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 old “war on drugs” was morphed into the “war on terror.”

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, President Donald 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 were 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 counter-narcotics 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........

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