The Trump administration’s recent airstrike on a small vessel in the southern Caribbean—allegedly carrying narcotics and members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang—was not just a military maneuver. It was a signal. A signal that American imperialism, long cloaked in diplomacy and economic influence, is now being rebranded as counterterrorism and narcotics enforcement.
President Trump announced the strike with characteristic bravado, claiming the vessel was operated by “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”
Trump said on Truth Social: The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
Eleven people were killed. No trial. No extradition. No independent verification. Just a grainy video and a declaration of guilt from 30,000 feet.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News, “This is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike.” That statement should chill anyone who believes in proportionality, sovereignty, or the rule of law.
Let’s be clear: Tren de Aragua is a violent criminal organization. It has been linked to extortion, human trafficking, and regional instability. But according to InSight Crime, it is not a major player in international drug trafficking. And it is certainly not a transnational terrorist threat on par with ISIS or al-Qaeda.
So why the airstrike? Why the escalation?
Legal experts like Mark Nevitt, writing for Just Security, warn that labeling drug traffickers as terrorists could open the door to a new “forever war”—one where the U.S. president claims unchecked authority to kill civilians based on vague affiliations and unverified intelligence. “Applying a new label to an old problem does not transform the problem itself,” Nevitt writes. “Nor does it grant the U.S. president or the U.S. military expanded legal authority to kill civilians.”
This is not just about Venezuela. It’s about the precedent. It’s about the normalization of extrajudicial violence in the name of national security. It’s about the erosion of international norms and the reemergence of a foreign policy rooted in domination rather than diplomacy.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called the strike “extravagant, unjustifiable, immoral, and absolutely criminal.” While Maduro’s own record on human rights is deeply troubling, his condemnation of the strike raises legitimate questions about sovereignty and the weaponization of U.S. power.
This is not the first time the U.S. has used Latin America as a proving ground for its military ambitions. From the Monroe Doctrine to the Cold War to the War on Drugs, the region has long been treated as a backyard—ripe for intervention, manipulation, and control.
But today’s imperialism is different. It’s not about boots on the ground. It’s about drones in the sky, algorithms in the war room, and narratives crafted to justify violence. It’s about redefining threats to fit political agendas and using military force to send messages rather than solve problems.
Mainstream media should not treat this strike as a one-off event. It is part of a pattern—a pattern of expanding executive power, eroding legal standards, and militarizing foreign policy under the guise of public safety.
We owe it to the public we serve to ask harder questions: Who decides who is a terrorist? What evidence is required before a missile is launched? And what happens when the line between law enforcement and warfare disappears altogether?
This is not just a story about a boat in the Caribbean. It’s a story about the future of American power—and whether we will continue to accept its most dangerous expressions without scrutiny or consequence.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network. Balta is the only person to serve twice as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.