beleaguered country. Maduro has endured primarily because of rigged elections and the support of well-armed partisan militias.

However, defeating those militias might not be all that easy. Even more limited options such as seizing selected ports and airfields could prove to be a difficult and bloody venture. A full-fledged regime change war could easily become another Third World fiasco for the United States on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq.

When Richard Nixon coined the term “War on Drugs,” he apparently meant it as a metaphor. Trump seems to take the term quite literally, and that mentality poses a great danger to the United States.