The recent U.S. maritime strikes against Venezuelan drug boats under Operation Southern Spear have drawn familiar outrage from elites in academia and the media. These critics insist that if the Venezuelan drug boats are legitimate military targets, President Trump needs congressional authorization to strike them. And if they’re merely criminal enterprises, President Trump should respond with law enforcement, not missiles. The concern is not limited to Washington: the United Kingdom has reportedly paused certain intelligence sharing over fears that it could be used to potentially violate international law. These objections fundamentally misperceive the nature of the threat.
To understand why the administration has the legal and moral authority to act militarily, we need to first understand the target. What the United States faces in the Caribbean is not ordinary crime. It’s a hybrid, state-sponsored campaign that blends narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and covert warfare.
The evidence is compelling: Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and others in his vast apparatus are central figures in the narcoterrorist group Cartel de los Soles. The Cartel de los Soles is no small enterprise. It’s a sprawling network embedded in the Venezuelan state itself. According to Insight Crime, the cartel operates with “members of the presidential family, congressmen, and other corrupt officials…” and uses its connections “at the highest levels to protect its members and its interests.”
Put simply, this is not crime the Maduro regime tolerates — it is crime the Maduro regime runs.
Cartel de los Soles poses a direct threat to Americans. In 2020, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged Adel El Zabayar, a former Venezuelan lawmaker and close ally of the Maduro regime, with brokering arms-for-drugs deals with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. El Zabayar also recruited operatives from Hezbollah and Hamas, who were brought to Venezuela to train, procure weapons (including anti-tank rockets) and ultimately form a “large terrorist cell capable of attacking United States interests,” all with the blessing of Maduro’s right-hand man, Diosdado Cabello.
Cabello is widely considered the regime’s real power broker — arguably more influential than Maduro himself. If the man calling the shots is brokering deals with designated terrorist organizations to acquire weapons and plan attacks against Americans, then this is no longer a law-enforcement problem. When a regime fuses its security services with terrorist networks and transnational cartels, it crosses the line from criminality into armed hostility—and U.S. self-defense is not optional but necessary.
Evidence goes beyond a single indictment. While former President Hugo Chávez first opened Venezuela’s doors to Hezbollah in the early 2000s, Hezbollah’s presence has grown rapidly under Maduro – as have its ties to the Cartel de los Soles. The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community warns that Hezbollah “maintains the capability to target U.S. persons and interests worldwide, and to a lesser extent, in the United States.” That such a network, entrenched in the Western Hemisphere, could use drug trafficking and terrorist training camps as cover for operations against the U.S. is not speculation — it is intelligence fact. To view this as a local crime problem rather than a transregional threat is to ignore the intelligence the U.S. government itself has made public.
Although the Cartel de los Soles deals primarily in cocaine rather than fentanyl, the Trump Administration correctly understands all narcotics are weapons in a campaign of asymmetric warfare against the health, morale, and cohesion of American society. Between 2020 and 2023, more Americans died each year from synthetic opioids than died during the entire Vietnam War. This is not traditional crime, but rather war by other means. A military response is both proportionate and justified.
There is ample historical precedent and legal justification for the President authorizing targeted military action without congressional approval, including by President Trump during his first term, to defend against threats to the American people or U.S. interests. The President, as Commander in Chief of the U.S. military, is vested with this authority under Article II Section II of the Constitution. These precedents include the 2018 airstrikes on Syrian chemical-weapons facilities, which targeted production and storage sites following repeated attacks on civilians, and the 2020 strike against Qassem Soleimani in Iraq to protect U.S. forces and deter further Iranian attacks. Operation Southern Spear fits well within this same legal and operational framework.
What is unfolding in the Caribbean is not a law-enforcement matter. It is a confrontation with a dictatorship that has integrated itself with terrorist networks, collaborates with groups sworn to America’s destruction, funds itself through American suffering, and cynically blurs the boundary between criminal enterprise and covert warfare.
Caution, in this context, is not virtue — it is risk. We cannot wait for these cartels to kill another million Americans. A hostile regime in our hemisphere has chosen to make war against us, and America has every right -- and every obligation -- to defend itself.
Melissa Ford Maldonado is the director of the Western Hemisphere Initiative at America First Policy Institute.
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