Beware the Boomerang Effect: Why U.S. Strikes on Alleged Drug Boats Pose a Profound Threat to American Freedom

On September 2, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued the first of a series of social media posts announcing successive lethal strikes against boats travelling in international waters across the Caribbean. As of October 22, the U.S. government had killed at least thirty-two people in such strikes (plus five more through similar actions in the Pacific).¹ The public has been asked to accept without further evidence that these boats originated in Venezuela and were smuggling drugs for the Tren de Aragua cartel. This is the gang to which Trump accused hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants in the United States of belonging before deporting them in March 2025 to El Salvador to be held in its notorious mega-prison, the “Terrorism Confinement Center.”²

These strikes have been met with applause among Trump’s supporters. Senator Lindsey Graham celebrated the first strike as a “welcome… sign that we have a new sheriff in town.”³

This is a grave mistake. Key elements of the official story are contested:⁴ that the crews were from Tren de Aragua,⁵ and even that the boats were carrying enough fuel to reach the United States.⁶ But, even if those claims are true, the strikes are unlikely to be justified either legally or morally. Most worrying of all, they indicate a direction of travel from the First Trump Administration’s experiments in armed force that should further alarm those already anxious about military deployments to U.S. cities.⁷ It points toward an intensification of unchecked destructive and coercive power that directly threatens civil and political freedom at home as well as abroad.

The Legal Status of the Strikes

Trump and Hegseth frame these attacks as “acts of war,” claiming legal legitimacy for what would otherwise be unlawful killings amounting to the crime of murder. The U.S. State Department’s declaration on February, 20, 2025 that Tren de Aragua is a “foreign terrorist organization” helped prepare the ground.⁸ Writing on September 15 on X, Hegseth characterized the targets of the attacks as “narco-terrorists” and described strikes as a defensive measure to protect “our homeland and our citizens.”⁹

It is not clear that designating a group as “terrorist” affects its liability to the use of armed force under international law.¹⁰ But stretching the term to encompass drug gangs implies that they pose a quasi or actual military threat requiring an armed response. Hegseth’s construal of smuggling as an attempt “to poison our people” is intended to justify his claim that members of the gang are “combatants.”¹¹ Trump’s accusations against Tren de Aragua that it is engaging in “irregular warfare against the United States” lean further into this argument. Describing drug smugglers in this way defies credibility, stretching these terms beyond all recognition.¹²

If international law poses one set of challenges to Trump and Hegseth, the U.S. Constitution poses another. Article 1 grants the authority to declare a state of war to Congress, not the president.¹³ And the War Powers Act of 1973 requires the president “in every possible instance [to] consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities.” However, when Senators Adam Schiff and Tim Kaine introduced a resolution under the Act that would have blocked further strikes, it was voted down 51-48.¹⁴ And the extent of presidential power on the matter of armed force is contested. When the Trump administration launched strikes against Iran in Jun 2025, supporters of his decision could cite Article II of the Constitution, which names the president “Commander In Chief of the Army and Navy,” to question the need for congressional approval.¹⁵ The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Act (AUMF) offers further legal latitude that the President can potentially exploit, particularly if the description of a target as “terrorist” is widely accepted.¹⁶

Is there a Moral Justification?

UN experts Ben Saul, Morris Tidball-Binz, and George Katrougalos question the Trump administration’s attempts to justify the strikes, arguing that they violate their targets’ human right to life and amount to “extrajudicial killings.”¹⁷ But it is not enough to debate the legitimacy of U.S. boat strikes only from a legal point of view.

In claiming that the airstrikes defend “our homeland and our citizens,”¹⁸ Hegseth also offers a moral argument. He implies that the aim of targeted killing is to defeat smugglers carrying drugs that will jeopardize the lives of “millions.” So, in a nutshell, the claim is that the airstrikes seek to save lives, many lives.

This argument appeals to widely shared intuitions about the right of self-defense. As philosophers parse it, when one person wrongfully threatens the life of another, the assailant loses their right against being killed just as long as they wrongfully pose the threat and force defenders to act. Killing the assailant is not disproportionate, given what the other is defending against, and it is better to kill someone who has made themselves liable to harm by acting wrongfully than to let an innocent person be murdered. Finally, if it is permissible for someone to kill in self-defense, it is also likely to be permissible for others to act on their behalf, especially when they cannot defend themselves.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that the boats targeted were smuggling drugs, as alleged, and that those drugs could pose a risk to lives if delivered. Could an argument based on rights of self-defense justify the strikes?

