The Right Questions about America’s Strikes on Venezuelan Narco-Boats

Once again, the United States is using lethal force off its shores. In recent weeks, American drones and warships have sunk or disabled a string of speedboats in international waters off Venezuela. Washington says the vessels belonged to narcoterrorist networks tied to the Maduro regime and Tren de Aragua and that they were carrying cocaine and fentanyl precursors bound for the United States. At least 83 alleged traffickers and others are dead. Caracas calls this extrajudicial murder. Human-rights groups call it assassination. Cable-news panels and UN press releases are already rehearsing the same ritual question: Is this legal under international law?

That is the wrong question—not because the answer is obvious, but because the question itself is a trap. It drags debate into a framework that has repeatedly shown itself incapable of distinguishing between arsonists and firefighters. Instead of reflexively asking, “Is it legal?” we should be asking three far sharper questions:

Is it smart? Does disrupting these particular boats and networks actually reduce the flow of deadly drugs into American cities, or does it simply scatter the traffickers to new routes and methods? Do we have good intelligence, practicable rules of engagement, and a realistic theory of how this contributes to an overall strategy? Or are we just generating dramatic footage at long-term expense?

Is it just? Are we inflicting a level of collateral damage that we would condemn if the roles were reversed? Justice toward individuals—both the American overdose victims and the people on (or near) those boats—demands more than moral intuition; it demands rigorous standards we can defend in daylight.

Is it in the lasting interest of the American people? Short-term tactical wins are easy to cheer, but do these operations strengthen or weaken broader U.S. goals—stabilizing the hemisphere, deterring China and Iran (who back Maduro), protecting sea lanes, and preserving America’s reputation as a country that is on the side of justice, peace, and freedom? Impulses are not the same as “our interest, guided by justice,” which, as George Washington taught us, should be our lodestars in navigating peace and war.

Notice what these three questions have in common: none of them treats “Venezuelan sovereignty” or “proportionality” or “UN Charter compliance” as magic words that settle the matter. They also do not assume the strikes are automatically wise or automatically reckless. They simply refuse to outsource moral and strategic judgment to a legal-academic consensus that has spent the last two decades tying itself in knots over cases most people intuitively get right.

That consensus once spent years debating whether the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad was an “extrajudicial execution” and a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. It has issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders alongside Hamas commanders, as if defending a country against a genocidal attack were morally symmetrical to launching one. Now this same interpretive machinery is mobilized to analyze speedboats full of fentanyl precursors. Instead, it would be a useful, if negative, step toward a freer, more peaceful, and more just world if this machinery for obscuring evil and besmirching good were dismantled.

None of this is an argument that the law does not matter. Rules of engagement, congressional oversight, and basic transparency remain indispensable—if only because they help us answer the smart questions honestly. But when the very vocabulary of “international legality” consistently blurs the difference between indecent actors and those who block them, it is no longer a useful compass. It becomes a smoke machine operated, willfully or not, in defense of indecency.

Americans are right to demand that their government act with cunning, with justice, and with a cold-eyed view of the national interest. Whether the current operations in the Caribbean meet those standards is a legitimate and urgent debate. But we will never get to the bottom of it if we keep letting the debate be framed by a legal paradigm that aims at fairness in the struggle between good and evil.

We should stop contending within a framework of “customary international law” that has never been democratically endorsed, and institutions that, in their actual operation ,are hard to defend with decency. Let us argue about justice, costs, and consequences instead. Those are the only questions worth discussing.

Michael S. Kochin is Professor Extraordinarius in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. He received his A.B. in mathematics from Harvard and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, Claremont McKenna College, and the Catholic University of America. He has written widely on the comparative analysis of institutions, political thought, politics and literature, and political rhetoric. With the historian Michael Taylor he has written An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States (University of Michigan Press, 2020).

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