The Case for U.S. Self-Defense against Narcoterrorism

On September 2, 2025, U.S. armed forces struck an identified narcoterrorist fast-boat in international waters transiting at high speed in the Caribbean Sea. The vessel reportedly carried on board eleven persons who were members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the strike occurred in the “Southern Caribbean.” The vessel had “departed from Venezuela” and was attacked, presumably by a missile, and destroyed, killing everyone on board. On September 15, the United States destroyed a second boat operated by drug trafficking cartels. The next day, President Donald Trump said, “We knocked off, actually three boats – not two – but you saw two.”

On October 3, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed that a fourth strike was carried out on a vessel trafficking narcotics on a known narcotrafficking transit route in the Caribbean, killing four terrorists on board. A fifth lethal strike against a semisubmersible narcosubmarine, was conducted in international waters off the coast of Venezuela on October 16. Two of the four crew members survived the attack on the submersible, which was specifically built to transport large amounts of illegal drugs, and were taken into custody by U.S. forces. Since October, an additional seventeen strikes have been conducted in both the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Secretary Hegseth indicated that the “strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over.”¹

In this essay, we will argue that these strikes and actions are a lawful exercise of the president’s powers under the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law, and entirely consistent with the international law of self-defense.

Structure of the Debate in Fact and Law

UN and legal experts have criticized the strikes as “extra judicial killing” because they argue the United States is not at war with Venezuela or TdA. Disagreement over the legality of the strikes, like virtually all legal issues, turns on two issues: fact selection and rule selection. Critics of the attack focus on the fact that the boats destroyed were operated by drug trafficking organizations committing criminal offenses. Since the late 1990s, these drug boats have been approached unsuccessfully as a law enforcement problem in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean. During that time, Colombian cartels have become eclipsed by the emergence of even more powerful Mexican cartels and new entrants like TdA. The illegal cargo enters the United States along the southwestern border, by light aircraft and carried on go-fast small boats.

In recent years, semisubmersibles have been used because of their low radar signature. No doubt unmanned aerial vehicles are or soon will be part of the equation. At sea, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard have, mostly unsuccessfully, attempted to interdict boats and submarines and arrest the traffickers. In the intervening years, the drug cartels have undergone a metamorphosis from drug traffickers to all-spectrum terrorist groups, which are often better armed, wealthier, and even more politically powerful than the governments in their host countries. The administration claims it is responding to this direct and imminent threat to U.S. national security, one that warrants urgent action in self-defense. But detractors remain unable to grasp the changed nature of drug trafficking organizations. 

There is also disagreement over applicable law governing self-defense. One interpretation of international law, constructed from an elaborate scaffolding of a handful of cases, animating scholarship, and state interpretation, presents a very narrow view of self-defense. In this perspective, self-defense is not available for low-level threats and is reserved only for “grave” uses of force, like a major military attack. The International Court of Justice and international criminal courts have promoted this view in an effort to restrain the right of self-defense in the hope that by making self-defense more difficult to justify, war can be avoided. In doing so, these jurists have placed democracies in an untenable position by preventing them from responding to low-level threats, which have destabilizing and corrosive effects on national and regional security. The American view has always been rather more permissive, with greater leeway for sovereign states to use force in self-defense against diffuse uses of force, such as gray zone operations.

The Threat of Tren de Aragua

TdA suddenly emerged as an imminent threat to the United States following a massive surge of 1.5 million Venezuelans that were allowed to enter the country by the previous administration. Among these were individuals either entering the country illegally or through new, accelerated immigration procedures, including thousands of criminals. A lack of cooperation from the Venezuelan government made it virtually impossible to identify members of TdA in the United States. President Trump said Venezuela also emptied the worst criminals from its prisons and released them into America, a claim the BBC assessed as likely to be “partly true,” as the crime rate in Venezuela has plummeted.

TdA is not just a violent drug gang involved in mafia-like tactics such as taking over apartment complexes, trafficking in guns, drugs, and humans, and committing rape, torture, murder, and robbery. The organization is also a state-sponsored tool of asymmetric warfare, connected to the regime of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro: a blended organization, sometimes pursuing state objectives with nonstate actors. The White House claimed TdA is “undertaking hostile actions” and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States, both directly and under the supervision, “clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime.” The Venezuelan president is believed to be the leader of the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) group that provides material support “to foreign terrorist organizations threatening the peace and security of the United States, namely Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel.”

