In 2009, I sailed on a Turkish destroyer in the Gulf of Aden, when it was a new challenge for NATO’s expensive navies to halt the little pirate skiffs from Somalia that were indistinguishable on a warship’s radar from fishing boats, or, in some cases, from ocean chop. The men I met in the officers’ mess were frustrated by their rules of engagement. Why couldn’t they just blow the boats out of the water?
The Turkish captain showed me a high-octane video from a month earlier. Pirates were speeding toward a merchant vessel, and a German helicopter tried to stop them with warning fire, laying an arc of heavy-caliber rounds into the water just ahead of the wooden boat. Each round spat a high fountain of spray, but the pirates kept moving. They stood in the bouncing skiff with Kalashnikovs on their shoulders and glanced up now and then at the helicopter, seemingly calm in the awareness that “warning fire” would not become lethal fire until they, the pirates, fired back. So the boat pilot simply opened his throttle.
Arguments about skiffs back then were similar to arguments now on social media over “drug boats” near Venezuela and Colombia. “Look at this one!” people used to type over a posted picture, encouraging NATO to change its rules of engagement. “It has ladders and guns! No fishing nets! That’s how you know they’re pirates.” Donald Trump has justified his orders to shoot the “drug boats” in the same terms. “When you see five engines on a boat going about 65 miles an hour, loaded up with white powder in silver cases, generally speaking that’s not a good sign,” he said during a press conference in late October. “They’re not going fishing, right? And you don’t see any fishing rods.”
He’s right that most of the boats destroyed by the U.S. are probably not innocent. The question is whether they ought to be blown up at all. In the more circumspect early 2000s, at least within NATO, the answer to extrajudicial killings was no: pirates were a nuisance, but not an existential threat. Even then — before pirates kidnapped me in 2012 — I was not sure that was the right policy. It startled me that armed men could zip around the coast of Somalia with no consequences.
But drugs aren’t pirates. The mules and traffickers who move heroin and fentanyl are often not armed, and they pose no threat to shipping or anyone besides their customers, who of course have to actually take the drugs before they do any harm.
So the serious and legal response for a destination country — if it’s really worried about supply — is to focus on its own addictions, or at least arrest the smugglers and put them on trial. “They’re not terrorists,” an anonymous but smart intelligence community source told Washington Monthly last week. “They’re not trying to overthrow the United States government. They have no ideology or religious purpose. They’re not enemy combatants. They’re not enemy soldiers. They’re not enemies of anything. They’re common criminals.”
When the Navy destroyed an unambiguous drug-smuggling submarine on Oct. 15 — one of those clanking, jerry-rigged submersibles that typically move cocaine around the Caribbean — did it arrest the two survivors? No, it sent them home, to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. The Navy’s methods on this mission are too aggressive for the courtroom; they would probably not survive an American defense lawyer. The Trump administration, moreover, doesn’t want to air too many facts. Where did the submersible come from? Where was it going? What was it smuggling? (Probably not fentanyl.) And where were those drugs ultimately bound? (Probably Europe.) Who cares? The explosion on a grainy film clip was more important.
Never mind that the killings amount to murder: The U.S. government has known since the late ’80s that a militarized “War on Drugs” will fail. Violent interdiction can slow the drugs but not stop them. “What we know from our history is that traffickers are very smart and patient,” said the intelligence community source at Washington Monthly. “If you deny them or raise the costs of smuggling drugs in a certain way, they’ll back off that for a while and do other things.” A cartel that builds a submarine can also use a plane.
So what’s going on? Conventional wisdom around the Caribbean says Trump wants to invade Venezuela. Nicolás Maduro is a dictator who thwarts U.S. oil interests, and because of long-standing sanctions on his government, the price of American gas is probably higher than it needs to be. Maduro has real connections to organized crime, and he made the mistake of stealing his last election in July 2024. He’s also unpopular, and far less talented than Hugo Chávez, his predecessor and mentor. On Maduro’s watch, Venezuelans have starved. During Trump’s first term, the CIA even assembled a mercenary operation to oust him in favor of a rival named Juan Guaidó, but it fell apart, Bay of Pigs style, and two former Green Berets went to jail in Venezuela. Trump washed his hands of the mess, and the story disappeared as quickly and bizarrely as it broke.
So the situation is clear, even if facts about the drug boats are not. The Reaper drones that have probably fired the missiles don’t need support from the nine U.S. warships now cruising the Caribbean, or the 5,000 or so troops amassed in Puerto Rico, much less the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group, which was ordered to sail for the region on Oct. 24. Trump, meanwhile, has authorized the CIA to “carry out lethal actions in Venezuela,” according to The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal reports that he might send warplanes to hit “military facilities used to smuggle drugs.” Trump’s administration won’t confirm these stories, but the recent past shows that he wants Maduro gone.
So compared to the puzzles over “fishing boats” and “pirates” 15 years ago, the debates over gear in the South American skiffs are a laughable distraction on social media, and accounts posting them to promote the killings are likely engaged in war propaganda. An invasion, if it happens, will be more lethal but no more legal than the missile strikes, and it would contradict Tulsi Gabbard’s otherwise welcome promise in the Middle East last Friday that Washington wants to end its “counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation-building.” It should also put an end to Trump’s wish for a Nobel Peace Prize.
But — speaking of old arguments! — it might bring down the price of gas.
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