America’s Shadow War: Part One
Waves of Impunity: How America Turned the Caribbean Into a Kill Zone
The footage is now infamous, a grainy snuff film for the digital age. A small, rickety Venezuelan fishing boat, a mere speck on the vast, indifferent canvas of the Caribbean, is suddenly engulfed in a flash of fire and smoke. A US missile, a marvel of destructive precision, has found its mark. The boat is shattered, its wooden hull splintered into a thousand pieces. But the horror is not over. For an agonising hour, the survivors, dazed and wounded, cling to the wreckage, their desperate hopes for rescue slowly extinguished by the unforgiving sun and the chilling realisation that they are utterly alone. And then, the second strike comes. A second missile, a second explosion, a second wave of death that silences the last vestiges of life on the water (Tait, 2025). This is the new reality in the Caribbean, brought to you by the United States of America.
Let us be clear: the United States is carrying out extrajudicial killings at sea. The September 2nd double-tap was not an isolated incident, but the most brazen example of a campaign of violence that has escalated since autumn 2025. In just a few months, under the guise of a new “narco-terrorism war,” the Trump administration has unleashed its military might on a fleet of small, often defenceless boats. As of early December, at least 15 boats have been destroyed, and the death toll stands at 87 (TIME, 2025). Rather than drug enforcement, this is a brutal demonstration of unrestrained power, a superpower flexing its muscles and showing the world that the Caribbean is its backyard, its playground, and, when it deems it necessary, its execution ground. Families are filing human-rights complaints (Al Jazeera, 2025), and even America’s allies are condemning the strikes as a flagrant violation of international law. Legal scholars are even more blunt, calling the strikes “almost certainly illegal” (Tait, 2025). This is a story of impunity, of a nation that has decided it is above the law, and of the human cost of that arrogance.
The Birth of a Doctrine: How Trump and Hegseth Rewrote the Rules
This campaign of extrajudicial killing did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the toxic fruit of a deliberate and cynical political strategy, born from a second-term Trump administration that sees the world not as a community of nations, but as a gladiatorial arena. The key to understanding the violence now unfolding in the Caribbean lies in a seemingly innocuous bureaucratic manoeuvre: the reframing of drug trafficking as an act of terrorism. This semantic sleight of hand, reportedly enshrined in a secret Department of Justice memo, was championed by Secretary of War (previously known as Secretary of Defense) Pete Hegseth (Vox, 2025a). It gave the Pentagon the latitude to wage a war on its own terms, unburdened by the quaint niceties of international law or due process.
Hegseth, a Fox News talking head elevated to a position of immense power, has become the public face and the driving force behind this new “strike-first” doctrine. He proudly told TIME magazine that the US is “sinking narco boats,” a chillingly casual admission of a policy of summary execution (TIME, 2025). The crucial element of this new doctrine is what it omits: there are no arrests, no seizures of contraband, no trials. There is only the cold, hard calculus of the kill chain. The legal justification for this, as investigative journalists have uncovered, is a secret Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo that reportedly authorises the use of lethal force even when a target’s criminal status is unproven (Tait, 2025). This is a radical departure from the established norms of law enforcement, a shift from a model of policing to a model of paramilitary warfare, executed in the lawless expanse of the open sea, far from the prying eyes of oversight and accountability.
The First Strike: The “Double-Tap” That Shattered the Narrative
Of all the strikes that have been carried out under this new doctrine of maritime assassination, none has so perfectly captured its inherent brutality and lawlessness as the infamous “double-tap” of September 2, 2025. This single incident, meticulously reconstructed by investigative journalists, serves as a damning indictment of the entire campaign (Tait, 2025; The Washington Post, 2025). The first strike, a missile launched from a US warship obliterated the small Venezuelan fishing boat, killing most of its crew in an instant. But the horror did not end there. Surveillance drones, circling high above the carnage, captured the harrowing image of two survivors clinging desperately to the debris of their shattered vessel. For a moment, it seemed as though they might have a chance, a sliver of hope in the vast sea. But that hope was extinguished with the launch of a second missile. The “double-tap,” as it has come to be known, was not a mistake, but a deliberate act of killing. A cold-blooded execution of two men who were, by any legal or moral standard, defenceless and incapacitated; men who had never posed any threat whatsoever.
