For 2 weeks, U.S. Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth has been warding off scrutiny over a second U.S. strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela. The hit killed two survivors who had been clinging to the vessel’s wreckage after an preliminary U.S. strike. Hegseth now claims he “didn’t stick round” for the second strike and that Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley made the decision. Whereas it’s refreshing to see the media and Congress maintain U.S. management accountable for what’s assuredly an unlawful assault, there’s something ghoulish about parsing whether or not faceless males ought to have been killed in a second strike or left to cling to a disabled vessel till somebody determined their destiny.
Would it not actually have been a lesser outrage if the boat’s occupants had all died within the first blast, their identities unsure and the kill chain shorter than ever? The authorized distinction between an energetic combatant, already a doubtful classification, and an incapacitated one issues, nevertheless it misses the bigger level. Washington is widening the circumstances underneath which it makes use of deadly pressure. What’s new just isn’t the violence, however its rising openness and the political showmanship behind it.
As soon as cloaked in legalese and largely restricted to energetic warzones, U.S. strikes are actually carried out in worldwide waters and blasted throughout social media. That shift issues. Overtly acknowledged extraterritorial strikes, particularly in locations the place the USA just isn’t formally at struggle, function underneath a unique logic than covert missions, high-value goal strikes and raids, or the “signature strikes” that outlined the Afghanistan Struggle period.
The hazard right now is the normalization of overt, extremely publicized killings. A Pentagon that after stored such operations underneath wraps now uploads the footage to social media itself. This morbidly gleeful transparency could invite scrutiny, nevertheless it additionally creates a perverse incentive: deadly strikes solely for the sake of spectacle. Political theater, meant to venture toughness or distract from coverage failure, is changing the tougher work of addressing threats with technique.
The deadly strikes that outlined the worldwide struggle on terror weren’t freed from political motives. The 9/11 assaults, which killed almost 3,000 folks, set in movement a response that in the end despatched almost 7,000 People to their deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and different components of the world. Relatively than pursue a rightsized, hedged technique in opposition to terrorism, U.S. leaders embraced a doctrine of zero tolerance for terrorism danger, irrespective of the accompanying price.
That mindset powered twenty years of regime change wars, the torture regime and the authorized black gap of Guantánamo Bay that continues to be open, the rise of more and more highly effective companies such because the Division of Homeland Safety, and an expansive deadly strike framework designed to kill potential militants with out exposing U.S. troops to hazard. Lots of the United States’ civil liberties crises right now hint their origins to the excesses born of the struggle on terror. However nevertheless misguided they grew to become, these early insurance policies had been no less than rooted in discernible nationwide safety considerations.
Broadly talking, deadly strikes overseas fall into two classes: focused strikes, which purpose at a identified particular person deemed a risk, and signature strikes, that are carried out in opposition to folks whose identities could also be unknown however who interact in conduct that the U.S. army or intelligence companies interpret as in line with threatening exercise. Each kinds of strikes are ruled by worldwide legislation, and the authorized debates round them are huge. However the extra revealing query is: What motivates states to make use of these strikes within the first place?
Focused strikes, as I’m utilizing the time period right here, sometimes contain killing somebody the attacker considers a high-value enemy combatant. The rationale will be strategic (similar to eradicating a key commander or operational thinker) or political (gaining the symbolic worth of eliminating a high-profile determine). The upper the goal’s profile, the extra political the calculus tends to be.
Examples embody Israel’s 2024 killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and summer season 2025 marketing campaign that focused a lot of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ senior management in their very own houses; the Biden administration’s 2022 strike in Kabul that killed al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri; the Trump administration’s 2019 killing of Iranian army commander Qassem Suleimani and militia chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on the Baghdad airport; and the Obama administration’s 2011 strike that killed U.S.-born al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
These strikes are geared toward particular people, however the focusing on just isn’t at all times clear. A strike two weeks after the one which killed Awlaki, reportedly meant for senior al Qaeda operative Ibrahim al-Banna, as an alternative killed Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman, himself a U.S. citizen.
Why do states interact in these practices? For all the explanations acknowledged above and in addition just because they’ll. Regardless of the audacity of the Suleimani strike, U.S.-Iraq relations stay normalized, even comparatively optimistic by some measures. Israel’s strike in Doha, Qatar, focusing on senior Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya—which killed Hayya’s son and a Qatari safety officer however not Hayya himself—didn’t set off the regional conflagration many predicted. Nevertheless, as states develop bolder of their actions, a future miscalculation turns into more and more inevitable and may have disastrous penalties.