Intercepted communications indicate TdA functions as enforcers for the Maduro regime. For example, TdA is suspected of conducting a sophisticated murder in 2024 of Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Ojeda, a Venezuelan dissident who fled to Santiago, Chile. Four individuals tied to TdA and the Maduro regime posed as Chilean police officers with tactical gear and forcibly entered Ojeda’s house, carried him away, and killed him. One of the assassins, Walter Rodriguez Pérez, worked on El Aissami’s security detail in Aragua, making it very likely he was trained by Venezuela’s Military Counterintelligence Directorate (DGCIM), known for its brutal repression. These details suggest that the targeted assassination of Ojeda in Chile was a joint operation between DGCIM and TdA.

In the United States, TdA shot police officers in New York in 2024. In May 2025, about two dozen members of a TdA group attacked two NYPD officers in Times Square. TdA operates child sex trafficking rings in Louisiana; they were associated with the murders of nursing student Laiken Riley in Georgia and twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston, Texas. TdA also seized hotels in El Paso, Texas, and took control of the Palatia Apartments in San Antonio, Texas, with three hundred residential units. Nearly seven hundred police calls for services “related to criminal activities, including assaults, gang involvement, and suspected prostitution” were received just by the El Paso Police Department. TdA used the Palatia Apartments as a base of operations for five to six months to deal cocaine and other drugs and as “prostitution dens to pimp out women and children.” Empty units in the apartment complex were illegally rented out to other illegal migrants.

In 2023, TdA forcibly took control of and operated an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, named Whispering Pines. Armed with automatic rifles, the group committed “violent assaults, threats of murder, extortion, strongarm tactics, and child prostitution” that exerted a “stranglehold” on fifty-four apartments in the complex. In November of that year, TdA beat a property manager in an unprovoked attack so severely that he had to go to the hospital. Two other members armed with “large firearms” were arrested as they were on their way to kill a property manager. The gang additionally threatened to kill a police officer who responded to one incident. There was a similar story at Edge of Lowry apartments and a third apartment complex, also in Aurora.

TdA is a hemispheric threat working with cartels in Mexico and Colombia. These relationships hold terrifying potential. Mexican cartels, for example, are in Ukraine to learn first-person view (FPV) drone warfare, drone manufacturing, electronic warfare, and real-time battlefield coordination on the front lines to carry their lethal skills back home. In Mexico, former members of the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE) special forces appear to have transitioned to work for the cartels through the ultraviolent Zetas organization.

Colombian cartels are present in Ukraine as well, and the country has become an inadvertent training ground for the most dangerous terrorists in the Western Hemisphere. Former members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) appear to have infiltrated Ukraine’s drone schools as well, using fake documents. In April of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a Colombian police Black Hawk helicopter in Antioquia was blown out of the sky by a drone operated by a drug trafficking gang, killing twelve (some reports say eighteen) law enforcement personnel. From April 2024 to August 2025, Colombian cartels conducted 301 strikes with unmanned aerial vehicles, two-thirds of them in Cauca and Norte de Santander provinces, killing twenty-two soldiers and police officers. Similarly, a truck bomb in Cali, Colombia’s third largest city, believed to be planted by the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), killed five civilians and injured dozens.

The Cost in Blood and Treasure

This chaos inside the United States and other countries has had a profound effect on safety and quality of life. From 2020 to 2025, drug cartels originating in Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia exacted a devastating toll on the United States. During this period, drug overdoses claimed approximately 500,000 lives, with synthetic opioids (largely Mexican-sourced fentanyl) accounting for over 70 percent of fatalities. That is more than the total number of U.S. military personnel killed in action during the Second World War from 1941–1945. Cartel-affiliated violence, including gang operations, contributed to thousands of murders and rapes, though precise numbers and attribution remain challenging due to underreporting. Human trafficking, often intertwined with migrant smuggling and forced criminality, victimized tens of thousands, with many subjected to sexual exploitation and debt bondage. Economic damages, encompassing healthcare expenditures, lost productivity, criminal justice costs, and enforcement, surpassed $5 trillion, driven predominantly by the opioid crisis.

TdA, operating both within and outside the United States, presents an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economic stability of the United States and greater Western Hemisphere. The Department of State reports that TdA operates on “a complex and adaptive system characteristic of organizations engaged in insurgency and asymmetric warfare.” Consequently, TdA and other international cartels “constitute a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime.”

