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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24133 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-admiral-approved-second-strike-boat-venezuela-was-well-within-legal-2025-12-01/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/some-us-republicans-want-answers-venezuela-strikes-despite-trump-2025-12-01/

Aaand (after previously denying it?) the White House confirms that a second strike killed survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat. (Hegseth is joking about it) It even seems the purpose of the second strike was solely to leave no survivors.

Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...

  1. Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?

  2. The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."

The “laws of war” aren’t real and don’t apply to terrorists. This kind of bloviating about moral principle might work on the DC politicians who read the Washington Post, but we here simply don’t have to participate in this. We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. The purpose of a military is to kill people. We’re not playing these nice legal lawyer games where we can’t kill our enemies or else they win. We don’t have to care about the latest high-level inflammatory anonymous “sources familiar with say” nonsense story about how Trump is doing this evil evil thing that was normal until five minutes ago.

My position is that it didn’t happen and it’s a good thing if it did.

Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...

If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.

The purpose of a military isn’t actually to kill people. It’s a tool for asserting the national interest. Sometimes that means accepting limitations—when you actually get something in return. That’s civilization for you.

I don't have reason to believe that these strikes were actually illegal. But if they somehow were, Hegseth would be undermining an equilibrium that really does benefit the U.S.. And for what? A little extra assurance that those narcos wouldn’t get rescued? There’s no reward.

The purpose of a military isn’t actually to kill people. It’s a tool for asserting the national interest.

Our current Secretary of War has written a whole book (The War on Warriors) about how treating the US military as an instrument of policy and social change, rather than an instrument of violence, is the root cause of much dysfunction from the Vietnam-era to the present day.

And Clausewitz wrote a book saying that "War is the continuation of policy by other means". I think Clausewitz is right and Hegseth is wrong.

You are free to feel that way. Clausewitz's On War is widely viewed as a seminal work but then so to is Marx's Das Kapital.

In the meantime Secretary Hegseth is echoing a view that has been shared by military thinkers as diverse as Musashi Miyamoto and Tecumseh Sherman. The ultimate purpose of any soldier (or army) is to kill the enemy.

Social change has nothing to do with it.

When we signed the CWC, we were binding our hands with respect to chemical weapons. We’d decided that was a fair price for binding all the other signatories. Cooperate-cooperate.

We don’t bomb lifeboats so that other states don’t bomb ours. Even though narcos will never be in that position, bombing their lifeboats would set a bad precedent for our relations with other states. They might reasonably assume that we will, in fact, ignore the rules we’ve supposedly endorsed.

Social change has nothing to do with it.

Secretary Hegseth would disagree. As @gog and @YE_GUILTY observe above, there has been a societal shift towards the idea that discipline should be done away with. Hegseth argues that this attitude is fundamentally incompatible with the "warrior ethos" and by extension winning wars, and I feel like he makes a reasonable case for this position.

Which of those things applies to bombing lifeboats, though?

Who's bombing lifeboats?

This is no longer a moral argument but a political argument. At that point, it’s more parsimonious to admit this is just another anti-Trump hoax. That is, none of this press coverage exists as an organic natural concern about what’s best for America’s interests in the world. Those are just arguments made up to get the sexy “war crimes” headline into the news right as Mark Kelly is calling for soldiers to be prosecuted.

That would be selective outrage at worst. Hoax would mean that they made up the details of the story.

If the latest NYT reporting on this is to be believed: they did.

And how do they assert the national interest? Essays? Vibes?

No, with the threat of deadly force, and the application of that deadly force.

Diplomats are also there to assert the national interest, but diplomats aren't for killing people. Armies are.

A method isn’t a purpose.

Violence is the most important skill for armies, but it’s not the only one, and there’s no reason they can’t agree to hold back in some way.

We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.

If it is any consolation, I was against these invasions/interventions as well. Obama wisely got the Nobel before he started his campaign of drone strikes against weddings. (The main difference being that the logistics of capturing someone in rural Afghanistan might be slightly more difficult than capturing a small boat in the middle of the ocean. But international humanitarian law should be followed even if it is not convenient.)

The purpose of a military is to kill people.

Respectfully, I disagree. The purpose of a hitman or an SS-Totenkopfverband is to kill people.

