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Through the green haze of a drone’s camera, a fiberglass skiff skims across black water before erupting in fire.
The Trump administration portrays the recent spate of airstrikes against what it calls “narco-terrorists” as victories in a renewed “war on drugs.” Yet, such a war has always been a misnomer. Steady demand ensures steady supply. Criminals find ways to adapt to interdiction methods. In reality, the strikes do little to reduce the flow of cocaine or fentanyl into the United States.
Attacking go-fast drug boats is not a strategy, it is spectacle imbued with multiple meanings. The strikes are meant to intimidate Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro while signaling U.S. strength and resolve to China and Russia.
The attacks evoke an earlier era when the steady expansion of limited missions metastasized into open-ended campaigns without achievable political goals. From Afghanistan to Africa, and many places in between, ambitious ends outgrew the means to achieve them, and durable settlements never materialized. Body counts and leadership capitation became cherished metrics of progress, while networks regenerated faster than they could be dismantled.
The central mistake of the “Global War on Terror” was confusing short-term disruption with long-term strategy. In Afghanistan, a narrow counter-terrorism effort against al-Qaeda morphed into full-scale state-building. In Iraq, a hopeless search for weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist gave way to counter-insurgency and fragile stabilization. Libya began as a no-fly zone to protect civilians but slid into regime change. In Africa, decentralized “by, with, and, through” operations proliferated without clear measures of success. Targeting terrorist leaders rarely produces decisive results. Insurgents and traffickers alike behave more like adaptive markets than hierarchies.
The current drug boat campaign seems to contribute to a regional effort. With Argentina receiving a U.S.-backed financing package of up to $40 billion to stabilize a friendly, reformist government, including a $20 billion swap line and a $20 billion private-sector facility, and Venezuela facing escalating coercion from boat strikes to bomber flights, the administration appears to be bolstering its friends while pressuring its adversaries. Counter-narcotics is window dressing. The real instruments are gray zone coercion, the use of military force below the threshold of open war, and narrative generation, where perception and storytelling matter as much as interdiction.
This two-front posture makes sense in the context of great-power competition. China has invested deeply in both Argentina, particularly in infrastructure, mining, and energy projects, and Venezuela, where a Chinese firm recently deployed a $1 billion floating oil facility under a 20-year production sharing agreement. Russia has sold Caracas nearly $10 billion worth of arms, including advanced surface-to-air missiles and combat aircraft, while Iran has expanded its footprint through defense cooperation and joint participation in military games hosted on Venezuelan soil. By shoring up Buenos Aires and squeezing Maduro, Washington is signaling that the hemisphere remains under a measure of U.S. influence. Yet the way it is being done risks repeating old mistakes.
Despite popular claims, Venezuela is not a major producer of cocaine. That distinction belongs to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, as documented in the United Nations Office of Drug and Crime’s coca cultivation surveys. Instead, Venezuela functions primarily as a transit corridor. Its geography, porous borders, permissive coastlines, and corrupt officials create conditions that traffickers exploit. Go-fast boats are only one strand in a web that also includes semi-submersibles, containerized shipping, and light aircraft. The boats lack the range to reach the United States, typically ferrying product to nearby islands or rendezvous points with larger vessels. Destroying them does not cripple the trade — it barely inconveniences it. The picture is even murkier with fentanyl. Unlike bulky cocaine, fentanyl is potent in micro-quantities, concealed in parcels, air freight, or containerized cargo. Much of it originates in modular labs using Chinese precursor chemicals, trafficked through Mexico into the United States, as the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Fentanyl Flow Report makes clear. Claiming that fentanyl moves by go-fast boats stretches plausibility.
Even if the Trump administration treats boat attacks as routine and Congress shows no appetite to intervene, the precedent being set matters. A campaign that recasts criminal interdiction as armed conflict against narco-terrorists, executed with lethal force in or near international waters, risks normalizing militarized counter-narcotics and covert regime pressure as peacetime tools of statecraft.
This reflects a familiar error of the Global War on Terror: treating tactical strikes as ends in themselves, allowing them to metastasize into a normalized substitute for strategy. As recently argued in these pages, the strikes may expand into Venezuelan territory with foreseeable risk of a military response. Other countries may emulate U.S. practice to justify extraterritorial force against their own “criminal” foes — rivals can cite it to mirror or counter-justify actions at sea. Within the administration, “boats destroyed” risks becoming the seductive metric of success, just as body counts once were, crowding out harder, higher-leverage work on finances, precursors, containers, and prosecutions. In that sense, the drug boat strikes are less a serious strategy than political theater, designed to show decisive action at home rather than solve the problem abroad.
The escalation risk underscores the danger. The New York Times reported that the administration has secretly authorized covert action in Venezuela, potentially targeting Nicolás Maduro’s government directly. Publicly, the strikes are framed as counter-narcotics interdiction, implicitly embedded in a regime-pressure campaign. That duality highlights how narrative and perception management matter as much as interdiction. But it also deepens the risks of precedent for other countries. Covert action may be permissible under U.S. law if Congress is notified, yet internationally, operations aimed at regime change without U.N. Security Council approval or a credible self-defense claim constitute unlawful intervention.
