A Bounty on the High Seas: Inside the Administration’s Illegal War on Venezuela

5 minutes read time.

In the lawless theater of the second Trump administration, the Caribbean Sea has become the new Wild West, a stage for a campaign of state-sanctioned piracy and extrajudicial killing, proudly announced and live-streamed by the President himself. On Monday, for the second time in as many weeks, Felonious Punk took to his social media platform to boast of a “SECOND Kinetic Strike” against a vessel in international waters, an attack that killed three people he labeled “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.” This latest act of deadly force, celebrated with a 30-second snuff film of a seemingly stationary boat exploding into a fireball, is not just a dangerous escalation in a manufactured conflict; it is a profound and brazen violation of international and U.S. law, carried out under a pretext so demonstrably false it borders on the absurd.

The administration’s public justification for this new maritime bounty-hunting program is a masterclass in cynical propaganda. They claim they are protecting the homeland from the “poison” of illicit drugs, invoking the tragic figure of 100,000 annual overdose deaths in America as a catch-all rationale to operate under the “laws of armed conflict.” This, they argue, gives them the right to summarily execute suspected smugglers on the high seas. “BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” the President thundered online. His Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was even more blunt in his bloodlust, telling Fox News, “What needs to start happening is some of these boats need to get blown up.” The President’s language is carefully chosen. By repeatedly labeling the victims “terrorists” and the drugs “A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!”, he is attempting to retroactively construct a legal basis for the strikes under his Article II powers, framing them as acts of national self-defense rather than what they appear to be: assassinations.

This entire narrative, however, collapses under the slightest scrutiny. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the United Nations, Venezuela plays almost no role in the production and trade of fentanyl, the primary driver of American overdose deaths. That grim trade is run almost entirely out of Mexico with chemicals from China. Furthermore, the vast majority—nearly 75 percent—of cocaine is trafficked not through the Caribbean, but through the Pacific. The administration is, in effect, fighting its “war on drugs” in the wrong ocean against the wrong country for the wrong drug. When asked about the legality of the strikes, the President offered a stunningly dismissive deflection: “What’s illegal are the drugs that were on the boat.”

The illegality of these actions is as clear as their factual basis is false. As numerous legal specialists and retired top military lawyers have pointed out, summarily killing suspected smugglers is a crime. Drug trafficking, while a serious offense, is not punishable by death in the United States, and Congress has not authorized a war against cartels. These are not wartime combatants; they are criminal suspects who, under both U.S. and international law, are entitled to due process. The president’s actions have no clear legal precedent. They are, in the stark language of international human rights law, extrajudicial killings.

Even a member of the President’s own party, Senator Rand Paul, has had the courage to state the obvious. “Maybe [the boat] was coming here. Maybe it wasn’t,” he said after the first strike killed 11 people. “But nobody’s even asking whether we need to prove that. We just blow them up.” His skepticism is well-founded. Reporting from The New York Times on that first strike revealed that the boat had reportedly altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack began, completely undermining any claim of an “imminent threat” that might justify such a use of force. Secretary Rubio, however, revealed the administration’s chilling new doctrine in a revealing comment: “We can’t live in a world where all of a sudden they do a U-turn and so we can’t touch them anymore.”

The true motive, as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has charged, appears to be “regime change for oil,” not drug interdiction. Maduro, whom the U.S. has indicted and for whom they are offering a $50 million reward, has accused the U.S. of trying to goad his country into a “major war.” After the second strike, he declared that relations with the United States had moved from “battered” to “completely broken,” and that his government would “fully” exercise its “legitimate right to defend itself.”

This is not idle rhetoric. It is a response to a massive and undeniable U.S. military buildup in the region. The administration has assembled an “armada” of at least eight warships, including the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group carrying 4,500 sailors and 2,200 marines, as well as P-8 surveillance planes and submarines. The unannounced visit of the Defense Secretary to Puerto Rico, along with the arrival of F-35 fighter jets on the island, confirms that the U.S. territory is being converted into a forward operating base for this undeclared war. The sheer scale of this force has led analysts to suggest a “mismatch between the targets and the assets,” indicating a much larger strategic goal. The President himself, when asked if he would now order strikes on mainland Venezuela, offered a chilling and ominous, “We’ll see what happens.”

This is the grim reality of the unmanaged world. An American president, emboldened by a compliant media and a paralyzed opposition, is now openly boasting about ordering illegal killings on the high seas, justified by a narrative of lies, in the service of a reckless and dangerous agenda of military escalation. WE CANNOT LET HIM GET AWAY WITH THIS TYPE OF BEHAVIOR!