Trump's Drug Strategy Excuses Murder as Self-Defense

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has sought to justify his policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs.

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Those positions are hard to reconcile with each other, but they are consistent with Trump's disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. His administration has tied itself in knots to portray murder as self-defense while avoiding congressional constraints.

As of early December 2025, Trump had ordered 21 attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing a total of 83 people. As he tells it, those people were “unlawful combatants” in a “noninternational armed conflict” with the United States because they were affiliated with “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”

According to the United Nations, the definition of a “noninternational armed conflict” requires violent confrontations between “organised Parties” that possess “organised armed forces.” The violence must “meet a minimum threshold of intensity” that distinguishes it from threats such as “riots,” “banditry,” “unorganized and short-lived insurrections,” and “terrorist activities.”

The “armed conflict” that Trump describes does not meet these criteria. “This is not stretching the envelope,” Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army's senior adviser on the law of war, told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”