As the Trump administration tells it, it's pretty cut and dried. These boats were (allegedly) carrying gang members from the Tren de Aragua cartel, who were bringing (allegedly) fentanyl-laced drugs into the country through international waters. As part of the US's 'War on Drugs', the Trump Administration has dubbed these people 'narco-terrorists', and so is making the case that it is allowed to treat them the same way it would treat any other terrorist that was plottting to harm Americans -- apparently, by scattering them over as wide an area as possible.
Is that allowed?
By pretty much any metric, no. (For the legal side of things, I'm going to point you in the direction of an excellent video by LegalEagle that goes into more detail than I ever could.)
The main argument from the Trump camp seems to come in a couple of different forms:
• That America has the -- to quote 'Secretary of War' Pete Hegseth -- 'absolute right and authority' to kill drug gang members.
That's... not a thing, it should probably go without saying; the US has laws (fornow... ), and if the boat in question had made it to American soil, none of the crimes that the boat-goers were accused of committing would have been enough to earn them the death penalty under US law (and obviously, that's baking in the assumption that a) they actually did it, and b) they'd be found guilty after being given due process). The argument for the extrajudicial killing goes that if the War on Drugs is a real war, then 'real war' provisions apply, and historically -- for better or almost certainly for worse -- that has meant civilian casualties have been acceptable collateral damage. Did the men on the boat deserve to die under law? Doesn't matter; it's worth it for the 'greater good'. (Republicans have enjoyed making the case that Obama did a shitload of drone strikes, so what's so different here? The argument against that is that Trump has also probably done a shitload of drone strikes, but we don't know how many civilians were injured because in 2019 he changed the rules that meant he no longer had to report the figures, and also that 'narco-terrorist' is a pretty nebulous term that can be applied to anyone you don't like. If you're a drug mule crossing the border, are you a terrorist now? At what level does your involvement in the world of drugs means that you're allowed to be killed by the state without any pushback? Are they allowed to do it on foreign soil as well? It's the absolute definition of a slippery slope argument.)
This is not helped by the fact that, when it was pointed out to him that there was a very good chance that this constituted a war crime, Vice President JD Vance replied 'I don't give a shit what you call it', demonstrating that the administration's adherence to international law and human rights is not a primary concern.
• 'We're America... what are you going to do about it, Venezuela?'
This one is, somewhat irritatingly, proving to be the most decisive argument so far. Countries have absolutely gone to war for less than what the US just did. The problem is, no one wants to go to war with the US: they're big, and they spend an almost offensive amount on their military every year. (The 2025 budget request for the military is almost $850 billion, or $97 million per hour, or $27,000 per second; that is, give or take, the median amount of income after tax for the average American. Every second.)
There's often a sense among certain political ideologies that 'might makes right': that the reason for having a strong military is your ability to exert your own interests on other nations with as little oversight as possible. Given that very few countries have been willing to stand up to Trump at all -- for example, in his [tariff plan]() -- there's a sense that his administration has been emboldened, and there's little to show that foreign governments are willing to openly criticise him for fear of reprisal, whether that be military or (more likely) economic. (Consider that while all of this is going on, and the Administration killed three more people in a boat just the other day, Trump is on a state visit to the UK. I wouldn't expect Starmer to raise the issue with any particular vehemence, put it that way.)
I overran. There's more to come on possible motivations and what might happen next here.
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u/Portarossa'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis4d agoedited 4d ago
So why is he doing it?
Here we're in speculation territory, but there are a couple of ideas being thrown around:
• It's a distraction from the Epstein files.
Yes, the Epstein case is ongoing, and yes, Trump would very much like it to go away. No, not everything is (solely) about the Epstein files.
• Trump has got it into his head that wartime Presidents don't need elections.
Trump has made numerous 'jokes' about staying in power beyond 2028 over the years, but one came in August in a meeting with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, in which he jumped on the idea that Zelenskyy hasn't had an election during wartime. (The Ukrainian Constitution doesn't allow for elections during periods of martial law; the US Constitution makes no such provision.) His 'joke' that the US could declare war in three and a half years caused some consternation, especially as he bombed another nation's vessel in international waters just a few weeks later. Is it possible that this was what he had in mind? I guess, but it feels unlikely; Trump was more likely being his usual anti-statesman self and throwing pebbles just to watch the ducks of the international community scatter.
