Trump refuses to rule out striking Venezuela. What's next for Trump's war on drugs?
President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented war against cartels and has threatened narco-terrorists, saying he will "blow you out of existence" as his administration seeks to curb the influx of drugs into the U.S.
The White House sent lawmakers a memo Sept. 30 informing them that the U.S. is now participating in a "non-international armed conflict" with drug smugglers — on top of conducting four fatal strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean since September.
The Department of War recently announced a new counter-narcotics Joint Task Force in the Southern Command area of responsibility, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
The aim of the task force is to "crush the cartels, stop the poison, and keep America safe," Hegseth wrote on X Friday. "The message is clear: if you traffic drugs toward our shores, we will stop you cold."
These recent developments suggest that Trump is eyeing targets within Venezuela, not just those within international waters, according to Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council international affairs think tank.
"This is a sign that President Trump is taking the US war on drugs in Latin America to the next level," Ramsey said in a Monday email to Fox News Digital. "By involving the military, the president is going after drug cartels in a way that no previous US administration has dared to so far. I think it is likely that we will see the Pentagon evaluate targets inside Venezuela."
Additional strikes could target more drug shipments or drug flights, which often take off from covert airfields near the Colombian border, Ramsey said.
"It's a bad time to be posted in a guerrilla camp on the Colombian border or operating a Tren de Aragua safe house along the Caribbean trafficking route," Ramsey said.
Even so, Ramsey said it would be challenging to strike within Venezuela’s territory. Doing so would require the U.S. to dismantle Venezuela’s air defense system, which would escalate hostilities by openly engaging with Venezuela’s military, he said.
That’s a departure from the current approach, in which the U.S. has intentionally avoided targeting Venezuelan military assets, Ramsey said.
"When two Venezuelan F-16s flew over a US destroyer last month, the fact that those planes weren't blown out of the sky suggests that the US is not interested in a shooting war with Venezuela's military," Ramsey said.
Trump himself has not ruled out conducting strikes within Venezuela though, and signaled such strikes could happen when he told military leaders in Quantico, Virginia, Sept. 30 that his administration would "look very seriously at cartels coming by land."
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So far, the Trump administration has utilized maritime forces to address drug threats, and has beefed up naval assets in the Caribbean in recent months. For example, Trump approved sending several U.S. Navy guided missile destroyers to bolster the administration’s counter-narcotics efforts in the region starting in August.
"I expect these deployments to continue for months or more than a year, with new ships rotating in to replace those that need to return home for maintenance or crew rest," Bryan Clark, director of the Hudson Institute think tank’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, told Fox News Digital in September.
Nathan Jones, a nonresident scholar in drug policy and Mexico studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, predicted the strikes are unlikely to impact the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. That’s because fentanyl precursors originate in China, and are then produced in labs in Mexico before they head north without a pathway into the Caribbean.
"I wouldn't expect your drug flow to be affected because of these strikes," Jones told Fox News Digital Tuesday. "This could, though, leave transnational criminal organizations running a little scared in terms of what the administration is going to do."
Still, Jones said that he predicted drug flow routes would adapt and that land or aerial drug routes would take precedence over sea routes in the Caribbean.
The strikes have prompted members of Congress to question their legality and senators Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., filed a war powers resolution in September that would block U.S. forces from engaging in "hostilities" against certain non-state organizations.
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"There has been no authorization to use force by Congress in this way," Schiff told reporters Wednesday. "I feel it is plainly unconstitutional. The fact that the administration claims to have a list and has put organizations on a list does not somehow empower the administration to usurp Congress's power of declaring war or refusing to declare war or refusing to authorize the use of force."
However, the measure failed in the Senate by a 51–48 margin Wednesday. Even so, the measure attracted support from Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted alongside their Democratic counterparts for the resolution.
Other Republicans have defended the strikes though, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said that Trump’s actions were well within his rights and that the resolution was "unreasonable."
"When he sees an attack like this coming — an attack of drugs or explosives or anything else that's going to kill Americans — he not only has the authority to do something about it, he has the duty to do something about it," Risch said Wednesday before the vote.