The United States is not at war in the Caribbean Sea, but the Trump administration is behaving as if it were — and in so doing, it is courting international criminal responsibility while corroding the rule of law at home. Cloaking lethal force — 21 kinetic strikes against supposed drug boats and killing nearly 100 Black and brown persons in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean — in the name of “armed conflict” and “counterterrorism,” has turned drug interdiction into a theatre of extra-legal violence against largely poor and faceless civilians on the high seas.
At the heart of this crisis lies a deliberate distortion of international and domestic law. In contemporary international law, the term “war” has given way to the more precise term “armed conflict,” which presupposes sustained hostilities between identifiable parties whose actions reach a threshold of gravity, measured in invasions, bombardments or attacks that cause significant loss of life or destruction. By any reasonable measure, sporadic encounters with alleged drug vessels do not constitute such a conflict, nor do they grant the president a standing license to wage unilateral war beyond American borders. Congress retains the authority to declare war.
Yet Democrats, instead of challenging this false premise, have conceded it. The debate has focused on whether the response to drug traffickers is proportionate and appropriate, instead of questioning if an actual armed conflict is occurring and addressing the possible crimes against humanity conducted by the Trump administration. This failure of imagination and courage has ceded constitutional ground and normalized the idea that the executive may unilaterally identify shadowy networks of alleged criminals as de facto enemies.
The administration’s attempt to rebrand international drug trafficking as “terrorism” compounds this danger. By using this rhetorical approach, the distinction between legal limits becomes blurred, allowing counterterrorism measures — including targeted killings, indefinite detention, and military-style operations — to be applied in cases where law enforcement, human rights protocols or public health strategies would be more appropriate.
Under both the U.S. Constitution and international law, murder and summary executions are strictly forbidden, no matter what label is applied to the person involved — whether they are called a “terrorist,” “drug runner,” or any other politically motivated term. To accept this conflation is to accept that the executive may unilaterally downgrade human beings from rights-bearing persons to killable targets by mere definitional fiat. This horrific precedent justifies the extrajudicial killing of alleged drug-running Americans. Shame on us all!
There is also a grim hypocrisy at work. The narrative that external drug traffickers are “waging war” on America obscures the reality that there is no drug market in the United States without American demand, complicity, and profit. The United States is both consumer and conspirator in a transnational economy of addiction; it suffers not from foreign invasion, but from self-inflicted wounds rooted in greed, consumption and regulatory failure. To respond to this domestic crisis by killing small-time “drug runners” at sea while leaving the architects and financiers of the trade untouched is not a strategy; it is scapegoating with lethal consequences.
Once, members of both major parties were willing — at least on occasion — to assert their institutional prerogatives and restrain presidential excess. That era appears distant. Congress includes Republicans loyal to the president and Democrats whose criticism lacks intelligence and unity. Defending human rights at home and abroad is not a partisan indulgence; it is a core tenet of American constitutional democracy.
Dr. Jeremy Levitt is a distinguished professor of international law at Florida A&M University College of Law.
The stakes of this abdication extend beyond reputation. By directing or condoning lethal, systematic attacks on civilians in the Caribbean, the Trump administration risks exposure before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, a category of offense that admits no immunity. The legal doctrine is clear: high office does not shield those who authorize or orchestrate widespread or systematic attacks against civilian populations. Whether or not prosecutions ever materialize, the legal vulnerability of the United States is real, and the damage to its moral authority is irreparable.
Jeremy Levitt is a distinguished professor of international law at Florida A&M University College of Law.