The purpose of a military is to achieve military objectives. Frequently, this involves blowing stuff up, which incidentally also tends to kill bystanders. Sometimes, it involves incapacitating enemy soldiers, and the best ways to do so often involves killing them.

Now, I am personally sympathetic to Tucholsky's claim ("soldiers are murderers"), but I reject your framing that this is all there is to the military. I see them more like Walter White, someone willing to murder when their goals demand it, and less like cultists of Bhaal or Khorne, who murder for the pure joy of it.

I am skeptical that honor has ever been a dominant force on the battlefield, but I believe that it is something which can slightly lessen the horrors of war. If you have your soldiers kill helpless combatants, that will affect the self-understanding of your troop.

If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.

This is a fully general argument against due process. After all, with the data the NSA has on US citizens, we could just trust them to designate bad people and have the cops shoot them.

I think that in response to Trump blowing up boats, other countries have decided not to share their intel on drug smuggling any more. I do not believe that the US has the tech to identify drugs on boats from satellites.

Now, it could be that the US has ground assets to reliably identify all drug-smuggling boats, but it could also not be the case. My mental model of Trump says that he is unlikely to accept "Sir, we have no positive ID on any drug smugglers at the moment". In such a situation, it would be in the self-interest of the commander to identify the most suspicious boat and destroy it. After all, nobody will go through the wreckage and find out what amount of drugs they were carrying. If you say you had ironclad evidence that they were carrying drugs, who could prove you wrong? Probably some Latinos (and the left) will cry about how you murdered innocents, but realistically that would happen in either case.

This is, of course, why we need due process: not because the government will never have ironclad evidence for its violence, but because we can not trust them to tell the truth about their evidence.

But then again we should not worry, because you estimate the probability that a commander acting on less-than-perfect evidence would target an innocent boat as similar to that of losing the Moon (which is p<1e-10, conservatively).

I do not believe that the US has the tech to identify drugs on boats from satellites.

Military technology does not lend itself to a sources-cited I-make-my-claims you-make-yours open debate. So I’m not sure I have much to add here in the good nature of this forum. But I can tell you that you are completely wrong. I can’t really convince you of that when again we’re talking about military secrets. So it would be easier if you said you don’t trust Trump, or the government in general if you prefer, because then we’ve reduced the argument to its real essence. Otherwise I can’t say very much productively, because our priors about US military capabilities are wildly far apart.

If it is any consolation, I was against these invasions/interventions as well.

Well, that’s not really what I’m concerned about, because this isn’t really about whether you as an individual are arguing in good faith. (And I assume you are.)

This story doesn’t just fall out of the sky and then journalists put on their truth suits and we sit around debating what it all means. Every phase of these stories are political and carry political connotations. “War crime?” Nobody in the public knows what that means or how important that is, so someone has to pick a few pieces of context to give that meaning. “Anonymous sources?” Someone has to stake some credibility asserting that these people are telling the truth, not those other people making denials. “Fishermen” Now we need part of this story to deny Trump’s / Hegseth’s determination that these are narcoterrorists, because the story is a non-story if it’s accepted on Trump’s terms.

Every part of this story involves relying on assumptions made by people acting out of political motives. Moreover, many of these political actors don’t care when we do it in Ukraine, supported the Iraq War, allowed millions of illegal immigrants at the border, etc. Many of these same journalists and senators pushed hoaxes about Trump and Russia, Kavanaugh, January 6 and 2020, Corona, etc. Why should I take them at their word?

So no this isn’t about your good faith as an individual. I’m calling bad faith on the entire media complex that reifies this as a story I have to care about, as though I’m somehow a hypocrite if I don’t jump through exactly the right rhetorical proofs while denying that Hegseth did anything wrong. Especially today, a day later, as the New York Times reports that WaPo got the story wrong, I feel increasingly good about my priors and attitude toward the latest anti-Trump hoax.

Candace Owen’s is reporting today that the French government is trying to have her killed. Should we kick France out of NATO? Is Israel behind it? Actually it’s ok to just call that one bullshit

This is a fully general argument against due process.

