• Donald Trump’s broader aerial campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean (almost certainly) violates international law.• Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have repeatedly called on the US military to commit more war crimes throughout their careers in public life.• Violating the laws of war undermines America’s national security interests.
In early September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the US military to “kill everybody” aboard a speedboat in the Caribbean.
A missile then shattered the vessel and set its fragments ablaze. When the smoke cleared, US surveillance drones showed two people clinging to the smoldering wreckage. An admiral then ordered a second strike against these flailing survivors — an act that violated a wide array of international and domestic laws.
Or at least, this is what a recent report in the Washington Post alleges.
The Trump administration publicly insists that the Post’s account is “fake news.” In closed-door briefings with lawmakers, Pentagon officials have reportedly claimed that the second strike was not intended to kill survivors, but rather, to sink the boat so as to clear a navigation hazard for other vessels. Yet, the administration has refused to provide either the public or members of Congress with unedited video footage of the bombings.
In a social media post Friday, Hegseth argued that the strikes were “lawful under both U.S. and international law.” Many in Congress are skeptical, with the bipartisan House and Senate Armed Services Committees both vowing to investigate the incident.
Such oversight is vital. It’s important to determine whether America’s Defense Secretary authorized the killing of wounded, shipwrecked persons. Both international and US laws forbid the killing of anyone who has already been rendered defenseless, even amid warfare.
And yet, there is also something a bit disingenuous about this debate.
By all appearances, the White House’s true position is not that its actions are consistent with the laws of war but that it should not be bound by such laws. The president and defense secretary have not only conveyed this belief implicitly through their actions; they’ve also explicitly advocated for the commission of war crimes throughout their time in public life.The biggest scandal facing the US military therefore is not that it appears to have committed a lawless strike on defenseless victims, but that it is indisputably led by men who believe such criminality is morally permissible and strategically sound.
America’s war in the Caribbean is based on a lie
We do not yet know with certainty that the US military targeted survivors of a boat strike at the Defense Secretary’s encouragement. But, we do know that the bombing in question was illegal, regardless.
Officially, Hegseth ordered that attack to combat drug trafficking. Since September, the administration has conducted more than 20 lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing over 80 people. In each case, the White House claimed that the targeted vessels were transporting narcotics on behalf of drug cartels, although they’ve presented no evidence to support those allegations.
Of course, the US military has not traditionally claimed the authority to summarily execute criminal suspects. When the government believes that an individual is selling illegal substances, it typically arrests that person and puts them on trial.
The Trump administration insists, however, that South America’s drug cartels should be considered terrorist organizations — and that each time these groups export narcotics across our border, they effectively commit an attack on US soil. Therefore, the US has the right to “secure our homeland from the drugs that are killing our people” by waging war against Venezuela’s narcoterrorists (and/or small fishing boats that could theoretically be carrying contraband).
This reasoning is absurd on its face. Supplying cocaine to Miami dance clubs and flying planes into New York skyscrapers are categorically different offenses. To define the former as an act of war is to drain that term of all meaning. In practice, it also entails empowering the president to kill anyone he suspects of engaging in illegal commerce. No past administration has ever asserted this authority, and no domestic or international legal body has ever affirmed its legitimacy.
What’s more, the president’s position isn’t just theoretically unsound but factually baseless. In justifying its campaign, the Trump administration has constantly invoked America’s overdose epidemic. In September, Hegseth called his missile strikes a “defense of the American people,” since “100,000 Americans were killed each year under the previous administration.” President Donald Trump, meanwhile, claimed that each individual speedboat the military has incinerated would have killed “25,000 American people” (a claim that is, of course, mathematically ludicrous).
Yet, America’s overdose crisis is driven by fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico, not South America. Venezuelan drug runners generally export cocaine, which, by itself, accounts for a tiny fraction of US overdoses (less than one in 10 overdoses are attributable to cocaine unpaired with opioids). And in any case, it’s not clear that the targeted boats were even hauling blow. After one of the administration’s strikes, the military captured two survivors — and then proceeded to let them go instead of making them stand trial for drug trafficking. This invites the suspicion that our government does not actually have strong evidence against the supposed criminals it is incinerating.
More broadly, the administration’s focus on Venezuelan cocaine traffickers — instead of Mexican fentanyl labs — suggests that its fundamental concern is not with reducing US drug deaths. Trump and his allies have long sought to remove Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro from power. The president reportedly encouraged Maduro to leave office in a recent phone call. And his administration has dubiously declared the Venezuelan leader to be the head of a “narcoterrorist organization.”