The legal implications of this act are staggering. International law, a body of rules that the United States has long claimed to champion, explicitly prohibits the killing of shipwrecked persons. The Pentagon’s own Law of War manual echoes this prohibition, stating that such individuals “shall be respected and protected in all circumstances” (Tait, 2025).
The second strike on September 2 was a flagrant violation of these fundamental principles.
The Pentagon’s response to the ensuing outcry has been a masterclass in obfuscation and bad faith. At first, they claimed that the survivors were “not visible.” When that lie was exposed by the very drone footage they had captured, they shifted their story, claiming that the second strike was aimed “at the hull” of the boat, not the men clinging to it. Finally, when pressed for further clarification, they simply declined to comment (Tait, 2025). This shifting narrative, this desperate attempt to spin a story of a tragic accident out of a deliberate act of killing, is as damning as the act itself. Even if one were to accept the dubious legality of the first strike, the second one lays bare the moral and legal bankruptcy of the entire enterprise. The “double-tap” is more than just a single act of violence; it is a symbol of a campaign built on a foundation of plausible deniability and aggressive, unaccountable force.
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The Venezuela Factor: When “Drug War” Becomes Prelude
To understand the true nature of America’s new maritime kill-zone, one must look beyond the flimsy pretext of the “war on drugs” and examine the geopolitical chessboard on which this deadly game is being played. The key, as is so often the case with the Trump administration, is Venezuela. The strikes, while ostensibly targeting drug traffickers, are overwhelmingly concentrated in the waters used by Venezuelan boats. This is no coincidence. It is a tell, a revealing clue that exposes the drug war narrative as a convenient camouflage for a much larger and more dangerous geopolitical project: the punishment and destabilisation of Nicolás Maduro’s government (Vox, 2025b), which happens to be socialist.
But to see this merely as punishment is to miss the point. This is preparation. The Trump administration’s obsession with Venezuela is not new, but its methods have evolved. The designation of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the deployment of a U.S. carrier strike group, and the semantic alchemy that turns smugglers into terrorists are not random acts of aggression (Vox, 2025a). They are the deliberate, sequential steps of a war plan being executed in plain sight. These strikes are designed to soften the target, to establish a legal and operational precedent for lethal force, and to acclimate the public to the idea of military action against Venezuela. The drug war is the public-facing justification, the politically palatable story sold to the American people. But the reality is a shadow war, a campaign of aggression waged against Venezuela that serves as the opening act for a far more direct and devastating conflict. The full nature of that coming war, its architects, its justifications, and its catastrophic consequences, is a story for another time. For now, it is enough to recognise that the bodies washing up on the shores of the Caribbean are the first casualties of a war that has already begun.
The Legal Black Hole: How the Sea Becomes a No-Accountability Zone
To justify this campaign of state-sanctioned murder, the Trump administration has had to construct a legal house of cards, a flimsy and transparently false architecture of rationalisation designed to collapse under the slightest scrutiny. They have twisted and distorted both domestic and international law, creating a legal black hole in the open sea, a space where the normal rules do not apply and accountability is an alien concept. The entire enterprise is built on a foundation of lies, from the cynical redefinition of drug trafficking as “terrorism” to the absurd claim that the United States is in a state of “armed conflict” with a diffuse and ill-defined network of small-time smugglers (Vox, 2025a).
The prohibitions under international law are clear and unambiguous. The Geneva Conventions, the bedrock of the laws of armed conflict, explicitly forbid attacks on shipwrecked persons. The principle of distinction, another cornerstone of international humanitarian law, requires combatants to distinguish between military objectives and civilians. Extrajudicial executions are a flagrant violation of fundamental human rights. And the use of lethal force is only permissible as a last resort, when arrest is not feasible. The US military’s actions in the Caribbean violate every single one of these principles (Tait, 2025). These are not complex legal questions. They are basic, foundational rules of civilised conduct, rules that the United States has long purported to uphold. But now, in the pursuit of a cynical political agenda, they have been cast aside.