Pretty much nobody thinks that due process should be applied or not applied depending on what you think the chances are of guilt. But the argument was about the chance of guilt--the OP was trying to insinuate that because the boats have large crews, they are unlikely to be criminals. So disputing that can't be an argument against due process.

In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"? Terrorists, as I understand the word, are people who aim to instill fear in a civilian population by way of violent acts in order to extract political concessions. What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for, what are the violent acts, and what civilian population do they instill fear in? I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money. This makes them regular financially motivated criminals. If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry. If anything, the US is more suspect of something meeting the definition of "terrorism" here: the best explanation for this sort of double-tap attack seems to be that they seek to instill fear in other would-be drug smugglers.

Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights; Americans generally can and will murder them with impunity, and in return it naturally can't really be helped that Americans may not expect baseline civilised treatment from them either. As someone who has many American friends and relations, I therefore begrudgingly accepted that they should be kept separate from people in that class, and I couldn't for example expect them to join me in travelling to those countries (so e.g. my long-standing wish to travel to Iran may not be realised together with my American SO). It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans - the geographic proximity is greater, the entanglements run deeper, and the affected countries and peoples hold more social and cultural value. More importantly, why? What did the US actually gain from killing the shipwrecked here (as opposed to picking them up and sending them to a POW camp or whatever), or blowing up the desert weddings in the past? Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for

Political power, in many cases; protection rackets, economic domination of various industries and ability to exclude personal enemies or rivals in many others. In still others, there are out-and-out ideological motivations, often some derivation of Marxist (e.g. Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and FARC in Colombia).

what are the violent acts [the narco-smugglers engage in]

Murder both of competitors, politicians, and law enforcement, as well as of alleged collaborators, opponents, and personal rivals/enemies. Human smuggling, sex slavery/prostitution, kidnapping for ransom, and other major crimes, up to and including active armed insurrection against local governments.

what civilian population do they instill fear in?

Anyone who isn't actively on-board with them.

I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money.

This is incorrect. Business always involves some form of politics, especially when crossing international borders and on the scale of narco-cartels. Also, there's whole subcultures that have developed around the cartels. These aren't homo economicus any more than the Sicilian Mafia is.

If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.

We did use to hang horse thieves, and shooting a fleeing felon was entirely legal in the US under longstanding anglo-american common law principles until iirc SCOTUS decided to prune it back in the 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner. You're right nowadays, but it's a comparatively recent development.

Murder both of competitors, politicians, and law enforcement, as well as of alleged collaborators, opponents, and personal rivals/enemies. Human smuggling, sex slavery/prostitution, kidnapping for ransom, and other major crimes, up to and including active armed insurrection against local governments.

So basically, they're just a government-in-waiting that the US doesn't like, and has thrown in with the existing government to remove them in return for owing the US a favor later.

Except that they lack any form of legitimacy other than raw force...

Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

Emphasis mine.

Was this a typo? In what sense is it justifiable to take reprisal on the citizens of a belligerent power that aren't involved in hostilities?

The United States government is not friendly with the government of Iran. Both sides have killed individuals on the other side. Yet somehow I would not find it justified if someone on my street snatched up an Iranian tourist for torture / murder. I would not find it justified if the US government did it. And I would not find it justified if Iranians did it to random Americans.

If it's not a typo, can you please explain the line of government behavior beyond which the citizens of a country should expect to justifiably have their brains blown out if they wander down the wrong street on a foreign taco tour?

What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for

"Don't resist our lawbreaking, interfere with our operations or inform on us to the authorities."

what are the violent acts

See here.

and what civilian population do they instill fear in?

See here.

Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights;

I fundamentally disagree with this characterization. The middle-east wars were sold with pseudo-white-man's-burden arguments, and opposed over concerns of their harmful effects on the locals. Neither represents a lack of concern for the human rights of middle-easterners.

If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.

To the extent that we tolerate supermarket theives, we do so from the belief that they are only occasional theives and might yet amend their ways and rejoin productive society. Those who make victimizing others a fundamental part of their identity and way of life are not productive targets for this type of forebearance.

I mean, what makes terrorists special?