It, therefore, looks like America is bombing civilian ships as a means of toppling a sovereign government that has committed no act of war against the United States. This is precisely the kind of behavior that international law was constructed to forbid.
The president and defense secretary have both publicly advocated for war crimes
There is no reason to believe that Trump and Hegseth are earnestly confused about the laws of war. Rather, they have each repeatedly expressed contempt for that very concept.
The defense secretary has been particularly clear on this point. Just last year, Hegseth published a book that explicitly argued for the U.S. military to commit more war crimes. Among the Pentagon chief’s insights:• “Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?”
• “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?!”
• “[I]f we’re going to send our boys to fight—and it should be boys—we need to unleash them to win. They need them to be the most ruthless. The most uncompromising. The most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be. We must break the enemy’s will. Our troops will make mistakes, and when they do, they should get the overwhelming benefit of the doubt.”
Hegseth has lived by these principles. As a Fox News host, he championed the cause of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused by fellow serviceman of randomly sniping a young girl and elderly man in Iraq, as well as stabbing a prisoner of war to death. Hegseth successfully lobbied Trump into awarding Gallagher a pardon.
For his part, the president has repeatedly called on the US military to perpetrate atrocities. As a candidate in 2015, Trump argued that America should target the wives and children of ISIS militants for extermination and mass murder Muslim prisoners of war (with bullets dipped in pig’s blood). In a 2019 post on X addressed to Hegseth, meanwhile, Trump suggested that it was hypocritical for the US to hold American war criminals legally accountable since “we train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”
Nullifying international law does not advance American interests
Many conservatives have recognized the administration’s true position on the laws of war and forthrightly defended it. Joel Berry, a right-wing influencer, contended that the bombing of defenseless survivors only horrifies liberals because “they’ve forgotten the biblical purpose of government”: “to execute wrath on him who practices evil.”
Conservative Sirius XM host Megyn Kelly voiced similar sentiments, saying of the strike’s victims: “I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
Personally, I have some moral qualms about the US government torturing people to death for nonviolent offenses that were never proven in court. But, even if you embrace the MAGA right’s basic normative view on this question — that America should ruthlessly pursue its interests without concern for international law or human rights — you should still reject the administration’s position.
Adhering to the laws of war is not an act of charity. The United States has an interest in upholding various constraints on geopolitical violence. The prohibition against killing enemies who’ve been rendered defenseless isn’t just rooted in humanitarian considerations, but also strategic ones. If you want to minimize the number of Americans who must die to prevail in battle, then you need to persuade foreign combatants to surrender when they’re clearly outgunned, rather than fighting to the last man. And such combatants are more likely to lay down their arms if they believe that the US military does not execute the defenseless. Bombing the helpless survivors of a missile strike undermines America’s reputation on this front.
Likewise, Americans benefit from norms against attacks on civilian ships. Indeed, one of the core justifications for our nation’s globe-spanning military presence is that it helps safeguard maritime trade. Maximizing the safety of global shipping reduces American consumers’ costs (as it allows exporters to pay less for insurance and charge less for their wares) while ensuring our continuous access to vital goods and commodities. Perversely, the president has actually bragged about deterring legitimate commerce with his attacks in the Carribean, telling donors in October, “Nobody [in Venezuela] wants to go fishing anymore. No one wants to do anything near the water.”
Americans also have an interest in minimizing armed conflict. War doesn’t just inflict death and suffering on nations directly involved but also imposes costs on the wider world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up Americans’ energy bills. The Syrian Civil War generated a refugee crisis that roiled the politics of many Western countries. A Chinese attack on Taiwan could devastate the global economy. And, of course, any war between nuclear weapons states would threaten to devastate the entire world.
International law seeks to deter war by placing restrictions on the legitimate use of military force. As the world’s preeminent martial power, the US has a unique capacity to reinforce — or erode — norms against offensive wars. Even before Trump, America frequently chose to do the latter. But this administration’s farcically expansive definition of self-defense has further undercut the conventions that have made the past eight decades unusually peaceful (by our species’ belligerent standards).
What defending America truly requires
Congress is right to investigate the US military’s “double tap” strike on a Caribbean speedboat. But, no probe is necessary to determine that our government is led by war crimes enthusiasts.
Trump and Hegseth subscribe to a vicious and juvenile worldview — one that equates restraints on our military’s brutality with impediments to our nation’s interests. That idea is more toxic than Venezuelan cocaine. If they wish to put America first, conservatives of good conscience must loudly reject it.
