Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
President Donald Trump’s critics have denounced his order to launch lethal military strikes against boats with alleged narco-terrorists aboard who are suspected of smuggling illicit drugs from Venezuela to the United States. These strikes have killed scores of the suspected drug smugglers aboard, including two survivors of an initial strike, which have prompted accusations by some of war crimes. The critics have also condemned the armed seizure, at President Trump’s direction, of an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela with about thirty sailors, most of whom were Russian. This tanker, which was flying the flag of another country to hide its true point of origin when it was seized, “spent four years as part of Iran’s covert fleet” before shipping Venezuelan oil, the New York Times has reported.
The critics could not be more wrong. President Trump has compelling reasons in defense of America’s national security to ratchet up military pressure on the illegitimate Maduro regime.
Instead of playing armchair critics, President Trump’s political opponents should listen to the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado. She clearly explained the national security threat posed by the Maduro regime’s criminal nexus with America’s most dangerous adversaries during her December 14th interview on Face the Nation. She described the Maduro dictatorship as a “very complex criminal structure that has turned Venezuela into a safe haven of international crime and terrorist activities, starting with Russia, Iran, Cuba, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels operating freely and directed in partnership with Maduro and his regime.” Ms. Machado added that “we finally have the administration, in this case, President Trump with a clear strategy that truly represents a credible threat for the regime.”
Jeh C. Johnson, who served the Obama administration as its Department of Defense general counsel and Secretary of Homeland Security, is an example of a misguided critic who should not be throwing stones at glass houses. He wrote a New York Times op ed article published online on December 7, 2025, entitled “Not All Targeted Killings Are the Same. Hegseth’s Boat Strikes Are Illegal.”
Mr. Johnson argued that the Trump administration illegally conducted lethal military strikes that destroyed boats and killed suspected narco-terrorists allegedly transporting illicit drugs, primarily cocaine. “That is the very definition of ‘extrajudicial killing,’” Mr. Johnson wrote in his op ed column. But he defended the Obama administration’s “targeted killings of other bad guys around the world” with drone strikes. “There is a world of legal and moral differences,” Mr. Johnson declared.
Mr. Johnson is cynically trying to have it both ways. He is arguing for a distinction without a substantive legal or moral difference.
As the Obama Department of Defense’s general counsel, Mr. Johnson helped provide the legal justification for former President Barack Obama’s approval of the September 2011 drone missile strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen. The attack occurred inside a foreign country that was not at war with the United States. The Obama administration suspected that this radical Muslim cleric was an al-Qaeda leader in the Arabian Peninsula but had not brought formal criminal charges against him in the United States.
The Obama administration claimed that it had no choice but to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki because he could not be feasibly captured and brought back to the United States alive for trial. That is nothing more than a pretext for a kill operation that was more convenient for the Obama administration to conduct from the air. As national security experts Christopher M. Faulkner and Jeff Rogg wrote in their 2021 article published by The Modern War Institute at Point, the Obama administration “risked American lives on the ground in Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, and yes, even Yemen in missions to capture or kill terrorists or rescue hostages.”
In short, Barack Obama appointed himself as the judge, jury, and executioner. To paraphrase Mr. Johnson, what the Obama administration did in Yemen is “the very definition of ‘extrajudicial killing.’”
To make matters worse, U.S. military forces also killed three other Americans that day who, according to the Obama administration, “were not specifically targeted.” And Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who had no known terrorist ties and was also a U.S. citizen, was killed by another strike in Yemen the following month. The Obama administration claimed that he was not deliberately targeted either. They were all “collateral damage” of operations that occurred on Mr. Johnson’s watch as the Obama Department of Defense’s general counsel.
Yet Mr. Johnson hypocritically condemns the Trump administration’s lethal strikes in international waters on vessels with no national registry operated by suspected foreign narco-terrorists working with violent drug trafficking cartels to smuggle drugs into the United States. He failed to acknowledge that, unlike the Obama administration’s military operations in Yemen, not a single American citizen is known to have been killed by the Trump administration’s strikes.
President Trump’s critics reject the president’s claim that Venezuela is involved in transporting deadly fentanyl to the United States. And they scoff at the idea that shipments of the far less lethal drug cocaine to the U.S. represents an imminent threat to the American people that would justify the Trump administration’s strong military actions.
These naysayers are missing the forest for the trees, as usual.