The origin of a ‘special category’ of criminals was pirates as hostis humani generis, followed by slavers in the 19th century, and terrorists after 9/11. Adding narcotraffickers doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

Historically, though, while using military force against pirates, slavers, etc. was commonplace, you executed hostis humani generis after a trial if they surrendered or were in a position to be captured. You weren't supposed to just summarily execute guys you thought maybe were pirates or slavers if they weren't actively committing piracy, manstealing, or resisting arrest. This actually mattered historically - for instance, several people who were tried for piracy because they were part of Blackbeard's crew were acquitted, so the trials weren't just pro forma. But the ones who weren't acquitted were generally hung pretty promptly.

There's no real logistical obstacle to taking these guys in and trying them for smuggling drugs, the US military/Coast Guard has a long arm and could easily arrest these smugglers instead of airstriking them. But the political situation in the United States has evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) to the point where it's significantly easier and cheaper to use the military to blow up hostis humani generis by basically executive fiat than it is to pass a bill saying "we will execute you if you smuggle lots of drugs into the United States" and then...execute people who smuggle lots of drugs into the United States.

hostis humani generis

Drug smugglers are not hostis humani generis. Perhaps they should be, and unless the international legal position is changed by treaty, making it US policy that they are falls within the Article 1 power of Congress to "define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations" - it isn't something the President can do by proclamation.

The Trump administration has accused Tren de Aragua of various violent crimes committed on land, and argues that their encouraging illegal crossings of the Mexico/US land border is legally an invasion, but as far as I am aware they have not accused them of anything that would be piracy as a matter of US or international law.

Sure, agree with all of this. But even if they were clearly hostis humani generis, summary execution would not have been the usual means of dealing with them if they were not offering resistance or threatening violence.

In my understanding, judges during the age of piracy were rather the opposite of bleeding-heart liberals. If a hostile judiciary were fighting like hell to let pirates off without serious response because they're poor kids who are nice to black people sometimes, I suspect that summary executions would have made a triumphant comeback.

Weren't drumhead trials for pirates pretty common (if officially disallowed) also?

More comments

the US military/Coast Guard has a long arm and could easily arrest these smugglers instead of airstriking them

I don't think this is accurate. It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.

But the political situation in the United States has evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) to the point where it's significantly easier and cheaper to use the military to blow up hostis humani generis by basically executive fiat than it is to pass a bill saying "we will execute you if you smuggle lots of drugs into the United States" and then...execute people who smuggle lots of drugs into the United States.

The reason for this is because of how long it takes to put people to death. Decarlos Brown, for example, is still living and breathing. and won't even get a trial for months. That's unacceptable. I'd rather he were shot in cold blood at the scene than linger on for months, years, or, god forbid, decades.

Justice delayed is justice denied, after all, and the one thing the justice system does well is delay. Fix this, and you'll find me coming around to due process and rule of law, but right now those are empty words that mean, in effect, no punishment for criminals.

It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.

Civ2 notwithstanding, I think a Super Stallion might be able to pick up one of those boats.

It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.

Sure, but two Hellfires (in a double-tap situation like the one at hand) is going to run around $300,000, so you are probably losing money just to save time, if you contrast it with the cost of putting four guys that you're already paying in a speedboat out there or what have you. Granted, some of that depends on the specifics of the situation, and granted also that the .gov will allocate a certain number of Hellfires for firing as practice every year, but until the cartels start shooting back it's mostly just a question of if you want to give the Chair Force guys or the Coast Guard/high speed low drag types a live-fire exercise. It is true that sending the Navy SEALS or whoever out to arrest them is more dangerous than simply bombing them, but they do a lot of dangerous training anyway.

The reason for this is because of how long it takes to put people to death.

Yes. Dronestriking people is more theatrical, but it would be better (assuming for the sake of the discussion that it's good to execute drug smugglers) to do it via arresting and trying them, if only because we aren't going to drone strike the guys we apprehend at a border checkpoint. (Well, probably not, but see below).

coming around to due process and rule of law, but right now those are empty words that mean, in effect, no punishment for criminals.

