Trump is probing how to cross a red line — and only one thing can stop him

The first US missiles that struck boats in the Caribbean in early September were described by Washington as a “counter-narcotics operation,” a sterile phrase meant to dull the violence of incinerating human beings in an instant. Then came the second strike, this time on survivors already struggling to stay afloat. Once the details emerged, however, the official story began to fall apart.

Local fishermen contradicted US claims. Relatives of those killed have said the men were not cartel operatives at all, but fishermen, divers, and small-scale couriers. Relatives in Trinidad and Venezuela told regional reporters their loved ones were unarmed and had no connection to Tren de Aragua or other cartels, describing them instead as fathers and sons who worked the sea to support their families.

Some called the US narrative “impossible” and “a lie,” insisting the men were being demonized after their deaths. UN experts called the killings “extrajudicial.” Maritime workers noted what everyone in the region already knows: the route near Venezuela’s waters is not a fentanyl corridor into the United States.

Yet the administration clung to its story, insisting these men were “narcoterrorists,” long after the facts had unraveled. Because in Washington’s post 9/11 playbook, fear is a tool. Fear is the architecture of modern American war.

The US did not emerge from the Iraq War into peace or reflection. It emerged into normalization. The legal theories invented and abused after 9/11 — elastic self-defense, limitless definitions of terrorism, enemy combatants, global strike authority — did not fade. They became the backbone of a permanent war machine.

These justifications supported drone wars in Pakistan, airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia, the destruction of Libya, special operations in Syria, and yet another military return to Iraq. And behind every expansion of this global battlefield was a US weapons industry that grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict. What we are seeing today in the Caribbean is not an isolated action; it is the extension of a militarized imperial model that treats entire regions as expendable.

The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of US power.

A framework for endless war

The Trump administration has advanced several overlapping legal arguments to justify the strikes, and together they reveal a post-9/11 framework that stretches executive power far beyond its intended limits.

According to detailed reporting in the Washington Post, a classified Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo argues that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with so-called narcoterrorist organizations. Under this theory, the strikes qualify as part of an ongoing armed conflict rather than a new “war” requiring congressional authorization. This framing alone is unprecedented: drug-trafficking groups are criminal networks, not organized armed groups targeting the US.

A second pillar of the memo, described by lawmakers to the Wall Street Journal, claims that once the president designates a cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it becomes a lawful military target. But terrorism designations have never created war powers. They are financial and sanctions tools, not authorizations for lethal force. As Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) put it, using an FTO label as a “kinetic justification” is something “that has never been done before.”

The OLC memo also invokes Article II, claiming the president can order strikes as part of his commander-in-chief authority. Yet this argument depends on a second unsupported premise: that the boats posed a threat significant enough to justify self-defense. Even internal government lawyers questioned this. As one person familiar with the deliberations told the Post, “There is no actual threat justifying self-defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans.”

At the same time, the administration has publicly insisted that these operations do not rise to the level of “hostilities” that would trigger the War Powers Resolution because US military personnel were never placed at risk. By the administration’s own logic, that means the people on the boats were not engaged in hostilities and therefore were not combatants under any accepted legal standard, making the claim of a wartime self-defense strike impossible to reconcile with US or international law.

Under international law, executing people outside a genuine armed conflict is an extrajudicial killing. Nothing about these strikes meets the legal threshold for war. Because the people on the boats were not lawful combatants, the operation risks violating both international law and U.S. criminal law, including statutes on murder at sea, a concern reportedly underscored by Adm. Alvin Holsey’s early resignation.

The memo goes further still, invoking “collective self-defense” on behalf of regional partners. But key regional partners, including Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, have publicly criticized the strikes and said they were not consulted, undermining the very premise of “collective” defense.

This internal contradiction is one reason lawmakers across both parties have called the reasoning incoherent. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) put it, “This is a memo where the decision was made, and someone was told to come up with a justification for the decision.”