The escalation is not limited to the sea. On Oct. 15, three B-52 bombers flew within 150 miles of Venezuela’s coast, circling in the Caribbean before returning to base. According to U.S. Global Strike Command, the flights were routine, but their timing, alongside a deployment of eight warships, a nuclear-powered submarine, and 10,000 U.S. personnel in the region, underscores the dual logic of the campaign. With CIA covert authority already in play, the introduction of nuclear-capable bombers into the theater blurs the line between interdiction and regime-change signaling, thus repeating the error of the Global War on Terror, where limited missions expanded into unsustainable political projects.
U.S. military and press reporting confirm that the campaign is no longer deniable. According to Reuters, the commander of U.S. Southern Command announced his retirement amid the strikes, as the United States deployed warships, a submarine, and thousands of personnel off the coast of Venezuela. The reporting makes clear that the effort is not confined to counter-narcotics. Strikes against drug boats can simultaneously be framed as interdiction, as coercive pressure on Maduro, and as signals of resolve to rivals like China and Russia. Public acknowledgment of bomber flights and major force movements confirms that the Trump administration is deliberately pursuing multiple objectives at once: fighting a drug war, projecting U.S. power, and tightening the screws on Maduro.
Relations with even longstanding U.S. partners are now fraying, not necessarily because of pressure on Maduro, but because the administration has criticized Colombia. On Oct. 19, President Trump branded President Gustavo Petro an “illegal drug leader” and announced the suspension of U.S. aid and new tariffs on Colombian exports. Bogotá, once Washington’s most reliable counter-narcotics partner, reacted with outrage. Colombian officials condemned U.S. accusations and warned that a recent strike on a vessel in the Caribbean had killed civilians, calling the move reckless and illegitimate. The Financial Times noted that the administration’s accusations frame Colombia as little better than Venezuela, effectively labeling both as narco-terrorist regimes. Instead of reinforcing regional cooperation, the ongoing campaign risks dismantling it.
Legitimacy is not an abstraction. Practical cooperation has always been central to drug interdiction. The Joint Interagency Task Force South depends on intelligence from Colombia, surveillance by Caribbean partners, and coordination across multiple navies and coast guards. If regional partners interpret the administration’s actions as stretching the law, cooperation may become more politically constrained even if intelligence continues to flow. Much of the activity has taken place in international waters, where the legal footing is murky. Under U.S. law, the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act authorizes boarding and seizure, not destruction, while under international law, treating traffickers as legitimate military targets shades close to the prohibited use of force against another state. Legal issues likely won’t deter U.S. action, but they can erode legitimacy that regional partners rely on when justifying cooperation to their domestic audiences.
Each strike risks degrading the long-term effectiveness of the wider campaign. Meanwhile, more effective pressure points exist: The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has repeatedly disrupted laundering networks and front companies. Containerized freight and mother ships carry tonnage, not kilograms — interdicting them produces genuine disruption. Consolidation nodes such as warehouses, clandestine airstrips, and fuel depots are throughput chokepoints whose loss constrains capacity. Successful prosecutions of facilitators, coupled with asset seizures, yield enduring impact. And for fentanyl, the decisive leverage lies in precursor chemical control, lab dismantlement, and parcel inspection, not in blowing up skiffs at sea. These methods lack the flash and spectacle of blowing up drug boats. They do not generate videos on social media feeds or the evening news. But they often work.
The stakes, then, extend far beyond drug runners in go-fast boats. The administration’s actions may contribute to a broader plan: shore up Argentina as a regional anchor, pressure Venezuela as an adversary, and counter Chinese and Russian influence. But spectacle is not strategy.
If trafficking methods adapt, drug flows continue unencumbered, and the number of overdose deaths at home remain unchanged, the current show of force will have bought neither security nor credibility. As important, by normalizing lethal strikes against narco-terrorists at sea, the administration sets a precedent that others will likely exploit sooner or later, eroding the very legitimacy on which durable influence depends.
The lesson of the Global War on Terror was that tactics without strategy lead to endless campaigns. In South America, where great-power competition is playing out alongside a drug war, the United States needs a coherent strategy that aligns resources with realistic outcomes. What is unfolding instead risks confusing activity for progress, deterrence for disruption, and counter-narcotics for regime change. It is action for the sake of action, meant to project toughness at home and pressure adversaries abroad. The danger is that spectacle becomes a substitute for strategy, locking the United States into costly adventures without addressing the deeper problems of demand, governance, and great-power competition.
That is not strategy — it is drift.
J. William “BILL” DeMarco, D.Prof is the director of innovation and analysis Air University where he is also an assistant professor. He is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with five command tours spanning mobility, refueling, and joint operations. A former Hoover fellow at Stanford and research fellow at Cambridge University, he focuses on operational design, intrapreneurship, and leadership innovation in complex military systems. The views in this article are those of the author and not those of Air University, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
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Image: Midjourney