Caveat that this is under-researched and I would be glad for pushback:

See, what seems to be under-discussed is the "can we drone strike US citizens with the military without due process by accusing them of being terrorists" ship sailed under Obama a decade ago. What's interesting about what Trump is doing is that now we've expanded what constitutes a terrorist to "member of a cartel." I have not done a deep-dive on the legal backing here (and IIRC the Trump admin hasn't released their exact legal reasoning!) but it seems to me that there's precious little reason not to drone strike US citizens assessed by US military intelligence as being drug dealers, under these legal theories, and then I'm not really sure what would stop you from doing it domestically except "bad optics." (Posse Comitatus prevents the US military from being used domestically for law enforcement purposes but my understanding is that this is not law enforcement but rather counter-terrorism under the auspices of an AUMF).

Which, frankly, wouldn't be surprising given the incentives. But I oppose it because I don't actually think it's a good idea to drone strike Americans in Kansas or wherever for drug-running, and also because I do not think the US government is nearly as good at determining if someone is actually "a bad guy" as TV would have you think, and finally because if the government can drone strike American citizens without having to show proof that they are actually doing bad stuff (which is the point of a trial!) then it's pretty tempting to just...blow people you don't like up and say "they were bad guys trust me bro."

See, what seems to be under-discussed is the "can we drone strike US citizens with the military without due process by accusing them of being terrorists" ship sailed under Obama a decade ago. What's interesting about what Trump is doing is that now we've expanded what constitutes a terrorist to "member of a cartel." I have not done a deep-dive on the legal backing here (and IIRC the Trump admin hasn't released their exact legal reasoning!) but it seems to me that there's precious little reason not to drone strike US citizens assessed by US military intelligence as being drug dealers, under these legal theories, and then I'm not really sure what would stop you from doing it domestically except "bad optics." (Posse Comitatus prevents the US military from being used domestically for law enforcement purposes but my understanding is that this is not law enforcement but rather counter-terrorism under the auspices of an AUMF).

As you hint at in your last sentence, the AUMF is the critical distinction. When the Obama administration dronekilled people it was (at least nominally) attacking allies of the guys who did 9-11, as was explicitly authorised by Congress. Both the GW Bush and Obama administrations claimed (correctly) that citizenship is irrelevant to the US's ability to kill wartime enemies on the battleground, and (probably correctly) that the President had broad discretion under Article 2 and the AUMF to decide who was an enemy and where (except US territory) was a battleground. When the Trump administration dronekills Tren de Aragua drug traffickers, he only has his inherent article 2 authority. In non-lawyer's terms, it is the difference between ordering the military to kill alleged enemies in wartime, and ordering the military to kill alleged enemies in peacetime.

(correctly) that citizenship is irrelevant to the US's ability to kill wartime enemies on the battleground

I agree with this, but at least in al-Awlaki's case, there wasn't any allegation that he was on the battlefield, except I suppose in the very broad GWOT context in which the entire world was the battlefield.

the AUMF is the critical distinction

It's not clear to me that the AUMF isn't in play, since the Trump administration hasn't released their legal reasoning yet, have they?

Nor is it clear to me that the AUMF is actually a very clear bar on to strikes on narcos. Didn't the AUMF give the President leeway to go after anyone that aided those who assisted in the 9/11 plot (all broadly defined)? It doesn't seem crazy that TdA and the Taliban, for instance, might have done e.g. a drug or arms deal. At which point you could probably invoke the AUMF.

Returning to the Obama administration again, we see that they used the AUMF as their justification for strikes against ISIS. That seems less ridiculous because ISIS and Al-Qaeda and the Taliban all sort of look the same if you squint but is that really the case legally? I'd need to do more digging into the question to have a very strong opinion, but from my admittedly pretty superficial understanding of this all it looks like the AUMF has already been stretched all out of proportion to provide a legal fig leaf for doing whatever the President wants, so I would not be surprised if this is being done again.

Iirc the Supreme Court has ruled that narcotrafficking could be tried as treason. It just takes 20+ years to execute someone.

In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"?

Drug cartels are designated as terrorists at least according to us.gov. This link contains reasoning behind adding them earlier this year.

Isn't this a case where the US should be granting letters of Marque to hunt stateless vessels in international waters? Offer a bounty for each kilo of drugs returned and let them keep any oil they capture.

US should be granting letters of Marque

If letters of Marque start getting issued anyone want to go in on a boat? As the classic goes:

A letter of marque came from the king congress

To the scummiest vessel I've ever seen ...