On February 20, 2025, TdA was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. § 1189), as amended. Additionally, it was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) group on July 24, 2025, under Executive Order 13224, which targets terrorist groups and their supporters, enabling sanctions to disrupt financial networks. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1189, the Secretary of State may make a designation upon finding that a group fulfills three elements: (1) it is a foreign terrorist organization; (2) the organization engages in terrorist activity (defined in 8 USC 1182(a)(3)(B)) or terrorism (as defined in 22 USC 2656f(d)(2)), or retains the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism; and (3) the terrorist activity or terrorism of the organization threatens the security of U.S. nationals or the national security of the United States.

The statutes do not provide for authorization to use force against a terrorist organization but reflect the normative stature and national danger that they present. The decision to use force to protect the nation is inherent in the president’s Article II power in the U.S. Constitution.

Use of Force against Terrorist Threats

History is replete with examples of U.S. armed forces, and the Navy in particular, working to find, fix, and destroy terrorist cells and nonstate armed groups that threaten American lives and property. These actions have occurred throughout the world, from China to the Middle East to the Caribbean Sea. In 1817, for example, U.S. President James Monroe ordered U.S. forces to land at Amelia Island and expel a group of “smugglers, adventurers and freebooters.” In 1822, the U.S. Navy landed on the northwest coast of Cuba and burned a pirate station. The following year, U.S. forces pursued pirates near Escondido, near Cayo Blanco, at Siquapa Bay, Cape Cruze and Camarioca.

The United States sent an expeditionary force of over 6,600 troops under General John J. Pershing into northern Mexico in 1916–1917 to pursue revolutionary bandit Pancho Villa and his forces after Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, which killed eighteen Americans. The operation involved cavalry pursuits and skirmishes but failed to capture Villa, though it dispersed the armed band.

The U.S. Navy intercepted the Achille Lauro Hijackers in 1985, forcing their aircraft to land at a U.S. airbase in Italy, creating a diplomatic row. U.S. Navy fighter jets from the USS Saratoga intercepted the EgyptAir plane over the Mediterranean carrying four Palestinian terrorists who had been given safe passage by Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after they hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered an American passenger. The small-scale aerial operation forced the plane to land at Sigonella, Italy, where the terrorists were arrested.

On December 21, 1989, President George H. W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama and sought to bring General Noriega to justice. From 1993 to 1995, President Bill Clinton enforced a unilaterally declared “no fly zone” over Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia and shot down four Serbian Galeb aircraft. On November 21, 1994, President Clinton ordered U.S. combat aircraft to attack Serbian military bases. President Clinton imposed another no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina on May 24, 1995, and that fall U.S. combat aircraft conducted hundreds of attacks against Bosnian Serb Bases.

The Trump Administration’s Rationale

After the first strike, President Trump announced on Truth Social:

Earlier this morning, on my orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco-terrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere. The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in international waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action. No U.S. forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!

A senior Defense official confirmed that the attack was a “precision strike.” Given that the boat was isolated in international waters, the likelihood of striking civilians or civilian objects was essentially nonexistent.

Secretary of State Rubio told reporters after the attack:

The President has declared that these organizations – Tren de Aragua, Cártel de los Soles, and others – these groups are narcoterrorists. These are narcoterrorist groups, designated so by the U.S., operating in international waters, and their destination is taking drugs to the U.S. streets.

And the President used the force and the power of the United States to protect the United States, and they blew up a boat. And that could happen again; it might be happening right now. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen next week. But let there be no doubt that these groups that are using these maritime routes through the Caribbean are not going to be able to continue to act with impunity. They will not simply lose a shipment and be set free; that’s not going to happen. This President isn’t going to allow that, and he’s been clear. 

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller explained that the regime in Venezuela is a narcotrafficking drug cartel running Venezuela. “For generations, we used our military to engage in action against terrorists in the Middle East and in Africa while leaving unharmed the terrorists in our own hemisphere, who are responsible for so many more American deaths, who have spilled so much blood across the Western hemisphere, who have bereaved so many parents and families, and who have contributed to such a horrific cycle.” He went on to say Venezuela is “working directly with” cartels in Mexico and Colombia that are murdering American citizens, importing drugs and guns into the United States. These terrorists are responsible for “so much more [sic] American deaths” than the conflicts overseas. To address this threat, “President Trump is finally allowing and directing the United States military to use its authorities under the Constitution to defend America from the terrorist organizations that have run free for too long in our own hemisphere.”