Indeed, the Venezuelan drug trafficking organization known as Cartel of the Suns has reportedly formed alliances with the powerful Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel and the Colombian ELN guerrilla group. Cartel of the Suns, which includes high-ranking Venezuelan military officers, has direct links with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government. Maduro himself was indicted in Manhattan federal court in 2020 for participating in an international cocaine trafficking conspiracy.
Venezuela is not only the hub for criminal activity in the Americas. Marshall Billingslea, former assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury, described Venezuela as “a willing safe haven” for the Iranian-sponsored terrorist organization, Hezbollah. Hezbollah has turned to international drug trafficking as a source of funding to supplement what it receives directly from Iran, leveraging its long relationship with the Venezuelan dictatorship.
Brian Townsend, a retired DEA special agent, told Fox News Digital that Hezbollah provides “networks to help cartels send money through the Middle East. Simply, they take a cut from the drug trade, which then funds their operations in the Middle East.” He added that “Hezbollah has become “a main finance and money launderer for narco-terrorism groups like Tren de Aragua,” the violent Venezuelan gang whose members have killed, robbed, and assaulted Americans. “Iran’s partnership with Maduro enables Hezbollah to operate in Venezuela,” Mr. Townsend explained.
Interdictions and arrests have done too little to disrupt the drug and financial networks involving the Venezuela regime, Colombian and Mexican cartels, Iran, and Hezbollah. The interdictions and arrests have not been able to prevent them from making enough profits to fund actions that directly threaten American lives. And interdicting and arresting drug traffickers on the high seas are not simple law enforcement operations, as the Obama administration’s Department of Defense general counsel, Jeh C. Johnson, would have us believe.
Commander Krystyn Pecora of the U.S. Coast Guard wrote that “seizure operations at sea are far from easy. In the Maritime Transit Zone—a 6 million square mile region between the United States and drug-producing countries that is roughly twice the size of the continental United States—interdiction is a cat-and-mouse game.”
The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, as amended, states that “trafficking in controlled substances aboard vessels… presents a specific threat to the security and societal well-being of the United States.”
The Trump administration’s critics argue that Congress has only authorized expanded law enforcement jurisdiction to interdict and apprehend drug traffickers in international waters, not to destroy their vessels and kill them with missile strikes. It is true that the title of the statute itself incorporates its drug law enforcement purpose. But by designating certain foreign drug cartels and criminal gangs as Specially Designated Global Terrorist entities and as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the Trump administration changed the name of the game. It has made suspected drug smugglers working for these cartels and gangs, and their vessels, legitimate military targets.
President Trump does not need specific congressional authority to order the limited operations involving military strikes on the suspected drug-smuggling vessels because they do not expose U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period. Before objecting to President Trump’s actions, President Trump’s critics should consult the Obama administration’s legal opinion regarding President Obama’s authority to direct the use of military force in Libya without congressional approval. The Obama administration memo cited various historical precedents of operations that were conducted “without specific prior authorizing legislation.” They include “an intervention in Panama (1989), troop deployments to Somalia (1992), Bosnia (1995), and Haiti (twice, 1994 and 2004), air patrols and airstrikes in Bosnia (1993-1995), and a bombing campaign in Yugoslavia (1999).”
“The President had the constitutional authority to direct the use of military force in Libya because he could reasonably determine that such use of force was in the national interest,” the Obama administration memo said. “Prior congressional approval was not constitutionally required to use military force in the limited operations under consideration.” Pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, the president has such power by reason of his role as Commander-in-Chief and his foreign affairs authority.
The same reasoning applies to President Trump’s constitutional authority to conduct limited military operations against the alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers’ vessels. Those who insist that the president must comply with the War Powers Resolution should read the clause making clear that nothing in it “is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President…” (Emphasis added) The operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces. Nor, to date, do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops in Venezuela.
In addition to his Article II powers, President Trump has the authority to carry out the United States’ obligation to guarantee the states protection from “invasion” pursuant to Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution. As for whether smuggling can be considered an invasion, James Madison, widely considered to be the “Father of the Constitution,” provided his answer in the affirmative. At the Virginia Ratifying Convention for the U.S. Constitution, James Madison specifically brought up “suppress[ing] smugglers” as an example of a justified use of the military. He referred with approval to an actual prior case of Virginia calling out its militia to combat “a number of smugglers, who were too formidable for the civil power to overcome…Should a number of smugglers have a number of ships, the militia ought to be called forth to quell them.”
If a legal challenge to President Trump’s military actions ends up at the Supreme Court it would likely be considered a “political question” to be hashed out solely between the two elected branches of the federal government. In areas involving national security and foreign relations, the judiciary has an exceedingly limited role.