The Yankee Bolivarian lay low down with gold drugs

How I wish I was in Sherbrooke Destin now

She was broad and fat and loose in the stays

But to catch her took the Antelope two whole days

But seriously, I wonder what flag these boats are flying and if they respond to hails on guard. It seems unlikely that vessel designed for discreetly carrying drugs would be confused with a fishing boat to a trained navel eye. If you're being hailed by the US navy and ordered to submit to a Article 110: Right of visit (using UNCLOS as a customary standard though the US is not a signatory) to verify your flag, under any circumstance, wouldn't you yield and submit to inspection?

If they are flying a Venezuelan flag is the argument that Venezuela (also not a signatory) is not complying with Article 108:

All States shall cooperate in the suppression of illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances engaged in by ships on the high seas contrary to international conventions.

Where exactly are these events occurring, are they being initiated in the exclusive economic zone where and Article 111: Right of hot pursuit would exist? If they are or not, are the boats running when contacted or are they not contacted? If they are running what rational actor would choose that course of action, how do they expect to out run a F/A-18 Super Hornet?

The legal analysis seems fraught given how much information has been released.

Being sure of your prize seems like huge headache if you only had a letter of Marque to protect you. Never mind on going in on the boat.

If you're being hailed by the US navy and ordered to submit to a Article 110: Right of visit (using UNCLOS as a customary standard though the US is not a signatory) to verify your flag, under any circumstance, wouldn't you yield and submit to inspection?

The administration has said it could have done this, but chose to dronekill from a safe distance without haling the boats in order to make a point.

If that's really the doctrine it seems... suspect?

I can imagine some construction where you hail them, they surrender, you find drugs and determine they are not properly flagged. You then scuttle their vessel to deny the organization the materiel. They could then claim the operators are unlawful combatants and send them to GTMO or claim they are stateless criminals and send them to CECOT El Salvador. Or even hang them as pirates.

The practical effect might be the same, but even literal pirates flying the Jolly Roger in the golden age of piracy would offer quarter if thier target surrendered and offered no resistance. Legal or not, offering no quarter at all seems highly undignified for a civilized navy and not at all in line with the traditions of the sea time immemorial.

but even literal pirates flying the Jolly Roger in the golden age of piracy would offer quarter if thier target surrendered and offered no resistance.

They did that because taking the ship was still risky and some of them could die. Do you think the average pirate would have still been so merciful if they had the option to push a button and simply delete the defending crew?

Average pirate, maybe given the choice of a button that maroons the defending crew vs a button that just deletes them. Most came from backgrounds as lawful seafarers and understood the plight of the average sailor of the age. Benjamin Hornigold probably yes, he mostly tried to maintain at least a thin veneer that he was acting lawfully as a privateer. Just straight deleting the operators of merchant vessels would not have been in line with the veneer of lawful privateering.

Regardless, if the legal target is the drugs and vessels that are carrying them why waste a missile on them when the operators likely would surrender and you could just scuttle them by opening a seacock? I mean if they run or start shooting at you, sure they left you no choice. If the targets are the actual vessel operators, then definitionally this is an extrajudicial killing; in the sense that it is a intentional killing by a state actor without any judicial process. I'll let the lawyers argue about whether it's also an unlawful killing, but I do consider conducting extrajudicial killings to be an odious, ungentlemanly, and undignified task if I were the one that had to push the button. Maybe the age of expecting our officers to also be gentlemen is long gone or never existed, or our modern environment makes that ideal impossible. I still think it's lamentable if that's the case.

It's one of the few things they can do that can't be undone by a judge.

I support this purely because of the vibes.

I suspect the real flaw in this plan has to do with ensuring that the privateers simply don't keep the drugs and sell it on the street. Unless the US government is offering a price above street value, the temptation to do this would be powerful (and even if the US did offer those sorts of bounties, I suspect that you'd still see problems with guys trying to take home narcotics and whatnot).

I think if the government bought at discounted bulk street value most mercs would accept it. Assembling a drug distribution network is time consuming and expensive, and probably requires you interfacing with people who want to kill you for killing their old reliable supplier.

I also wonder about that, but I have to imagine Dyncorp and whatever Blackwater identifes as these days has enough to lose to not decide street level distribution of contraband is a good idea if it puts all their other government business at risk.

