The War on Drugs Turns Into A Hot War In The "Gulf of America"

For fifty or so years, the so-called “War on Drugs” has been sold to the American public, at varying times, as a moral crusade, a public-health campaign, and a border-security initiative - sometimes all three - depending on the decade in question. But every so often the mask slips - the past several weeks has been one such occasion.

The Trump administration’s most likely to make you cover your drink, Pete Hegseth along with others in US high command - have repeatedly and with zerop provocation - ordered lethal strikes against numerous small boats off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, under the banner of anti-narcotics trade operations. The official story: these are “loaded drug boats,” “narco-terrorist vessels,” threats to the homeland. The real story: the War on Drugs was never about drugs - it was a counterinsurgency effort, an exercise in imperial policing, and a classic resource extraction ploy. Now the War on Drugs has gone from Nixonian metaphor to Trumpian “hot war.”

The original pitch was simple: drugs are a threat to the nation’s children; traffickers are evil; we must lock ’em up. In June 1971, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “America’s public enemy number one.” ^[1] That phrase launched what would become a sprawling global campaign - formal prohibition, heavy-handed enforcement, clumsy foreign “assistance”, and military action - all with little to no emphasis on treatment or addressing the structural roots of the American addiction epidemic.

What was never openly admitted is that from its earliest days, the War on Drugs also functioned as a tool of domestic repression (crushing the Black liberation movement, anti-war protesters, and other forms of community organization) and imperialist intervention (backing allied regimes, destabilizing inconvenient governments). ^[2] Oftentimes, these actions went hand in hand, as in the well-known fiasco that was Iran-Contra. Interference in the Global South is nothing new for American narcowarriors at the State Department and among the alphabet boys, but why Venezuela in 2025?

Here’s where the logic sharpens into something unmistakable:

First, Venezuela sits atop one of the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. It has stubbornly refused to bow to U.S. hegemony and has remained politically independent in ways that deeply annoy both the State Department and the American corporate class. After years of sanctions designed to kneecap its economy and exhaust its population, the country remains both standing and uncooperative - a combination Washington never tolerates for long.

Second, branding a country as a “narco-state” has become one of the most reliable pretexts for intervention in the modern American toolkit. It is vague, frightening, and conveniently unprovable - the holy trinity of imperial justification. As one blunt Al Jazeera op-ed put it, “The U.S. warships off Venezuela aren’t there to fight drugs.” The label itself does the work: once a government is described as a “narco-state,” every act of aggression becomes “interdiction,” every civilian casualty becomes an “unfortunate necessity,” and every resource grab becomes a “stabilization effort.”

Third, the militarization has now erupted into the open. U.S. warships have been deployed to the Caribbean, drones are operating with a level of latitude usually reserved for open conflict, and the administration has proudly announced strikes on “drug boats” loosely — and sometimes not at all — tied to Venezuelan gangs or trafficking networks. What we are witnessing is the evolution of the drug-war pretext into a fully militarized foreign policy, complete with targets, kill lists, and the same veneer of urgency that accompanied Iraq in 2003.

On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military carried out a strike on a boat allegedly trafficking drugs from Venezuela, killing eleven people according to President Trump and his supporting cast. A few weeks later, another detonation: on October 3, the U.S. announced the killing of four more people aboard a vessel described as “narco-terrorists.”

The red flags here aren’t subtle; they’re visible from orbit.

To begin with, the identities of the people killed remain murky at best, and the supposed links to trafficking or organized crime are often unverified or contradicted by local reports.

Further, the U.S. is using lethal military force - not internationally-approved law enforcement operations - against non-state actors in international waters. Numerous legal scholars argue this goes far beyond recognized boundaries of self-defense or armed conflict and amounts to undeclared hostilities against a sovereign nation.

And finally, American media coverage of these strikes has been depressingly predictable. Instead of interrogating the legality, the risk to civilians, or the geopolitical motivations, major outlets simply repeat whatever “interdiction” talking points the Pentagon hands them. It’s stenography dressed up in journalism’s heels and “little black dress” that goes with everything. The same dynamic that helped sell invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and a dozen coups before them has recently been dusted off for use in South America.

In short: the mechanics of empire, once hidden behind legalese and PR discipline, are now roaring in broad daylight.

Nixon set the foundations by declaring drugs “public enemy #1,” launching an enforcement-heavy regime, and creating the Drug Enforcement Administration — an agency that functioned from its inception as both police force and geopolitical instrument.

