With less publicity and less pushback than the high-profile deployments of the National Guard to American cities, the Trump Administration has undertaken another legally dubious, and strategically problematic, use of military force — against narco-cartels in the Caribbean.

Since the beginning of September, the defence department has announced that it has blown up four suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, killing 21 people on board, most recently on October 3. Last week, the administration notified several congressional committees that President Donald Trump had decided that the drug cartels are engaged in “an armed attack against the United States” and that drug smugglers are “unlawful combatants” who can be killed on sight. Lawmakers from both parties, to say nothing of legal scholars both conservative and liberal, are highly sceptical of the administration’s justification for this use of force.

Drug cartels are undoubtedly evil organisations that cause considerable harm to Americans, but they are hardly engaged in “armed conflict” like al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. When the administration claimed that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua cartel was waging war on the United States at the behest of the Maduro regime, the US intelligence community dissented.

“The administration is saying it can kill people simply by designating them as terrorists and then declaring there is an armed conflict,” former state department legal adviser Brian Finucane told the Notus website. “That is extremely concerning. It is a licence to kill based solely on the President’s authority.”

Indeed, Trump’s actions recall those of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, whom Trump has praised in the past. Duterte is now on trial for crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court for unleashing his police to kill suspected drug dealers without trial. His lawyers argue that the case should be dismissed because the court does not have jurisdiction.

But the legal issues regarding Trump’s actions are only part of the problem. The broader issue is: what the heck is the administration hoping to achieve with this use of force?

The answer is by no means clear because Trump and his senior aides have not explained their thinking in any detail. Instead, Trump has routinely pointed to the large number of US overdose deaths — primarily from fentanyl — and vowed to protect the American people. “We’re going to stop drug trafficking,” the President told sailors on board an aircraft carrier on Sunday, adding that the deadly attacks were an “act of kindness”.

Newsflash: the United States has been trying to “stop drug trafficking” at least since Richard Nixon declared the “War On Drugs” in 1971. While US interdiction efforts may have slightly reduced the flow of narcotics, they have hardly stopped the drug trade despite the Government spending at least $1 trillion over more than half a century.

In fact, US overdose deaths have been rising for more than a quarter-century before dipping in 2024. The biggest killer in recent years has been fentanyl, which does not come from Venezuela, the centre of the administration’s new drug war. Most fentanyl comes from Mexico, with chemicals imported from China. Venezuela is, admittedly, a transhipper of cocaine to the US, but far from the largest culprit. The coca plant is primarily cultivated in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia.

While the armed forces are now blowing up drug boats, the US Coast Guard remains engaged in more traditional, and more clearly lawful, interdiction efforts — boarding boats and arresting their crews. On August 25, for example, the coastguard reported offloading 76,140 pounds of illicit narcotics, valued at $473 million, in Port Everglades, Florida, after 19 boat interdictions over the previous two months in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says blowing up boats is necessary because “interdiction doesn’t work”. But if stopping 19 vessels in the course of two months “doesn’t work”, it’s hard to know what blowing up four more will achieve. The low-level couriers smuggling drugs at sea are not likely to be deterred by the risk of being blown up any more than they were previously deterred by the risk of serving long prison sentences. For the cartel bosses, whatever cargo they lose is simply part of the cost of doing business. And, from a law-enforcement standpoint, blowing up boats destroys the intelligence value of interrogating their crews and confiscating their phones.

Given that the sporadic boat strikes are unlikely to make much of a difference in the war on drugs, many analysts are wondering whether the administration is actually pursuing regime change in Venezuela under the guise of fighting the war on drugs. That certainly seems to be what Rubio — a longtime foe of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro — wants. NBC News reports that US strikes against drug traffickers in Venezuela itself could be in the works. The administration could even try to kill or capture Maduro, on the grounds that he is not a legitimate head of state but rather an alleged drug trafficker who was indicted by the justice department in 2020.

Using a similar rationale, US troops invaded Panama in 1989 to arrest President Manuel Noriega, who would go on to spend nearly two decades in a US prison. But Venezuela is not Panama — its population is more than six times larger — and even with a formidable US Navy armada in the Caribbean, America does not have nearly enough forces in the region to overthrow the Maduro regime. Moreover, as we have seen in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, the consequences of toppling even an odious tyrant can be deeply problematic.

Although it is hard to say exactly what the administration is up to with the boat strikes, the implications are clear enough. In essence, the administration is turning the “War On Drugs” from a metaphor into an actual war. Shouldn’t such a momentous decision require the consent of Congress? If Trump wants a Gulf of Venezuela resolution, authorising the use of military force, he should say so. If he doesn’t, he should stop the kinetic strikes.

• Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of The New York Times bestseller Reagan: His Life and Legend, which was named one of the ten best books of 2024 by The New York Times