Now, I wonder how much pure product gets liberated for personal use between those bust dog and pony show press events and the eventual incineration.

To your point, I suspect there are already problems with that. I agree that The Company Formerly Known As Blackwater is unlikely to have a corporate policy saying "steal cocaine illegally" and their guys probably aren't particularly less trustworthy than cops/soldiers, so if you screened organizations carefully you could probably weed out people going into it specifically to exploit their access to drugs.

I think that originally, narco-terrorist referred to people who made a fortune dealing narcotics and then started using violence for political ends, e.g. in Columbia.

This is basically not a thing in the US. Any drug lord with two brain cells knows better than to pursue political goals by blowing up people on US soil. None of them want the Bin Laden treatment, after all.

I can see how the terrorist label would apply to some in the narcotics trade (e.g. the Mexican cartels), but here it really doesn't seem applicable -especially if, as the Trump administration seems to insinuate, the drug trade is indeed backed by the Venezuelan government. What political ends do they need to achieve by fear if they are already in power? (Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist.)

Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist

When the government does it (above a certain threshold, which is likely very low for anarchists), we call it terror (or crimes against humanity, sometimes), not terrorism.

Of course, there are a lot of special cases, such as government A sponsoring terrorists or freedom fighters in country B, as has happened with bin Laden in multiple stages of careers.

What if the goal was to destabilize the US? Andrew Yang used to argue pretty convincingly that Trump's 2016 election was only made possible by the Opioid crisis destroying communities.

I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid), and fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico? Now, you could argue that cocaine played a role when the US elected a TV personality president, given its use as an "act confidently in front of a crowd" drug, but...

(...and well, "destabilizing" does not meet the standard definition of terrorism either. Do you think Russia would be right to outlaw everyone involved in VoA/RFERL in the medieval sense too? Every kinetic war is "destabilizing" in the most straightforward sense; would "destabilizing=>terrorism=>give no quarter" then be a fully general argument against any ius in bello?)

That’s the real ploy. Everyone is missing the forest for the trees, quibbling over the legality of the drone strikes, when they are being prepped for Iraq 2.0. Venezuela is like in the D minus list for drug smuggling, if it was really about drugs they would be talking about Mexico.

Everyone is missing the forest for the trees

Are they? CNN is quoting Trump saying land strikes will begin soon. That’s Iraq 2.0 right there in the major news outlets.

fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico

It comes from Canada, too.

I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid)

Allegedly, the vast majority of US cocaine comes from Colombia, not from Venezuela.

Venezuela has weaker rule of law, transshipment wouldn’t surprise me.

It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans

There isn't a Latin American ummah. Brazilians aren't going to care very much if you blow up Venezuelan drug dealers.

the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

US foreign policy has caused bad blood in South America for at least half a century, but as far as I'm aware this hasn't led to revenge killings of American tourists being common. I'd be much more worried about the local criminal population than righteous pan-Latinx avengers.

There's a difference between "bad blood" (even on the level of sponsoring coups and what-not) and "you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you". I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals, in the way they do with Middle Easterners.

I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Yeah it’s not like the Reagan administration had a school in Georgia where they taught Latin American right wing death squads how to torture and murder people. Oh wait they did. Latin America is already well aware that America has no baseline rules of conduct. This boat stuff is absolutely tame by the standards of the 1980s.

taught Latin American right wing death squads

That's the crux, though? I didn't write "directly" for no reason. In terms of indirect support and training, American fingers have involved on most sides of most conflicts.

Yes, during the Cold War extrajudicial executions in Latin America were largely outsourced from the USFG to local governments.

I don't think that [...] there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Is it better to get tortured and killed by an American proxy than by Americans directly?

Do the several hundred civilians killed during the US invasion of Panama count as average South Americans killed directly? Should they consider themselves lucky if they weren't killed lawlessly?

How is killing suspected drug traffickers on the high seas supposed to be an escalation here?

Do the several hundred civilians killed during the US invasion of Panama count as average South Americans killed directly?

Presumably not, because Panama is not part of "South America" by most definitions I'm aware of. But that's a geography argument, and not a moral one.

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