The administration’s legal gymnastics are equally contemptuous of US domestic law. In peacetime, the actions being carried out in the Caribbean would be unthinkable. They would be murder, plain and simple. So, the administration has manufactured a war, stretching the definition of “terrorism” to encompass any and all drug-related activity (Vox, 2025a). They have invoked the spectre of a secret OLC memo, a magical legal document that supposedly grants them the authority to kill without consequence (Tait, 2025). They have exploited the “unflagged vessel” loophole, a dubious legal theory that claims boats without national flags are essentially fair game. And they have shrouded the entire operation in a veil of secrecy, refusing to release any public intelligence, any evidence of drugs recovered, any names of the dead, or any information that would allow for meaningful judicial oversight. The consensus among legal experts is overwhelming: these strikes are almost certainly illegal, a flagrant and dangerous assault on the very foundations of the international legal order (Tait, 2025; Al Jazeera, 2025).
The Caribbean as a Stage: The Politics of Spectacle
To truly grasp the depravity of the situation unfolding in the Caribbean, one must recognise that this campaign of violence is not just policy; it is performance. The missile strikes and the dead bodies are not merely the unfortunate byproducts of a misguided strategy; they are the entire point. This is political theatre of the most grotesque kind, a spectacle of state-sanctioned violence designed to play to a domestic right-wing audience. And in this macabre production, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has cast himself as the leading man.
With his triumphant public messaging, like his now-infamous social media post, “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat,” Hegseth has transformed lethal force into an applause line (TIME, 2025). Each strike is a carefully choreographed scene, complete with cinematic drone footage released to the public: a small boat, a flash of light, an explosion, a sinking hull. The narrative is simple, visceral, and utterly devoid of nuance. It is a story of American strength, of a nation taking decisive action to protect its borders. But it is a story that has little to do with reality. As analysts have repeatedly pointed out, the vast majority of illicit drugs enter the United States through official ports of entry and the international mail system, not on rickety fishing boats in the middle of the Caribbean (Vox, 2025b). The strikes are not about stopping drugs; they are about projecting an image of toughness, of a president and a secretary of war/defence who are not afraid to get their hands dirty. The dead fishermen of the Caribbean are not the targets of this campaign; they are the props, the set dressing for a political persona built on a foundation of cruelty and contempt.
The Human and Regional Fallout
Beyond the immediate horror of the killings, the Trump administration’s undeclared war in the Caribbean is leaving a deep and lasting scar on the region. For every man killed at sea, there is a family left behind, a wife without a husband, children without a father. These families are trapped in a cruel limbo, denied even the basic dignity of a body to bury, a grave to visit. They are given no information, no official confirmation of their loved one’s death, no recourse for justice. They are simply left to wonder, to hope against hope, and to eventually, agonisingly, accept the terrible truth (AP News, 2025).
The fear that now grips the fishing communities along the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia is palpable. The sea, once a source of livelihood and sustenance, has become a place of danger, a place where any boat, at any time, can be targeted on suspicion. Fishermen are now afraid to venture into the waters where their families have fished for generations, terrified that they too will become the next victims of America’s deadly new doctrine. This is crisis of culture, a severing of the deep and ancient bond between these communities and the sea.
The fallout is not limited to the grieving families and the terrified fishermen. The strikes have sent shockwaves throughout the region, with governments expressing outrage and alarm at the United States’ flagrant disregard for international law. The French government, through its territories in Martinique, has been particularly vocal in its condemnation, warning that the strikes “disregard international law.” Other regional governments, like Dominica, have echoed these concerns, creating a growing chorus of condemnation that the Trump administration has chosen to ignore (Tait, 2025). The danger is clear: the Caribbean is being transformed into a militarised sea, a place where the presumption of innocence has been replaced by a presumption of guilt, and where any small, wooden boat is a potential target in a war with no rules and no end in sight.
What Happens When a Superpower Starts Killing at Sea?
When a superpower decides that the laws of war and peace are mere suggestions, to be followed or ignored at its convenience, it does more than just kill people. It kills the very idea of a world governed by rules. The US military strikes in the Caribbean are a symptom of a much deeper and more dangerous pathology: a rot that has taken hold in the heart of the American empire. This is what happens when the distinction between war and policing, a distinction that has been painstakingly built over centuries of legal and philosophical debate, is allowed to collapse. The sea, once a symbol of freedom and a shared global commons, becomes a lawless space, a laboratory for new and more brutal forms of state violence.
