On September 2, President Donald Trump posted a 29-second black-and-white video of a high-prow, four-engine speedboat. At the 20-second mark, there’s a bright flash and fire. Trump claimed the footage was shot that morning, and that it showed the U.S. military destroying the vessel, killing 11 Tren de Aragua members smuggling drugs bound for the United States.

In the week since, little more information about the strike has been made public. No one has disclosed the coordinates where it took place, or any evidence that, as the administration insists, the vessel was carrying drugs and those onboard were smugglers. The administration hasn’t even said what kind of drug was being smuggled. No bodies have been fished out of the sea. No debris.

On Friday, Trump officials canceled, without explanation, a scheduled briefing with the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss the attack. When challenged about the legality of the killing, Vice President JD Vance tweeted that he didn’t “give a shit.” “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” he said, and more such actions should be expected.

No doubt the assault is par for Trump’s general MO, an expression of his aggrieved nationalism: the idea that the country is besieged by a variety of threats, among them Latin American drug traffickers. According to Pete Hegseth, the secretary of what until recently was the Department of Defense, now the Department of War, the killing was a defensive act against enemies trying “to poison our country with illicit drugs.”

Yet there’s no proof that the 11 people were smugglers or migrants. The kind of go-fast boat shown in the video are called pangas. They can’t carry enough fuel to get to the United States. They are used for smuggling, but also for trading and fishing. It was likely headed to Trinidad, where might have transferred cargo to larger ships bound for the United States.

Whether the vessel was carrying cocaine, migrants, or mackerel, our country’s highest officials are boasting about assassinating 11 human beings, civilians, traveling in a small ship in international waters who have not charged with, much less proven guilty of, a crime.

People should be outraged at what is in effect pure murder. But they should also be looking at why the U.S. military is suddenly shifting its focus to the Caribbean, amassing navy vessels and thousands of sailors off the shores and carrying out such a brazen strike. If they look close enough, they might see what the Trump administration is after — and the rift within Trump’s coalition that might scuttle his Latin American plans.

The Latin American Pivot

During this fraught geopolitical moment, as Washington hemorrhages global influence, the U.S. bipartisan strategic class is turning, as it often turns during crisis times, to Latin America.

A few years ago, Army Gen. Laura Richardson, as Biden’s head of SOUTHCOM — the branch of the Pentagon charged with policing South America and the Caribbean — gave a series of think-tank talks on the importance of the region’s resources to the United States: “You have heavy crude. You have light sweet crude. You have rare earth elements,” she told the Aspen Security Forum: “You have 31 percent of the world’s freshwater. … Sixty percent of the world’s lithium is in the lithium triangle: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile. … You have Venezuela’s resources as well, with oil, copper, gold.”

Latin America is “off-the-charts rich” when it comes to resources, the general said, and Washington’s “adversaries” — Russia and China — want a cut. Moscow and Beijing had consolidated their influence in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and were forging alliances with........

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