The United States military’s recent campaign of lethal strikes on small vessels off the coast of Venezuela demands our full attention—not as a distant foreign policy footnote, but as a grave breach of legal norms, human rights, and the values we claim to defend.
Since early September 2025, U.S. forces have carried out a series of attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, resulting in dozens of deaths. These operations, launched under the banner of a new maritime crackdown, are justified as counter-narcotics missions aimed at cocaine smugglers and so-called “narco-terrorists.” Yet the transparency, legality and proportionality of these strikes remain deeply suspect.
The essence of the government’s argument is that these vessels were trafficking drugs. But the publicly available evidence is thin, often framed only as “alleged” drug activity. Some of the dead were identified by their families as fishermen, not traffickers. Legal scholars have noted that treating suspected criminals as enemy combatants and killing them without judicial oversight runs contrary to U.S. law and international human rights standards. And a recent national poll shows that the American public largely agrees: only a small minority supports the military using lethal force against alleged smugglers without due process, while a clear majority opposes it.
This is not simply a matter of operational judgment; it is a matter of sovereignty, legality and moral standing. These strikes occur near Venezuelan territorial waters, sometimes in international zones where cooperation—not unilateral force—has long been the norm. For decades, maritime drug interdiction relied on coordinated policing: interdiction by the Coast Guard, vessel seizures, arrests, extradition, and court proceedings. Replacing that model with “shoot-to-sink” tactics is a sharp and dangerous departure from long-standing norms.
The United States also risks undermining its own credibility. We cannot lecture the world on human rights, transparency and the rule of law while using military power to kill people whose guilt has not been proven, whose identities are sometimes unclear, and whose deaths carry no visible trail of accountability. When the world sees warships firing on boats based on suspicion rather than verified evidence, it erodes the very moral foundation we claim to stand upon.
There are also practical consequences. Lethal maritime strikes invite retaliation, escalate tensions and create instability in a region already rife with political volatility. They also risk killing innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—people whose livelihoods depend on fishing, transport or small-scale labor at sea. The message we send to the world when we act as judge, jury and executioner is not strength but carelessness.
If the United States wishes to uphold principles of justice, humanity and international law, it must change course. The government should release the legal justification for these strikes, present credible evidence linking each targeted vessel to criminal activity, and submit to independent reviews wherever civilian casualties may have occurred. It should return maritime drug enforcement to the structures that worked: cooperation with coastal states, interdiction by law enforcement—not military firepower—and prosecution through courts rather than missiles. And above all, it should recognize that lasting progress against cocaine trafficking will come not from sinking boats, but from addressing demand at home, corruption abroad and the economic conditions that fuel the trade.
BentGent.com has always stood for truth, accountability and conscience. When a nation kills first and asks questions never, it betrays those values—and endangers the integrity of a world already struggling to hold onto its humanity. The United States must step back from this perilous path before more lives, guilty or not, are swallowed by a policy that confuses might with justice.