The normalization of extra-territorial violence against poor, brown, coastal populations is a chilling development, a throwback to a darker era of colonial gunboat diplomacy. It sends a clear and unambiguous message to the world: some lives matter more than others. The lives of Venezuelan fishermen, of Colombian labourers, of the desperate and the dispossessed, are expendable. They can be extinguished without consequence, without due process, without even the courtesy of an official acknowledgment. This is a dangerous precedent to set. Other states, watching from the sidelines, will surely take note. They will see that the language of terrorism can be used to justify almost any act of aggression, that the open sea can be transformed into a free-fire zone, and that the world’s most powerful nation is willing to lead the way in this race to the bottom.
The erosion of American moral authority is perhaps the most profound and lasting consequence of this reckless campaign. The United States has long claimed to be a beacon of freedom and democracy, a nation that stands for the rule of law and human rights. But with every missile strike, with every dead fisherman, that claim becomes more and more hollow. What is left is something simpler, darker, and more honest: raw, naked power. The message being sent from Washington is no longer one of ideals, but of capabilities. We can do it, so we will. This is the logic of the bully, the logic of the tyrant, the logic of an empire in decline, lashing out in a desperate and self-defeating display of dominance.
Conclusion: Smoke on the Horizon
America has turned the Caribbean into a laboratory, a testing ground for a new and terrifying form of unregulated military force. In this laboratory, the subjects are human beings, and the experiments are conducted with missiles and drones. The victims of this brutal experiment are invisible to the American public, their deaths a mere footnote in a news cycle dominated by spectacle and political theatre. But they are not invisible to their families, who are left to grieve in silence, their pain a testament to the human cost of American impunity. They are not invisible to the region, which watches with a growing sense of dread as the world’s only superpower casts aside the last vestiges of international law and embraces a new era of lawless violence.
The image that will forever define this dark chapter in American history is the one of a charred hull sinking slowly into the turquoise water, of two men clinging desperately to the debris, their faces a mask of terror and disbelief. It is the image of a drone, a silent, all-seeing eye in the sky, watching from above. And it is the image of a second missile, a streak of white against the blue, launched in silence, a final, brutal punctuation mark on a sentence of death.
When a superpower chooses to kill in the open sea, it tells the world what kind of empire it has become. But these waves of impunity are not the final act. They are the prologue. The Caribbean is a staging ground. And as the smoke from these strikes drifts towards the mainland, it signals the coming of a much larger fire. The undeclared war on the water is the prelude to the declared war on Venezuela.
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References
Al Jazeera (2025). ‘Family of man slain in a US boat strike in the Caribbean lodges complaint,’ 3 December. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/3/family-of-man-slain-in-a-us-boat-strike-in-the-caribbean-lodges-complaint[Accessed: 8 December 2025].
AP News (2025). ‘Trump accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced,’ 7 November. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-boat-strikes-drugs-cocaine-trafficking-95b54a3a5efec74f12f82396a79617ea
Tait, R (2025). Killing of survivors sparks outrage – but entire US ‘drug boat’ war is legally shaky. The Guardian, 4 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/04/venezuela-boat-strikes-legality-hegseth[Accessed: 8 December 2025].
TIME, (2025). ‘Hegseth Says U.S. ‘Just Sunk Another Narco Boat’ Amid ‘Double-Tap’ Strike Controversy,’ 5 December. Available at: https://time.com/7338857/hegseth-confirms-another-boat-strike-controversy-war-crime-debate/ [Accessed: 8 December 2025].
Vox, (2025a). ‘For the Trump administration, “terrorism” doesn’t mean what it used to,’ 25 November. Available at: https://www.vox.com/politics/470286/terrorism-maduro-venezuela-antifa [Accessed: 8 December 2025].
Vox (2025b). ‘Why is the US on the verge of war with Venezuela?’ 1 December. Available at: https://www.vox.com/politics/470879/venezuela-maduro-drug-boats-military-strikes [Accessed: 8 December 2025].
The Washington Post. (2025). ‘Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all,’ 28 November. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/28/hegseth-kill-them-all-survivors-boat-strike/[Accessed: 8 December 2025].