Reagan and Clinton escalated criminalization dramatically. Mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and militarized policing turned the War on Drugs into a domestic occupation, while U.S. “anti-drug” programs were exported across Latin America as justification for funding security forces and pro-U.S. governments.

After 9/11, the War on Drugs fused with the War on Terror, giving birth to the term “narco-terrorism” — a hybrid boogeyman that allowed the U.S. to treat traffickers, rebels, dissidents, and unlucky bystanders as interchangeable targets.

Under Trump, the final transformation occurred: the metaphorical war became a literal one. Drone strikes, boat bombings, naval deployments, and explicit threats against sovereign governments replaced the performative moralism of the past. The War on Drugs is no longer pretending to be a criminal-justice policy. It has become an undeclared military campaign.

A hot war on drugs carries predictable consequences:

First, trafficking routes shift rapidly in response to military pressure. This accelerates violence, empowers more brutal networks, and pushes civilians into the line of fire.

Second, the domestic fallout is immediate and ugly. Border militarization expands, immigrant communities are cast as narcotics threats- a move already under way thanks to Stephen Miller, et all- and narcotics policing acquires yet another national-security justification.

Third, the international consequences are severe. Sovereignty is violated under the guise of “intercepting traffickers,” unconventional methods of drug statute enforcement become normalized en masse, and resource-rich nations find themselves pressured, surveilled, or outright attacked under the pretext of combating drug-dealing cartels.

The key point is this: none of these outcomes are evidence of the policy failing. They are evidence of the policy succeeding if judging it by its actual purpose.

First, intelligence claims with questionable foundations are elevated to existential threats.
Back in 2002, anonymous sources and circular reporting were enough to convince half the country that Saddam Hussein had a personal WMD Etsy shop hidden somewhere in the desert. Today, a blurry satellite image of a fishing boat becomes “credible evidence of narco-terrorist activity.” The bar for proof hasn’t risen; it’s just been painted a different color.

Second, a narrative of imminent danger to the American public is hastily assembled from shaky, opaque, or outright contradictory evidence.
We were told Iraq could vaporize American cities “within 45 minutes.” Now we’re told Venezuelan skiffs loaded with—at most—a couple kilos of cocaine represent a dire threat to national security. The fear is the product, not the information. The details don’t matter as long as Americans are convinced something brown and foreign is headed for their doorstep.

Third, a foreign nation with valuable resources is framed as irrational, unpredictable, or otherwise unhinged — the sort of actor that must be “contained” before it does something terrible.
In Iraq, it was oil fields and lucrative reconstruction contracts waiting to be divvied up. In Venezuela, it’s the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, plus a government stubborn enough to resist privatization. Both countries were branded as incapable of reason, diplomacy, or sovereign decision-making. Funny how the U.S. never seems to diagnose Norway or Canada with that particular disorder.

And finally, media momentum comes first; the facts are sorted out later - if they’re ever sorted out at all.
Cable news treated the Iraq invasion like a season premiere. Embedded journalists became cheerleaders. Newspapers softened their headlines to avoid being “anti-troops.” We’re seeing the same pattern now: headline writers repeating Pentagon phrasing verbatim, talking heads calling boat bombings “precision interdictions,” and almost no one asking why a superpower needs to use naval missiles to stop something FedEx could smuggle in a padded envelope.

Once again, the U.S. political class discovers the magic formula:
Context is optional. Sensationalism is mandatory. Accountability is deferred indefinitely.

The cycle remains painfully simple and lethally effective:
Manufacture crisis → Justify intervention → Extract advantage.

It worked in Iraq because Americans trusted the premise. It worked because the fear was easy to sell, the targets were far away, and the story was simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker. And it’s being tried again in Venezuela because Washington is betting — with grim confidence — that the public still falls for the same narrative if you change just enough nouns to make the plot feel fresh.

Here’s the straight dope: the War on Drugs hasn’t gone off the rails - it reached its intended destination.

This is not an escalation so much as a reveal. The mask dropped, the polite fiction dissolved, and what we see now is the old imperial mindset in its raw, martial form.
If the U.S. government actually gave half a damn about drugs, we’d be building clinics, funding the social safety net, reforming simple possession statutes and substance-related - not launching missiles in the Caribbean.

But that’s not what this is about. It’s about power, extraction, and domination - all wrapped in a righteous narrative you’re told to applaud.

Naming that is the first step. The second step is refusing to consent. And that, dear reader, is something you can do.