Outrage at President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth’s pursuit of drug dealers operating in international waters has met with outrage and furious mumblings about international law from the usual suspects.
Last week, in my article, ‘Andrew Jackson’s Precedent for Trump’s Strikes on Drug Traffickers’, I demonstrated that there was plenty of precedent in American history for taking out pirates and other enemies classified as ‘pirates’ (including slavers back in the 19th century) in international waters. And, contrary to what America Last libertarians argue, did not require a ‘declaration of war’.
Now let’s turn to the ‘international law’ question. Obviously no conservative believes that international law applies to America. And we should assert that clearly.
But pursuing and taking out drug dealers is legal under international law for much the same reasons. As usual this goes back to the legal concept of piracy. Under admiralty law and later the law of the sea which was codified in ‘international law’, pirates were ‘Hostis humani generis’ or enemies of mankind. Much like Islamic terrorists today or slavers back then and thus could be pursued, fired on or killed at will by anyone.
By the 1980s, the United States had basically claimed jurisdiction over drug smugglers in international waters who were planning to traffic drugs into the United States. Some of this was done under the fig leaf of agreements and some shaky legislation, but the bottom line is that we’ve spent the last two generations intercepting ships in international waters if we believed that they were drug dealers. And we’ve threatened those ships with the use of armed force if they did not comply.
We’re just extending those same protocols more directly and beyond our more proximate waters against ‘enemies of humanity’.
