Is the U.S. at War With Venezuela? Latest Strike Raises Legal Concerns

“This morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests.”

He added: “BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!”

Trump included a 27-second video in the post that showed a vessel exploding and bursting into flames, which he said was proof that the boat carried drugs. It’s not clear from the video what was on the vessel.

“All you have to do is look at the cargo that was spattered all over the ocean—big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place,” Trump told reporters at the Oval Office. “We recorded them. It was very careful, because we know you people would be after us. We’re very careful.”

Still, Trump’s assurances, however, have done little to assuage concerns from some that the U.S. is headed toward—or already engaging in—an unauthorized war with Venezuela. Here’s what to know.

How Trump has targeted Venezuela in drug crackdown

The Trump Administration has said that its attacks on Venezuela are part of its wider crackdown on drug trafficking into the U.S. On the first day of his second term in office, Trump declared a national emergency over illegal immigration and drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border. He has since imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, accusing the countries of not sufficiently clamping down on cross-border fentanyl smuggling, and on China over its alleged manufacturing of fentanyl. He also designated drug cartels, including Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist groups and labeled them a national security threat. Last month, he signed a secret directive to the Pentagon authorizing the use of military force against these cartels, according to the New York Times.

The Administration has ratcheted up its offensive on Venezuela specifically. It has accused Maduro of being “one of the world’s largest drug traffickers” and leader of the so-called Cartel of the Suns, which the Venezuelan government has refuted. Last month, the Administration doubled the reward to $50 million for information leading to the arrest of Maduro, whom Trump has called a dictator. The U.S. government does not recognize Maduro’s last two electoral victories.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that the U.S. government had seized up to $700 million of assets allegedly linked to Maduro. Trump also issued penalty tariffs on countries that purchase oil from Venezuela in March.

The Trump Administration has also cracked down on Venezuelan immigration into the U.S., including revoking the protected status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and deporting 238 Venezuelans in March to an El Salvadoran prison, several of whom U.S. courts have said were wrongfully deported.

On Sept. 2, Trump ordered a military strike on a Venezuelan vessel, killing 11 people whom the Trump Administration claimed were members of Tren de Aragua and transporting illegal narcotics. The Times, however, reported that the boat had turned around after noticing a military aircraft following it. The strike came after Trump had directed U.S. navy ships to the edge of Venezuelan waters, prompting the Venezuelan government to mobilize militia troops and bringing the two countries to a precarious standoff.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday said that the U.S. government had “100% fidelity and certainty” that the boat in the first strike was involved in trafficking drugs to the U.S.

“What needs to start happening is some of these boats need to get blown up,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox News. He added that since the strike, the “number of boats heading towards the United States suddenly dropped dramatically.”

When asked on Sunday if the U.S. would “start doing strikes on mainland Venezuela,” Trump said, “We’ll see what happens.”

Venezuela says relations with U.S. ‘destroyed’

Shortly before Monday’s strike, Maduro said at a press conference in Caracas that what “battered relations” existed between the U.S. and Venezuela had “been destroyed by their bomb threats” and were now “completely broken.”

He characterized U.S. actions as “aggression all down the line, it’s a police aggression … a political aggression, a diplomatic aggression, and an ongoing aggression of military character.”

“The communications with the government of the U.S. are thrown away. They are thrown away by them with their threats of bombs, death and blackmail,” Maduro said.

Venezuela had responded to the Sept. 2 strike by flying two F-16 fighter jets over a U.S. Navy destroyer on Sept. 4.—to which Trump warned that the U.S. would shoot down Venezuelan jets that “put us in a dangerous situation.” Maduro claimed after the Sept. 2 strike that eight U.S. warships with 1,200 missiles were targeting Venezuela, adding that his country was in “maximum readiness to defend” itself.

On Saturday, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil accused the U.S. military of boarding a Venezuelan vessel, which he said was a “small, harmless” fishing boat. U.S. forces seized the vessel, Gil said, and “illegally and hostilely” detained those onboard for eight hours.

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said whoever ordered the action was “looking for an incident to justify escalating war in the Caribbean, with the aim of regime change.”

The Trump Administration earlier this month denied seeking regime change, arguing that its military build-up is intended to stop drug-smuggling by cartels.

Most cocaine in Latin America is produced in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia—not Venezuela. In 2019, 74% of cocaine shipments to the U.S. came through the Pacific, which Venezuela does not border, while 24% came through the Caribbean, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

‘Blowing ships willy-nilly’ raises legal concerns

Some observers have raised concerns around the legality of the U.S. military strike in international waters.

Countries are prohibited from using force unless under attack per the United Nations charter. After designating Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization, Trump accused the cartel of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion of predatory incursion against the territory of the United States,” invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, and said the gang was conducting “irregular warfare against the U.S.” at the direction of Maduro.

But after the first strike, Michael Becker, an assistant professor of international human rights law at Trinity College Dublin told the BBC that “the fact that U.S. officials describe the individuals killed by the U.S. strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets.”

Becker said the strike likely violated the U.N.’s bar on the use of force as well as protections of the right to life under international human rights law. He added in a post on X on Monday: “It doesn’t matter if the victims are criminals. These are murders.”

Other legal experts also weighed in to the BBC. “Intentional killing outside armed conflict hostilities is unlawful unless it is to save a life immediately,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at the Notre Dame Law School.

It’s not just international law in question. In the U.S., the President is required to have Congressional approval in deciding whether the U.S. should go to war, though the President has the authority to use force in limited circumstances under the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations of Use of Military Force (AUMF), which have come under bipartisan criticism for effectively giving Presidents a “blank check” to order military actions without Congressional approval.

A source familiar with Pentagon thinking told CNN, “If there was a boat full of al Qaeda fighters smuggling explosives towards the U.S., would anyone even ask this question?” Congress did officially authorize U.S. use of force against al Qaeda under the 2001 AUMF after the Sept. 11 attacks, which it has not done against Tren de Aragua.

“The fact that Congress has just been completely left out [of] the loop suggests the Trump Administration doesn’t feel that it has to follow the ordinary rules of the game,” Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, told NPR.

Rumen Cholakov, a visiting lecturer of U.S. constitutional law at King’s College London, told the BBC, “It is not immediately obvious that drug cartels such as Tren de Aragua would be within the President’s AUMF powers, but that might be what ‘narco-terrorists’ is hinting at.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Times that Trump’s order for the first strike “acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring poison to our shores.”

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, expressed concern about the extrajudicious nature of the strikes. “Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird? Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??” Paul posted on X on Sept. 6, in reply to a post from Vice President J.D. Vance arguing that “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”