In a letter sent to Senator Charles Grassley in compliance with the War Power Resolution, President Trump explained that “[e]xtraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels . . . have wrought devastating consequences on American communities for decades, causing the deaths of tens of thousands” of American citizens. These attacks posed a threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy interests at home and abroad.” The letter describes the struggle of “friendly foreign nations” to contend with transnational groups that “operate throughout the Western Hemisphere.”

In the face of the inability or unwillingness of some states in the region to address the continuing threat to United States persons and interests emanating from their territories, we have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense.

The letter confirms that the United States is attacking boats operated by a designated terrorist organization in international waters to meet an imminent threat to the most vital American interests through an exercise in self-defense. As the commander-in-chief, the president is positioned to identify and counter these threats under both domestic and international law.

Presidential Authority

In 1941, Attorney General (later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson framed the classic statement of the president’s military powers under the Constitution:

Article II, section 2, of the Constitution provides that the President “shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” By virtue of this constitutional office, he has supreme command over the land and naval forces of the country and may order them to perform such military duties as, in his opinion, are necessary or appropriate for the defense of the United States. These powers exist in time of peace as well as in time of war. . . . Thus, the President’s responsibility as Commander in Chief embraces the authority to command and direct the armed forces in their immediate movements and operations designed to protect the security and effectuate the defense of the United States. . . . [T]his authority undoubtedly includes the power to dispose of troops and equipment in such manner and on such duties as best to promote the safety of the country.

Thus, the president has broad constitutional authority to use military force in response to imminent threats posed by narcoterrorist organizations like TdA; this includes deploying military forces preemptively.

The U.S. Constitution vests the president with the plenary authority, as commander-in-chief and “sole organ” of the nation in its foreign relations, to use military force abroad in response to grave national emergencies created by imminent threats against the people and territory of the United States. The Office of Legal Counsel in every recent Administration—Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, and Nixon—have taken the position that the president may unilaterally deploy military force to protect the national security and interests of the United States.

Congress’s power to declare war in no way constrains the president’s independent and plenary constitutional authority over the use of military force to protect the nation from imminent threats. Moreover, depriving the president of the power to decide when to use military force would disrupt the basic constitutional framework of foreign relations, which are under the plenary control of the executive. It is clear that the president has the lawful authority to order such strikes according to U.S. law, but is doing so consistent with international law?

Self-Defense in International Law

The debate about whether the attacks are consistent with international law is really a stalking horse for whether one agrees or disagrees with the long-standing U.S. view of self-defense (see DoD Law of War Manual, sec. 1.11.5.2), an issue that predates the Trump administration by decades.

Self-defense is predicated upon occurrence of a “use of force” that constitutes an “armed attack.” The International Court of Justice held in the 1986 Paramilitary Activities Case (paragraph 228) that a “use of force” may be violated by “organizing or encouraging the organization of irregular forces or armed bands . . . for incursion into the territory of another State” and “participating in acts of civil strife . . . in another State.” The text is drawn from General Assembly Resolution 2625 (XXV). The Paramilitary Activities Case asserts Resolution 2625 reflects customary international law (paragraph 195). The complete scope of the “use of force” in the resolution includes “acquiescing in organized activities within its territory directed towards the commission of such acts. . . .”

The Paramilitary Activities Case also held, wrongly in our view, that to qualify as an “armed attack,” a use of force must surpass a certain threshold of “gravity” or “scale and effects” tantamount to a conventional invasion (paragraph 194). This bar is too high to provide an effective remedy to states that suffer low-level attacks and merely appears to license asymmetric strikes against the state that undermine the physical, economic, and political security of the civilian population. Perhaps more importantly, this is a judicially crafted formula made of whole cloth disconnected from any state practice or even travaux préparatoires of the UN Charter, yet it impinges on the sovereignty of the state and inhibits its most basic function of self-preservation. In making this determination, the Court may be seen to have acted ultra vires.

The United States has a bipartisan view of self-defense, one which holds that any use of force constitutes an “armed attack,” which may trigger the right of self-defense. In 1989, for example, U.S. Department of State Legal Adviser Abraham D. Sofaer explained, “The United States has long assumed that the inherent right of self-defense potentially applies against any illegal use of force, and that it extends to any group or State that can properly be regarded as responsible for such activities. These assumptions are supported in customary practice.” According to the DoD Law of War Manual, “The United States has long taken the position that the inherent right of self-defense potentially applies against any illegal use of force.” The 2005 U.S. Standing Rules of Engagement defines “National Self-Defense” as “Defense of the United States, U.S. forces, and in certain circumstances, U.S. persons and their property and/or U.S. commercial assets from a hostile act or demonstration of hostile intent.” The International Group of Experts writing in the Tallinn Manual 2.0 acknowledged the position of the United States on the rules governing self-defense as a perspective contrary to the judicially manufactured framework.