To do so, it would have to jump some hurdles. First is the fact that, in one-on-one defensive actions, it is generally presumed that killing is only permissible against someone posing an imminent threat. This means that the harm they threaten must be all but inevitable if you do not act, and it must be about to happen now: it must be imminent. To kill someone because they might kill you some time in the future cannot truly be called an act of self-defense. At best, it might be preventive but there is no consensus that preventive killing is permissible.

The “imminence requirement” has been put under strain over the past two-and-a-half decades as successive U.S. presidents sought to wrap a self-defense justification around the targeted killing of terror suspects. During the War on Terror, those targeted were not typically engaged in active attack, nor were they just about to be. To justify these strikes, therefore, successive U.S. administrations argued that the imminence requirement was satisfied if the target’s past connections and behaviors indicated an intolerable risk of future harm. And any opportunity to kill them might be framed as being potentially the only chance to eliminate them before their next attack.¹⁹

As critics of targeted killing point out, however, this stretches the requirement of imminence beyond recognition and, in doing so, it is far too permissive. As Jeremy Waldron puts it, we end up licensing “a speculative judgement that the killing of this person right now may make it somewhat less likely that a terrorist atrocity will take place at some undetermined time in the future.”²⁰ There are good reasons, therefore, to insist on imminence in quite a strict sense.

Trying to stretch the criterion of imminence to capture the threat posed by drug runners is liable to the same objection. But, even if we did so, the defense-of-persons justification for the boat attacks faces further challenges. First, the attempt at a defensive justification falls foul of the “necessity principle” if the option of capturing a boat crew rather than killing them is available, as seems likely. That is, the Navy could track vessels until they entered U.S. waters and then interdict them, arresting their crews, and confiscating their cargo—problem solved. Therefore, as many just war theorists would put it, killing cannot be justified because it is not a “last resort.”

So, the airstrikes do not seem likely to be justifiable in the same way personal self-defense is. But then, maybe this is where the claim that the United States is at war comes back into play. During an armed conflict, the ethics and law of war permit attack even if capture is possible. But there are two reasons why this argument is unpersuasive.

The first is that a resort to defensive war must satisfy the just war principle of “reasonable chance of success.” And, to do so, U.S. forces would have to engage in something much larger in scale and more systematic than an iterative series of strikes against a few alleged drug couriers.²¹ A defensive war entails a serious, coordinated attempt to defeat enemy forces as a whole. This demands a strategic use of arms, systematically degrading the enemy’s capacity to resupply and rearm, and proving over time that attempts to continue fighting are futile.²² By contrast, isolated killings of the sort seen so far appear to be little more than performative acts with a dangerously retributive or even vengeful complexion.

Secondly, as Rory Stewart recently remarked, the War on Terror showed that it was militarily much more effective to capture individual militants than to kill them.²³ Doing so put them out of action, degrading enemy forces directly, but also yielded communication devices that could be mined for invaluable intelligence. In the case of the alleged drug boats, U.S. forces appear to be wasting this opportunity, prioritizing dramatic kills over actionable intel. So not only does the pattern of airstrikes offer little chance of degrading any threat the cartels may pose but it is also directly counterproductive.

In any case, the very idea that the public should assess targeted killings chiefly as a way of diminishing the future risk of harm buys into something that is dangerous in a rather insidious way. It originates in the mistaken assumption that public uses of force should chiefly be judged by the standards of self-defense against murder. Let us unpack this assumption.

The Bigger Danger: Power and Domination

As we have seen, it is widely thought that the function of justified defensive killing is to diminish the chance that innocent people will die or suffer some similarly severe harm. In this perspective, a “threat” is someone whose actions cause an intolerable risk of harm.

But interpreting threats this way distracts us from something important. This is the fact that, when people deliberately pose a threat, they do so by arrogating to themselves a certain type of power—the uncontrolled power to inflict harm. Defending against them, therefore, is not just a question of reducing an intolerable probability of harm. It is also about defeating someone’s uncontrolled power to cause harm. In fact, I think it has more to do with power than probability.

When someone murders, the dominating power they employ is sometimes conjured out of nowhere—someone suddenly grabs a rock and brings it down on the head of an unsuspecting victim. Speed and surprise render the victim defenseless and establish a fleeting moment of total domination by the perpetrator, which then vanishes with the life of their victim. The dramatic prominence of the victim in the aftermath and the obvious harm that has befallen them might explain why philosophers who build the ethics of force on cases of attempted murder tend to think that an intolerable probability of harm is what triggers justified self-defense.