In distinction to those focused strikes, through the international struggle on terror, so-called signature strikes relied on patterns of conduct—similar to convoys, coaching websites, or different observable signatures—moderately than confirmed identities to justify deadly pressure. The Venezuela boat strikes will not be signature strikes within the counterterrorism sense, however they share the identical logic. Optimistic identification doesn’t matter. Solely a sample of conduct—on this case, merely working a velocity boat off the coast of Venezuela—does. Like signature strikes, these boat strikes depend on inference moderately than individualized intelligence.
For greater than twenty years, successive U.S. presidential administrations have stretched the definitions of “terrorist” and “enemy combatant,” exhibiting a disturbing willingness to danger civilian lives. Lots of the focused killings described above wouldn’t survive an easy software of worldwide legislation, whether or not as a result of the people struck posed no imminent risk, the pressure used was disproportionate, sovereignty was violated, or fundamental due-process protections had been bypassed.
The looming specter of drone strikes terrorized Taliban fighters, transnational terrorists, and civilians alike. Excessive-profile strikes, such because the killing of Suleimani, had been overtly celebrated amongst segments of the political commentariat and despatched a transparent message to members of Iran’s Quds Power that they weren’t protected in Iraq.
But normally up till now, the Pentagon and the White Home have most popular secrecy. Strikes had been meant to get rid of targets, not generate headlines. Usually, solely the survivors and a small circle of officers knew the main points. The Obama administration, specifically, labored to maintain each the strikes and their authorized justifications out of public view. The spectacle of deadly strikes as a political asset in U.S. home politics had not but taken maintain.
The strikes occurring right now within the Caribbean Sea and East Pacific are additionally legally doubtful, even whereas performed in plain sight. These authorized questions animate energetic debates in legislation opinions that assist protect the mental scaffolding of worldwide norms. However in observe, for all of the rhetoric a couple of rules-based order, world leaders way back lowered the true take a look at of permissibility, first to perceived safety imperatives and now to political expediency.
What we’re witnessing at current, nevertheless, marks a shift. The Trump administration’s whack-a-mole marketing campaign of sinking small boats off the coast of Venezuela within the title of combating the fentanyl epidemic is strategically incoherent and unabashedly theatrical.
In fact, fentanyl overdoses are an actual and lethal risk. In response to the 2025 Nationwide Drug Menace Evaluation, 69 % of the 107,543 drug overdose deaths in 2023 concerned artificial opioids, primarily fentanyl. This makes fentanyl the deadliest drug in America. On Dec. 15, Presidental Donald Trump issued an government order designating fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, including to an earlier designation of worldwide drug cartels as overseas terrorist organizations and specifically designated international terrorists.
That is all wonderful, besides that fentanyl is a drug, not a weapon. And the place it originates nonetheless issues. A 2020 unclassified Drug Enforcement Company intelligence report states plainly that “Mexico and China are the first supply nations for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked instantly into the USA.” Notably, that report, which centered completely on fentanyl, didn’t point out Venezuela as soon as.
The 2025 evaluation discovered that Mexican drug cartels and Chinese language suppliers “depend on refined delivery strategies and multi-step processes to evade detection.” In different phrases, they don’t use simply detectable speedboats racing throughout open water. Most consultants agree that when these boats are carrying a drug, it’s far extra prone to be cocaine headed for Europe. So why the fixation on blowing up speedboats? As a result of it’s far simpler than grappling with the complicated supply- and demand-side drivers of the opioid epidemic.
The boat strikes are arduous to defend as something apart from made-for-social media shows of toughness, divorced from any critical evaluation of U.S. safety. And Hegseth enjoys speaking robust. On the Reagan Nationwide Protection Discussion board earlier this month, he declared, “When you’re working for a chosen terrorist group and also you carry medication to this nation in a ship, we are going to discover you and we are going to sink you.” On X, replying to a publish by Turning Level USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet calling for an additional “narco drug boat blown up,” Hegseth responded: “Your want is our command, Andrew. Simply sunk one other narco boat.”
Final month, Hegseth even shared a mock e book cowl depicting the youngsters’s cartoon character Franklin the Turtle firing a rocket-propelled grenade at a drug boat off a tropical coast, captioned merely: “On your Christmas want checklist….” The shock worth is the purpose. Riling supporters and on-line influencers whereas daring critics to defend the human rights of suspected drug traffickers is all a part of a crude politics of spectacle.
And if these concerned within the boat strikes emerge politically and legally unscathed, as they possible will, it might usher in one thing much more troubling: a brand new period of signature strikes, pushed by the political want to venture pressure at residence. The legislation won’t save us. Neither will its interpreters; each are too simply bent by energy. What stays is a political and ethical selection.