The evidence supports the conclusion that TdA forces are irregulars utilized by the Maduro regime as a low-attribution force. They conduct themselves as brigands or spoilers to prey upon U.S. citizens and destabilize national security.

Conclusion

The United States has a view of self-defense that is contrary to some other states and the International Court of Justice. Yet the American position must be respected as equally valid as the narrower interpretation, reflecting the principle of the sovereign equality of states.

To many Americans, using the military to go after drug traffickers makes sense and is long overdue. For example, a 2023 poll found a majority of U.S. citizens support military strikes in Mexico against cartels: 52 percent supported such action and 26 percent opposed it. This includes two-thirds of Republican voters. Interestingly, Latin Americans also support U.S. military force, specifically against the regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. These views reflect perhaps an evolution in how we think about legitimacy and international law, much as the world collectively clarified after 9/11 that self-defense could be employed against terrorist groups. As crime has moved up the spectrum of scale and violence to become a national security threat, people in the United States and elsewhere are fearful of the danger to their daily lives.

The administration is also pushing against a normative wall dominant in law and policy, one constructed from the ideas of the most influential philosopher of our time, John Rawls. In his seminal 1971 work, A Theory of Justice, Rawls proposed that just societies are structured by rules to ensure fairness in which all doubts are always resolved in favor of those at the bottom: the poor, the indigent, the criminal defendant. To ensure equal basic liberties for all, he believed social and economic inequalities must be arranged to benefit the least advantaged. This approach underpins criminal defendants’ access to fundamental rights, such as due process, legal representation, and a fair trial, regardless of status. Rawlsian principles, when extended to criminal justice reform, contribute to “soft-on-crime” policies by shifting the focus from punitive deterrence and retribution to rehabilitation and equity.

Conservatives, most notably Robert Nozick, writing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, have criticized Rawls’s model as overly idealistic, undervaluing tradition, merit, human nature, and personal accountability, and creating a redistributive state that erodes incentives for moral behavior, while undermining deterrence and stability. The debate over Rawls is unfolding in the United States over bail reform, decarceration initiatives, and lenient sentencing for disadvantaged offenders, ostensibly to correct systemic biases—and it is reflected in the Trump administration’s exercise of national defense.

El Salvador has been at the center of this debate. Nayib Bukele, the country’s populist president, has packed as many as eighty-seven thousand gang members from MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Cecot, a mega-prison, with little or no due process. Most individuals were imprisoned based on evidence of membership, such as gang tattoos or being swept up in gang raids. The AP reports that eight thousand prisoners have been released in an effort to ensure only the most hardcore predators are imprisoned. When Bukele took office, the level of violence had paralyzed the country, shattering lives with rape and murder and bleeding the economy. The Congressional Research Service reports that El Salvador’s homicide rate has plummeted under Bukele’s policies from 53.1 per 100,000 to 1.9 per 100,00. This rate is just 40 percent of the U.S. rate as reported by the FBI and lower than Canada’s. A record low 114 murders occurred in El Savlador in 2024, contrasted with sixty-two who were killed in 2022 in just a matter of hours. As a result, Bukele’s approval ratings are around 80 percent. His approach goes directly against the Rawlsian paradigm and the prevailing notion of liberalism. Bukele responds, “Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we actually liberated millions.”

Trump’s use of force against narcoterrorists reflects an adjustment in how the United States uses force in the nation’s defense. Since the end of the Cold War, the ideas of liberal internationalism sought to use force for the global public good. The United States (and NATO) intervened and used force in numerous states, not for its own narrow interests but on behalf of the “international community.” These interventions include Somalia, Haiti, Serbia, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria and were designed to spread democracy and liberalism. The foreign policy establishment pushback against the Trump administration’s attack on TdA narcoterrorists repudiates the model of the past thirty years in favor of using force against manifest and tangible, albeit diffuse threats to the United States, rather than in pursuit of an altruistic vision of global human rights. The current administration reflects a swing of the pendulum back toward national interest. As Vice President Vance stated on X: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published December 15, 2025.

---

Notes