‘The U.S.’ strikes on Venezuelan boats’: Self-Defence, Drug War, or Legal Overreach?
‘The U.S.’ strikes on Venezuelan boats’: Self-Defence, Drug War, or Legal Overreach?
Op-ed by Denisa Sudureac, ed. František Skála
As of October 2025, the United States (US) has conducted at least ten strikes on Venezuelan boats, claiming that they were transporting narcotics. Almost all of these strikes were lethal, and where survivors were found, they were subsequently held captive aboard American naval vessels (Lowell & Stein, 2025). The White House frames the strikes as national self-defense. This comes in the context of President Trump announcing a non-international armed conflict with drug cartels (namely, Tren de Aragua - ‘TdA’), describing the people on the boats as ‘narco terrorists’ and emphasizing the need to ‘blow them out of the water’ (Goodman, 2025).
These attacks have been met with waves of backlash, including prominent opposition in Venezuela. The country’s officials and affected communities call the strikes extrajudicial killings, and Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro claims that the U.S. is threatening 'regime change' (Demarest, 2025). The communities of the victims are also vocal about the crimes, with relatives saying that ‘Trump is killing poor people’, referring to the socio-economic backgrounds of the strikes’ victims (Graham-Harrison, 2025).
Beyond the outrage of the Venezuelan people, legal experts have also raised questions concerning the legality of the U.S. ‘attacks’, considering the lack of information that the Trump administration is willing to reveal to the public, and the fact that people have been killed without the right to due process (Grasso & Waxman, 2025). Those who justify the attacks point out that the administration has designated some drug cartels as terrorist organizations, thereby accessing criminal law: legal code dating back from 1798 authorizes the removal from the US territory of ‘enemy aliens’ (Alien Enemies Act, 1798). Further, in framing the strikes as an act of ‘armed conflict’, the U.S. is granted the use of lethal force against the drug cartels members - in the same way that this legal code would permit such force when targeting enemy soldiers. Lastly, narcotics trafficking across the U.S.' southern border is a pressing problem with which the U.S. has been fighting for decades. Therefore, the attacks are justified as a ‘necessary evil’ which has to be done in order to achieve a higher goal: the reduction of drug inflow in the country (2025).
On the other hand, critics of the strikes emphasize the exaggeration in the use of the term ‘self-defence’ by the Trump administration. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky elaborates: ‘the right to self defence is not challenged by a speedboat twenty seven hundred miles from the U.S. alleged to have drugs and not attacking U.S. vessels’ (Vargos, 2025). The significance of such critiques is accentuated by the fact that Rand Paul is one of President Trump’s longstanding supporters, showing that even amongst his inner-elite members, there are divided views concerning these escalations.
Two main issues arise within the self-defence argument. The first one is inherent to the definition of ‘self-defence’: a permitted attack which somebody performs as the consequence of them being attacked first (or being met with an imminent attack) (Wathne, 2023). The case of the U.S. striking Venezuelan vessels that it alleges carry drugs can be analyzed using the Caroline doctrine (also known as the ‘Caroline test’). This doctrine is a key principle in international law that defines the conditions under which a state may lawfully use self-defence before actually being attacked. According to this doctrine, an act has to fulfil two requirements in order for it to be considered an attack: (1) the first condition is necessity, meaning a threat must be imminent and not able to be averted through any other means, and (2) the second condition has to do with proportionality, entailing that the scale of the self-defence must not exceed that of the attack (Denver & Denver Jr., 2013) . With these criteria being laid out, it could be argued that the danger represented by the targeted Venezuelan boats was not imminent, as they did not attack the U.S. navy in any kind of way. National security law expert Matthew Waxman even proposed that the Trump administration could have implemented other less violent measures such as interdiction of Venezuelan boats (Grasso & Waxman, 2025).
The second argument also refers to international law and it entails that a state is allowed to self-defend only against military attacks. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter typically does not offer one the right to armed self-defence in the case of drug trafficking (Grasso & Waxman, 2025) . Considering the absence of military operations by TdA, it can be deduced that the U.S. is prohibited in using armed attacks against drug cartels. One presidential determination was made by the Trump Administration to justify the use of violence against the drug cartels and that is that The United States is engaged in a non-international armed conflict with TdA which is a non-state armed group . However, this claim contradicts another presidential determination made by the same administration, namely that this non-state armed group is conducted under the direction of the Maduro regime, the president of Venezuela (Corn, 2025). If this last claim turns out to be true, the case of U.S. strikes will transform from a non-international armed conflict into an international one, as the attacks would not target just the drug cartels anymore but the Venezuelan government (Goodman, 2025).
The case of the U.S. strikes on Venezuelan boats alleged to carry drugs has larger implications that should concern all those who carry at least some sort of belief and sense of the importance for global order and security. What can be seen here is a general challenge with which the international law had to confront in multiple instances: the lack of a centralized authoritative enforcement mechanism that can impose its statutes. This absence of authority leads to a decentralized approach to dealing with international conflict, leaving it to states to hold other states accountable. In the presented case, we have a state with a significant political power (U.S.) and one that holds relatively minor power (Venezuela); the disbalance appears to point to one outcome: the U.S. managing to ‘get away with it’ in a showcase of political and military power (Grasso & Waxman, 2025) . While unprecedented at this scale, we can draw similarities with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, of which it was also argued that the U.S. did not satisfy the recognised criteria for self-defence under international law (Iwanek, 2009).
In the present case of maritime overreach we can identify patterns across a large area of such challenges to the executive and legislative branches by the Trump Administration. This calls into doubt whether the American system is still divided and balanced according to the principle of separation of powers in the state (Grasso & Waxman, 2025).
In the end, the Trump administration should stop being opaque about its legal justifications of the lethal strikes. It is only normal that the killing of people without trial is sparking public outrage, criticism and raising questions of legality. The fact that the Trump administration is so ambiguous in its justifications and data only makes the situation harder to comprehend from a humanitarian point of view.