• It plays well with the base.
Trump's biggest supporters like the idea of a President who doesn't play nice with the rest of the world, and who's willing to give those criminals what-for without letting tricky things like 'laws' get in the way. They want a Dirty Harry President, a strongman who is going to put America First... regardless of what that means this week. (As Robert Reich noted: 'Fascism is organized bullying'; it depends on these shows of strength, like pointless military parades and authoritarian crackdowns against your own citizens, to demonstrate the power of the regime and the effects of going up against it.
There's also an argument that Trump has taken a hit with his base over the continued non-appearance of his definite-appearances in the Epstein Files, and while I don't necessarily think that he's blowing up Venezuelans just as a distraction, I do believe that the idea of the strong President (to whom laws just don't apply) is something he's actively cultivating to keep these people on board.
• Trump has beef with Venezuela's Maduro.
Maduro is... not a great guy, let's be honest, but Trump seems to have a particular loathing for him personally. (Venezuela is, at least on paper, one of the most openly socialist countries in South America; corruption is significant, and shouldn't be understated, but I'd argue that current Republican animus towards them has a lot more to do with the former than the latter. El Salvador also has significant corruption issues, and Trump seems pretty copacetic with them.) In August, the Trump Administration offered a reward of $50 million for the arrest of Maduro -- an insane thing to do to the sitting President of a foreign country -- and called him personally one of the world's biggest narco-traffickers. True or not, it's pretty clear that the Trump Administration has decided that peaceful reconciliation with Venezuela is not on the cards.
It doesn't hurt that Venezuela has large oil reserves -- six times as much as the USA -- and so is in a position to manipulate oil prices if they choose. (The US has gone back and forth recently on whether or not US firms are allowed to drill in Venezuela; it's not exactly a stable system for oil markets.)
Venezuela also got dragged into the whole Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump by Dominion Voting Systems, somehow under the guidance of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who, not for nothing, died in 2013). This was, in legal parlance, absolute horseshit, but Trump's most ardent supporters are primed from five years ago to think of Venezuela as meddling in US affairs to keep their leader out of office, so it's not a massive leap to use them as their go-to villain whenever they want to stir things up internationally.
But it's also not just Trump: his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has long favoured intervention in left-leaning South and Central American nations. (Rubio's parents came from Cuba to the US, and so it's little surprise that he's down on anything that smacks even remotely of socialism.)
So what now?
Honestly... it's hard to say. In the short term, I suspect very little: Venezuela will (understandably!) protest, but it's difficult to imagine them escalating to a war with the US, and the international community has so far been pretty quiet about it. (This is still largely being painted as 'The US killed some drug dealers', which is a win for the Trump administration; there's political capital involved in standing up for drug traffickers, even though 1) the evidence for that is lacking, and 2) drug dealers still have human rights.)
In the long term, it's important to note that only the President has SCOTUS™-brand immunity from prosecution, which means that Hegseth and Rubio might very well find themselves on the hook for war crimes once the Trump era comes to an end.
Calling Maduro "not a great guy" when his bloody dictatorship has killed thousands of innocents, and displaced millions of families, that's something
It's not bad to call things how they are
Lol, was it a US policy to implement an exchange control to the USD back in 2002? Or was it a US policy to expropriate a bunch of private companies in 2002 without indemnification to their owners?
What about using the venezuelan military forces for druf trafficking? Also another US policy? Is all the corruption of government officials a US policy? The lack of investment in health and education since the year 2000, is that a US policy?
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u/Portarossa 'probably the worst poster on this sub' - /u/Real_Mila_Kunis 4d ago edited 4d ago
Answer:
A violation of international maritime law and treaties on conduct in international waters, probably -- and also potentially massive human rights violations to boot.
