Trump’s war on cartels is missing the target

U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign against alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean has raised alarm bells across the U.S. and Latin America, with many analysts raising concerns around the ethicality and legality of the recent strikes. But aside from these debates, there is another, more glaring truth: these strikes are entirely unnecessary and out of step with years of standard — and more effective — counternarcotics operations in the hemisphere.

In recent months, President Trump has launched a “non-international armed conflict” against alleged drug cartels, deploying warships, submarines, fighter jets, and thousands of U.S. forces to the Caribbean in the largest naval deployment to the region since the Cold War. In just over a month, the U.S. has conducted strikes against at least 14 boats, killing 57 people.

The administration’s aggressive stance includes designating cartels as terrorist organizations, authorizing the CIA to provide intelligence and conduct operations in the Caribbean and Venezuela, and exploring legal options to justify expanded strikes. Despite intelligence warnings questioning the Venezuelan government’s links to prison gang Tren de Aragua, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has staunchly backed their approach.

To those in the national security community, this strategy is all too familiar: an overreliance on militarized enforcement which jeopardizes other efforts that have resulted in meaningful movement towards defeating narcotrafficking. Decades of such efforts have demonstrated that a unilateral, heavy-handed approach to drug trafficking and organized crime is ineffective and inefficient, with the very real potential to aggravate violence and insecurity. Even the largest U.S.-backed military buildup in the region in the last 25 years, Plan Colombia, failed to root out the influence of drug trafficking networks in that country.

But there is a better way. If the administration is serious about dismantling drug cartels, addressing organized crime, and protecting American lives, it needs to look beyond military and defensive tools. Any effective counter-narcotics strategy must start with what’s already working, such as greater investments in specialized agencies like the Coast Guard that are better suited to the mission. It should also include a coordinated crackdown on arms trafficking, secure partnerships with regional allies, and the strengthening of financial and anti-corruption regimes.

The Trump administration’s military-first approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of modern drug trafficking. Blowing up small courier boats in international waters may generate headlines, but it does nothing to dismantle the sophisticated transnational criminal organizations that generated over $310 billion in revenue in 2023 — more than five times the combined defense budgets of all 31 nations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

At its core, the approach ignores the reality that the Navy is a poorly suited, expensive choice for counter-narcotics operations. A destroyer costs more than three times that of a Coast Guard cutter. The Coast Guard has law enforcement authority, specialized counter-drug experience, and personnel trained to capture suspects, collect evidence, and build criminal cases.

In August 2024, the Coast Guard offloaded 76,140 pounds of illicit narcotics worth $473 million from interdictions in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean — operations conducted efficiently and legally. Yet the administration continues to prioritize Defense Department assets over law enforcement tools, blurring the lines between the War on Terror and the War on Drugs in ways that create more problems than they solve.

Practical solutions can also be beefed up closer to home. In recent years, record-breaking drug seizures at the border in 2024 — particularly at ports of entry — have been achieved not through military force but through deploying more personnel, expanding non-intrusive inspection technology at the southwest border, and utilizing machine learning to identify high-risk shipments.

In fiscal years 2023 and 2024, the Department of Homeland Security stopped more illicit fentanyl and arrested more individuals for fentanyl-related crimes than in the previous five years combined. CBP seized 738.5 million doses of fentanyl in fiscal year 2024.

The Trump administration should bolster interagency coordination and enhance border interdictions by deploying more personnel and special agents, and investing in new technology and machine learning at points of entry. It also should increase domestic investigative and legal mechanisms, recognizing that a significant majority of individuals trafficking fentanyl across the U.S. southern border are U.S. citizens. There are transnational networks working on both sides of the border, and any effective counternarcotics strategy must also address the actors on U.S. territory.

Any serious approach to tackle transnational organized crime must also address the elephant in the room. While the administration deploys destroyers to blow up drug shipments, U.S.-sourced weapons continue flowing south, arming the very organizations Washington aims to fight. Between 200,000 and 500,000 U.S.-manufactured firearms are trafficked into Mexico — the main transit country for fentanyl — annually, with more than 70% of guns recovered in violent crimes traced to U.S. buyers. In the Caribbean, 73% of recovered firearms trace back to American sources. Other countries, like Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, have seen a documented increase in arms trafficking from the United States in 2025, fueling instability.

The White House should tackle this threat head-on. While the Biden administration made some progress, such as by launching bilateral initiatives with Mexico to deploy e-trace technology and ballistic imaging, and increasing joint investigations, these efforts require sustained investment and expansion.

Tracing technology has existed for years but remains underutilized due to insufficient training and inadequate staffing of federal investigators. Legislative bills like the ARMAS Act and the Stop Arming Cartels Act have stalled in Congress, though there are efforts underway to address this issue thanks to bipartisan recognition of the problem. More is needed to stop the “iron river” that is fueling instability across the hemisphere.

The United States should also build on its already strong relationships with regional partners. International cooperation under the Biden administration proved valuable in strengthening counternarcotics operations. This should be revisited and accelerated.

Regional initiatives like the Alliance for Security, Justice and Development and the Inter-American Development Bank’s Rapid Response Task Force have bolstered intelligence sharing and strengthened institutional and regulatory responses. These multilateral frameworks enable intelligence sharing, capacity building, and joint operations at a scale no single nation can achieve. U.S. engagement and investment in these operations would mean greater success.

Approaching regional governments as partners rather than through coercion allows for implementing counternarcotics strategies at a grander and more targeted scale. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself acknowledged regarding cooperation with friendly governments: “There’s no need to do that (unilateral attacks on land) in many cases with friendly governments, because the friendly governments are going to help us.”

Drug traffickers operate regardless of borders, and as such, our response must go beyond self sovereignty. The recent decision to sanction Colombia’s president, the Colombian First Lady, and the Colombian Interior Minister, while reflective of Washington’s displeasure with the Gustavo Petro administration‘s approach to cocaine trafficking, is likely to dampen Colombia-U.S. security cooperation. Such a punitive approach to our regional counternarcotics partners could jeopardize much-needed cooperation, which has proven successful at reducing drug flows and dismantling organized crime.

At the end of the day, the path forward requires treating organized crime as the complex, adaptive threat it actually is. Transnational criminal organizations are not conventional military targets that can be dismantled with bombs and weapons; they are networked enterprises that exploit gaps in governance, profit from multiple illicit flows, and adapt rapidly to enforcement pressure. Defeating them requires a strategy as sophisticated as their operations.

If the Trump administration wants to take this issue seriously, it must shift its mindset from blasting small transit boats to implementing new tools and strengthening those that are proven to be effective. The choice is not between doing nothing and sending destroyers to blow up boats. It is between repeating the mistakes that have failed for decades and adopting evidence-based approaches that treat the disease rather than the symptoms.

As long as American weapons flow south and drug profits flow north, as long as we alienate our partners, as long as we prioritize military spectacle over the hard work of intelligence-driven law enforcement and international and regional cooperation, we will not make progress. The only way to win this “war” is, counterintuitively, not through the military, but through a coordinated, multi-faceted strategy.

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