The photo above shows the usual ending to a pursuit of cartel drug smugglers by the US Coast Guard and US Navy: a smuggling boat set afire and scuttled after its crew is arrested and its contraband has been seized by a Coast Guard "Law Enforcement Detachment" (LEDET). Those have been the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to adhere to US and International Law for forty years.
What just happened off the coast of Venezuela is different.
On Tuesday, September 2, 2025, President Trump announced via social media that "on my orders," US Military Forces attacked "positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists ... in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action."
President Trump made it clear that this unprecedented attack was meant to send a message: "Please let this serve notice to anyone even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!," he posted on social media.
During remarks at the White House, he also indicated this was not a "one-off" attack, telling reporters, "There’s more where that came from."
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth revealed on Fox News on Wednesday that he watched live video of the attack and vowed more would follow:
"This is a deadly, serious mission for us, and it won't stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate." - US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
Some prior service members reacted with alarm in US military-related Reddit discussion groups. Here's a sample comment from one who identified as a US Navy veteran:
"We used to interdict drug boats, and that way we'd KNOW if they had drugs. We could also get Intel from the people on board, maybe even send them to jail or maybe find out that they're low-level mules who are only on that boat because the cartel will kill their family if they don't run drugs. It doesn't take 11 people to transport drugs, what if they were trafficking people? What if we just murdered some poor people who got kidnapped by a gang, when we could have rescued them? The point is, we don't know because they blew the boat up, along with any information about it and what it was actually doing." -Navy Veteran
The White House displayed none of those misgivings and shared video of the attack on x.com under the heading "President Trump Terminates 11 Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”
The attack occurred on the same day a US Federal Court ruled that President Trump could not deport Venezuelans it identified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang using an 18th-century "Alien Enemies Act." The Trump Administration is expected to eventually challenge that ruling before the US Supreme Court.
What are your thoughts about the US Navy blowing up a suspected drug-smuggling boat in International Waters?
Share your thoughts in the comments to this article!
Abrazos,
Jack Beavers
I know this post will not be well-received by many of my readers. If you are among them, I ask you to read the following Substack post by 10-year US Army/Air Force veteran Wes O'Donnell (who has since earned a law degree): https://tinyurl.com/3tshtrkk
I read this, and I also read that post by Wes O'Donnell that you linked. I'd say too soon to tell what really happened there. It's possible that there was justification, and we don't know about it, or it's possible that they were fired upon to conceal something else. Not to be conspiratorial, but things can go sideways sometimes when large quantities of cash or drugs are involved. Maybe it will come out later.
One thing I'm happy about, for now at least, is that this admin is moving fast and furious, which is necessary to deal with the multiplicity of threats the US is currently facing. I assume you were just as surprised as I was last week to see a Mexican senator going on Fox News to ask for a US intervention against the cartels. So we don't really know how much foreign support exists until we take action. One thing I do know is that it was both shameful and expensive to tolerate the Somalian pirates for so many years [decades, actually], instead of having military personnel sink any fast-boat that approached a container ship in the open ocean with a bazooka. Just as it was really bad that the "international community" tolerated Houthi terrorism in the Gulf of Aden until the Israelis finally decapitated their C-suite.
The real elephant in the room is the enormous Stabroek oilfield, which straddles Venezuelan and Guayanan territorial waters. There are already Chinese as well as American interests extracting oil there, and I'd make a sizable wager that this admin considers that a strategic risk. While there are always dire warnings about confronting China directly, many people like myself think they're just a paper tiger, as the USSR was in the late '80s. Note that Trump already elbowed them out of the Panama Canal, and bombed nuclear weapon labs in Iran [a Chinese ally], and what happened? It looks like nothing happened. China and Russia are better at subterfuge than we are, which also includes using Venezuela for weaponized migration of criminals to the US, and exporting drugs to the US, which is a useful lesson they learned from the British in the 19th century. But given the strictly mercenary nature of communist military forces, and their dubious combat experience, it is no small risk to engage with US forces in open combat. Sure, China has more ships than we do, and Russia has more nukes; but both nations have dire difficulties with equipment maintenance, not to mention officer loyalty.
As far as regime change, both Venezuela and Iran are relatively safe bets, because the citizens are being held hostage by tyrannical despots, and because there are popular local moderates in the pipeline if and when the dictators are deposed. Certainly more than can be said for most of the failed US regime change ops under both Bushes, or the counterproductive appeasement tactics of Obama & Biden.
Sorry, I'm getting off track here. Another possibility for sinking the Trendy Arugula boat was to send a message to Maduro's people that whoever wants to cash in on the bounty better hurry up, because we might be invading soon. I don't know any more than the next punter, but it looks like things are escalating quickly. And cartel retaliation in the US might be another unifying force to reignite the American appetite for hemispheric dominance. Not claiming that we have a moral imperative to do so, just that we are a patriotic and belligerent nation. Our enemies are merely belligerent, but not so patriotic. Perhaps its time we assert ourselves again; the world was largely better off with a US hegemon. I'd be more inclined to accept a multipolar world if the other great powers were not governed by psychopaths intent on our destruction and the eternal slavery of their own populations.