By contrast, if philosophers based their analysis on a contrasting but equally intuitive paradigm case, that of enslavement, they might interpret the function of defensive violence quite differently. If the threat you defend yourself against is that of being forced into bondage at the point of a sword, so to speak, then the probability of death would not really be the central issue—successful enslavement keeps its victims alive. It makes better sense to interpret the point of defensive killing to be that of defeating the uncontrolled destructive power that your assailant confronts you with, a power that they seek to convert into coercive domination. And since arrogating this sort of destructive power is a characteristic of both enslavement and murder, it is arguable that the function of defensive violence is the same in both cases—to defang the threat, depriving the assailant of their power or bringing it under control.²⁴

If this is the right way to think about threats, then maybe the thing to be most attentive to when judging attacks on Venezuelan boats is not the probability of death or injury, whether due to drugs or airstrikes. Instead, we should concentrate on who possesses to the greatest degree an intolerably unconstrained ability to kill, injure, and destroy at will—and, with that, the ability to leverage this primitively dominating power as a means of intensifying assaults on freedom.

Granted, it is likely that a gang like the Tren de Aragua itself wields some destructive power and, insofar as it seeks to pave the way for narcotics to be trafficked into the United States, it might project some of that power over parts of the American population. However, the scale of this threat—assuming it exists—is quite small. Current estimates put the number of gang members globally at around only five thousand.²⁵ And measures are available to contain the gang through national and international policing.

By contrast, the destructive power of the United States is enormous—indeed, world leading. It possesses the equipment needed to inflict harm on a massive scale—including warships, submarines, fighters, missiles, and drones (not to mention nuclear weapons). Its intelligence capabilities and ability to launch strikes covertly from vast distances and in ways that are extremely hard to detect intensify this destructive power, easily rendering many targets entirely defenseless against it.

As long as this power is controlled by democratic institutions at home and by international law abroad, it is prevented from becoming an intolerable threat. But the boat strikes signal that this may no longer be the case.

The Trump administration is claiming a right to act with impunity in spaces and against targets that are usually protected by law. Internationally, it is showing itself immune to the reputational and diplomatic consequences of using force on legally dubious pretexts. And the willingness of a U.S. vice president to dismiss legal justifications altogether communicates a fundamental disregard for the rule of law. When JD Vance declared, “I don’t give a shit what you call it” in response to a criticism that the U.S. was committing war crimes, it showed that, as Philip Johnson writes, “Impunity is the larger point, a display of power in itself.”²⁶

Signaling that you have both the power to kill and the latitude to do so—that you are undeterred by any legal or other consequence—is one way in which the primitively dominating power to kill may be leveraged to intensify coercive domination and thus to attack freedom itself. This should worry us not only for the effects it will have on U.S. behavior abroad but also due to its implications for freedom domestically.

As many commentators attest, U.S. behavior in the Caribbean since early September is closely connected with developments in its domestic space. While the U.S. Navy stretches the boundaries of permissible action abroad, military forces have already been sent to U.S. cities on the pretext that they are needed to “control crime,” and there are warnings of more deployments to come. At the same time, masked ICE paramilitaries are already acting with impunity across the United States, rounding up those they identify as illegal immigrants—among them, many people of Venezuelan origin.

If war breaks out between the United States and Venezuela, then Venezuelan nationals living in the United States may be rounded up wholesale as “illegal aliens in time of war” under the authority of an Executive Order.²⁷ And the loosening of constraints both abroad and at home might conceivably intensify other dangers too. If it is permissible (as Trump argues) to assassinate suspected drug smugglers in international waters rather than arrest them, and if the military is being deployed in U.S. cities ostensibly for the purposes of combating “crime,” then is it irrational to fear that a shoot to kill policy could extend inwards toward Democrat-leaning cities accused of failing to rein in gangs?

If it is not irrational, the point is not so much that Americans should fear large-scale loss of life; it is that a government that establishes the possibility of acting in this way casts the shadow of intolerably uncontrolled destructive power over everyone, a power that may be leveraged to shut down civil and political freedom comprehensively.²⁸ The major danger posed by U.S. strikes against Venezuelan boats, then, is the normalization of domination rather than the increasing number of deaths.

So, yes, we should condemn the violations of human rights that these strikes represent and, certainly, we should be very concerned about the loss of life wherever it occurs. But these should by no means be the only concerns from an ethical, legal, and political point of view. The greatest worry here should be the threat of political domination. When Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro describes the Trump administration’s actions as an “act of tyranny,” he is not far from the truth.²⁹

—Christopher J Finlay

Christopher Finlay is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Durham where he is also currently Head of the School of Government and International Affairs. His most recent book is The Philosophy of Force: Violence, Domination, and the Ethics of Republican War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).

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