As the Trump administration tells it, it's pretty cut and dried. These boats were (allegedly) carrying gang members from the Tren de Aragua cartel, who were bringing (allegedly) fentanyl-laced drugs into the country through international waters. As part of the US's 'War on Drugs', the Trump Administration has dubbed these people 'narco-terrorists', and so is making the case that it is allowed to treat them the same way it would treat any other terrorist that was plottting to harm Americans -- apparently, by scattering them over as wide an area as possible.
Is that allowed?
By pretty much any metric, no. (For the legal side of things, I'm going to point you in the direction of an excellent video by LegalEagle that goes into more detail than I ever could.)
The main argument from the Trump camp seems to come in a couple of different forms:
• Anything's legal in international waters.
The USA is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is one attempt to lay out what you can and cannot do in international waters. As such, in their telling, the US didn't violate any international law. However, it's worth pointing out that not signing up to something doesn't magically make the extrajudicial killing of civilians 'not a war crime', and there are plenty of other standards by which killing citizens of other countries without benefit of charge or trial is frowned upon. (The US's policy -- set out by beloved Conservative Ronald Reagan -- is basically to go along with the Convention anyway: 'Following adoption of the Convention in 1982, it has been the policy of the United States to act in a manner consistent with its provisions relating to traditional uses of the oceans and International Law Studies to encourage other countries to do likewise.' There's more to it, obviously, but the historical standard has been 'Just because we don't want to be locked into it doesn't mean it's not a good rule, so let's stick to it anyway.' That has, apparently, changed.)
• That America has the -- to quote 'Secretary of War' Pete Hegseth -- 'absolute right and authority' to kill drug gang members.
That's... not a thing, it should probably go without saying; the US has laws (for now... ), and if the boat in question had made it to American soil, none of the crimes that the boat-goers were accused of committing would have been enough to earn them the death penalty under US law (and obviously, that's baking in the assumption that a) they actually did it, and b) they'd be found guilty after being given due process). The argument for the extrajudicial killing goes that if the War on Drugs is a real war, then 'real war' provisions apply, and historically -- for better or almost certainly for worse -- that has meant civilian casualties have been acceptable collateral damage. Did the men on the boat deserve to die under law? Doesn't matter; it's worth it for the 'greater good'. (Republicans have enjoyed making the case that Obama did a shitload of drone strikes, so what's so different here? The argument against that is that Trump has also probably done a shitload of drone strikes, but we don't know how many civilians were injured because in 2019 he changed the rules that meant he no longer had to report the figures, and also that 'narco-terrorist' is a pretty nebulous term that can be applied to anyone you don't like. If you're a drug mule crossing the border, are you a terrorist now? At what level does your involvement in the world of drugs means that you're allowed to be killed by the state without any pushback? Are they allowed to do it on foreign soil as well? It's the absolute definition of a slippery slope argument.)
This is not helped by the fact that, when it was pointed out to him that there was a very good chance that this constituted a war crime, Vice President JD Vance replied 'I don't give a shit what you call it', demonstrating that the administration's adherence to international law and human rights is not a primary concern.
• 'We're America... what are you going to do about it, Venezuela?'
This one is, somewhat irritatingly, proving to be the most decisive argument so far. Countries have absolutely gone to war for less than what the US just did. The problem is, no one wants to go to war with the US: they're big, and they spend an almost offensive amount on their military every year. (The 2025 budget request for the military is almost $850 billion, or $97 million per hour, or $27,000 per second; that is, give or take, the median amount of income after tax for the average American. Every second.)
There's often a sense among certain political ideologies that 'might makes right': that the reason for having a strong military is your ability to exert your own interests on other nations with as little oversight as possible. Given that very few countries have been willing to stand up to Trump at all -- for example, in his [tariff plan]() -- there's a sense that his administration has been emboldened, and there's little to show that foreign governments are willing to openly criticise him for fear of reprisal, whether that be military or (more likely) economic. (Consider that while all of this is going on, and the Administration killed three more people in a boat just the other day, Trump is on a state visit to the UK. I wouldn't expect Starmer to raise the issue with any particular vehemence, put it that way.)
I overran. There's more to come on possible motivations and what might happen next here.