And beneath all of this lies the most dangerous element: the memo’s logic has no geographic limits. If the administration claims it is in an armed conflict with a designated “narcoterrorist” group, then, by its own theory, lethal force could be used wherever members of that group are found. The same framework that justifies strikes near Venezuela could, in principle, be invoked in a US city if the administration claimed a cartel “cell” existed there.

If Trump truly believes he leads “the most transparent administration in history,” then releasing the memo should be automatic. The American people have the right to know what legal theory is being used to justify killing people in their name.

For decades, OLC memos have been used not simply as legal advice but as the internal architecture that allows presidents to expand their war-making power. The Bush torture memos treated torture as lawful by redefining the word “torture” itself, calling it “enhanced interrogation,” thereby enabling years of CIA black-site operations and abusive interrogations. The Libya War Powers memo argued that bombing Libya did not constitute “hostilities,” allowing the administration to continue military action without congressional approval. Targeted-killing memos, including those related to drone strikes on US citizens abroad, constructed a legal theory that lethal force could be used outside traditional battlefields, without trial, based on executive determinations alone. In each case, the memo did not merely interpret the law; it reshaped the boundaries of presidential war powers, often without public debate or congressional authorization.

The American people have the right to know what “legal theory” is being used to justify killing people in their name. Congress needs it to conduct oversight. Service members need it to understand the legality of the orders they receive. And the international community needs clarity on the standards the US claims to follow. There is no legitimate reason for a president to hide the legal basis for lethal force, unless the argument collapses under scrutiny. A secret opinion cannot serve as the foundation for an open-ended military campaign in the Western Hemisphere.

A 200-year doctrine of control

If the legal foundation comes from the post-9/11 era, the geopolitical foundation is older — almost ancestral. For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine has served as the permission slip for US domination in Latin America.

The Trump administration went even further by openly reviving and expanding it through what officials called a “Trump Corollary,” which reframed the entire Western Hemisphere as a US “defense perimeter” and justified increased military operations under the language of counter-narcotics, migration control, and regional stability. In this framework, Latin America is no longer treated as a diplomatic neighbor but as a security zone where Washington can act unilaterally.

Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves, sovereign political project, and refusal to submit to US pressure, has long been marked as a target. Sanctions softened the terrain. Disinformation hardened public opinion. And now, military strikes near its waters test how far Washington can push without triggering public revolt at home. The term “narcoterrorism” is simply the newest mask on a very old doctrine.

The strikes in the Caribbean are not isolated. They are the predictable intersection of two forces: a post-9/11 legal regime that allows war to expand without congressional approval, and a 200-year-old imperial doctrine that treats Latin America as a zone of control rather than a community of sovereign nations. Together, they form the logic that justifies today’s violence near Venezuela.

Label that opened the door

After 9/11, every administration learned the same lesson: if you label something “terrorism,” the public will let you do almost anything. Now, this logic is being used everywhere.

The cruel, decades-long blockade on Cuba is justified by claiming that the island is a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Mass surveillance, border militarization, endless sanctions, all wrapped in the language of “counterterrorism.” And now, to authorize military action in the Caribbean, they simply take the word “narco” and attach it to the word “terrorism.” The label does all the work. The danger is not confined to foreign policy: after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the same elastic definition of “terrorism” is now being used domestically to justify crackdowns on NGOs the administration claims are inciting “anti-American” political violence.

The only reason Trump has not launched a full-scale attack on Venezuela is that he is still testing the ground, testing resistance inside Venezuela, testing Congress, testing the media, and testing us. He knows nearly 70 percent of people in the United States oppose a war with Venezuela. He knows he cannot sell another Iraq. So he is probing, pushing, looking for the line we will not let him cross.

We are that line.

If we do not challenge the lie now, if we do not demand release of the memo, if we stay silent, “narcoterrorism” becomes the new “weapons of mass destruction.” If we allow this test case to go unanswered, the next strike will be a war. We are the only ones who can stop him. And history is watching to see whether we learned anything from the last twenty years of fear, deception, and violence.

Because the next wars were always here, looming. We just need the clarity to see them and the force to stop them before they begin.

• Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants.