On September 2, the United States conducted a sensational military strike on a speedboat in the southern Caribbean Sea in violation of both international and US law. The extravagant attack killed 11 civilians on board, whom US President Donald Trump had magically intuited to be drug traffickers affiliated with Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.
The spectacle was staged amid the ongoing deployment of US warships off the Venezuelan coast under the pretence of fighting “narcoterrorists” whose ringleader, according to the current Trumpian narrative, is Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro – no surprise given the country’s lengthy role as a thorn in the side of US imperialism.
Warning that such attacks would continue, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that the interdiction of alleged drug boats simply does not work: “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”
Trump, meanwhile, remarked on the ensuing decrease in boat traffic near the site of the strike, perhaps due to the fact that people who fish for a living now fear for their lives: “I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.’”
As with most situations in which the US claims to be fighting terror, then, this episode appeared to be rather terroristic in nature – particularly given the president’s own insinuation that fishermen or anyone else on a boat could be indiscriminately targeted at any time.
On September 5, the global hegemon’s enlightened commander-in-chief signed an executive order renaming the US Department of Defense the “Department of War”. This from a president who campaigned on, you know, keeping the US out of wars.
With his signature eloquence, Trump announced that the name change would wrest the US out of a supposedly “woke” orientation that precluded decisive victories and usher in an era of military triumph: “We could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct or woke-y.”
Never mind that “politically correct” is not exactly the first descriptor that comes to mind when considering the mass US military slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who will henceforth be referred to as the “secretary of war”, concurred that the rebranding is necessary for “restoring the warrior ethos”.
But why the sudden need on Trump’s part to project a warrior image by blowing up a speedboat in the Caribbean? To put it briefly, it serves as a convenient distraction from the president’s dismal failure on other fronts to live up to his super-tough-guy vision of himself.
His ultimatums to Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine, for example, have proved fruitless. Ditto for intermittent pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wrap up the genocide in the Gaza Strip, where in less than two years Israel has officially killed more than 64,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
So why not hone the “warrior ethos” against easier targets – which may or may not include Caribbean fishermen?
Of course, this is not the first time Trump has put Venezuela in his crosshairs. In 2019, during his first presidential term, his administration took the liberty of recognising Juan Guaido, the little-known right-wing character who had spontaneously declared himself interim president of Venezuela, hypothetically replacing Maduro.
Things didn’t go quite as planned and Guaido ended up in Miami – but perhaps US warships surrounding Venezuela will help speed regime change along.
Nor, to be sure, is this the first time the US has used the old drug war as an excuse to kill civilians abroad, a hypocritical arrangement of particularly sinister proportions given that the US itself has been up to its ears in the global drug trade since pretty much forever.
As for the concept of “narcoterrorism” presently being invoked by Trump, this dates back to the 2006 renewal of the Patriot Act after the US Drug Enforcement Agency, fearful of losing its relevance in the whole “war on terror” era, proposed the new crime as a “pre-eminent threat” to the homeland.
So while Trump’s Caribbean showdown is not exactly a deviation from past US policy, his quest to perfect the art of total derangement does make for a somewhat unique display.
Thus far, the Trump administration has refrained from offering any evidence of Maduro’s alleged narcotrafficking ties. But, hey, evidence is just a “woke-y” thing, right?
At the end of the day, though, it’s not really about Maduro or Venezuela. It’s about Trump’s need to project power by blowing stuff up.
In August, Trump staged a summit in Alaska with Putin, ostensibly to end the war in Ukraine but really to distract from MAGA infighting – including on the subject of Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing to blow stuff up in Gaza.
Now, Venezuela is serving as the chosen distraction from the president’s weak showing against both Putin and Netanyahu as well as a venue for the general recuperation of a testosterone-fuelled “warrior ethos”.
And as the new Department of War proceeds to blow up international and domestic law along with a Caribbean motorboat, it’s more than just the fishermen who need to worry.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
