This article was originally published by Connor O’Keeffe at The Mises Institute.
Trump’s political opponents in the Democratic Party and establishment media trotted out a new line of attack on his administration over the weekend. It began after the Washington Post ran a story on Friday about the first strike against what the Pentagon claims were drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean back on September 2.
According to what the Post claims are seven sources with insider knowledge of the operation, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an explicit order to “kill everybody.” An initial missile strike blew the boat apart, destroyed the cargo, and killed most of the eleven men on board. But as the smoke cleared, two survivors could be seen on the drone feed clinging to floating debris.
The Post’s sources allege that the commander overseeing the operation ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors, in an attempt to comply with Hegseth’s initial order.
Establishment politicians like Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) called the second strike a “war crime.” Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) made the same accusation on the Sunday talk shows, while others, like Chuck Schumer (D-NY), called for the full, unedited video of the attack to be released.
The White House pushed back at the notion that there was anything legally wrong with the second strike, but the president’s opponents in the establishment media seized on the report to help escalate an ongoing battle between Trump and several members of Congress who had made a video encouraging American soldiers and intelligence officials to refuse illegal orders. Just as this fight kicks off over hypothetical future justified or unjustified mutinies, here comes a real example of an alleged illegal order originating from this very administration.
Allies of Hegseth and Trump were quick to point out that this is clearly a politically orchestrated media blitz born out of a desire to hurt the president rather than a genuine concern over presidential war powers. And further, that the Democrats and establishment figures crying “war crime” are complete hypocrites, because they stayed quiet or even defended past administrations when they conducted even worse strikes.
They are completely right about that. Establishment figures in both parties and various legacy media outlets have made it very clear that they are more than happy to look past or even enthusiastically support strikes that kill innocent people—including children—and that, in some cases, blatantly violate the laws of war laid out by the “liberal international order” that they so often claim to embody.
But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong about these strikes. Hypocrites are often right half the time. And, in this case, as hypocritical as they may be, Trump’s critics are more right than wrong in their attacks on Trump’s escalating operations in the Caribbean.
Sure, it’s not as easy to feel sympathy for some young men killed while smuggling illicit drugs by boat as it is for young children caught in the blast radius of a drone strike—although the administration’s refusal to provide evidence that these really were drug smugglers, beyond the vague assurances of some untrustworthy intelligence agencies, makes it harder to join those celebrating their deaths.
But core to the legal and cultural tradition that brought about Western civilization’s unparalleled rise has been the norm that rulers cannot just unilaterally execute people whom they claim were doing something bad. It’s a key restriction on the kind of unchecked despotism that has held most societies back throughout human history.
The fact that Western leaders have been abandoning this norm to a concerning extent in recent decades is a problem that needs to be addressed, not a license to abandon it further.
It is, after all, the fact that Western elites are abandoning—and in many cases outright attacking—the very institutions that fueled our civilization’s growth that has brought about the civilizational decline that figures like Trump rose to prominence promising to reverse. His administration’s adoption of the establishment’s worst practices in the name of reversing that decline would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.
If we zoom out, this is the main problem with Trump’s escalations in South America. Despite all the panic from cable news addicts trained to see Trump as a radical departure from political norms, this is just another administration trying to lie us into another war to benefit a few well-connected groups.
They’re lying because the waters off Venezuela are, at most, a minor footnote in the international drug trade that is almost exclusively used to deliver cocaine from Colombia to Europe. If Trump and his team were genuinely trying to use military force to prevent people from “poisoning” our country with dangerous drugs like fentanyl, as they claim to be, they wouldn’t be focusing on Venezuela.
The Trump administration is pushing the counter-drug narrative, not because it’s true, but because they seem to have concluded it’s a more effective way to get the American public on board with a possible war to overthrow the current Venezuelan regime than the actual reasons.
And those actual reasons are the typical financial and political interests of some well-connected groups—in this case, long-time anti-Maduro hawks, ExxonMobil, and any weapons companies or “national security” officials worried about the potential for peace in Ukraine—along with stale electoral calculus stressing that Trump needs to “look tough” for the upcoming midterms.
In other words, it is the same old interventionist, crony, imperial foreign policy status quo that has already done so much to bankrupt our country, trample on our rights, and decay our culture while spilling outrageous amounts of foreign blood, all to help a few well-connected companies prop-up their bottom lines and a few foreign leaders with effective lobbies to wage their regional power games.
The fact that a couple of establishment figures are shamelessly pretending to stand against one small part of this for a bit to score a few political points is worth calling out. But let’s not pretend that that’s the main problem here.
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