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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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If you ignore legal technicalities, the real issues are fairly clear. Before the alleged "double-tap", they were:

  • What is the appropriate level of force to be used when interdicting drug smuggling outside US waters? Or to be pithy, is the War on Drugs a real war like World War 2, or is it a metaphorical war like the War on Poverty?
  • Who decides? Is this an inherent Article 2 power of the President, or is it subject to Congress' power to declare war and to regulate land and naval forces?
  • Does all this form part of a cunning plan on the part of the Trump administration to start a war against Venezuela?

For contrast, if we ask the same questions about the War on Terror, the answers are:

  • It is a real war.
  • Congress decided by passing the AUMF
  • It was part of a cunning plan to start a war with Iraq. The Deep State and pro-establishment Democrats were in on the plan alongside the Bush administration. It turned out to be a pretty poor plan.

After the double-tap story, the first question becomes slightly more pressing because the level of force the administration is proposing to use is "Maximally destructive naval warfare, equivalent to USW" rather than "Civilised naval warfare".

But fundamentally, this is an important issue because pre-Trump, US policy was to treat drug smuggling as a law enforcement issue, and to interdict it by having civilian Coast Guard vessels intercept drug boats and arrest the drug dealers, with lethal force only used if the drug traffickers fought back. Trump is now treating drug smugglers as a wartime enemy. And no Congresscritters were harmed in the making of this policy change.

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