Trump Is Crossing a Line That Dates Back to the Revolution

Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, Jonathan Lemire, and Shane Harris

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The black-and-white video President Donald Trump released yesterday was, in some respects, familiar. The grainy clip, only 30 seconds long and taken from a U.S. aircraft, shows a small boat skipping across the waves, bracketed by crosshairs. The crosshairs move in closer. Seconds later, a missile explodes, engulfing the boat in fire and destroying everything and everyone on board. That missile, Trump said, killed 11 “narco-terrorists” on an illicit smuggling mission that threatened American lives.

In the near-quarter-century since the 9/11 attacks, four presidents have launched strikes against suspected terrorists in at least seven nations, including Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. But with this week’s air strike in international waters in the southern Caribbean, Trump expanded the counterterrorism campaign’s mission to a new part of the world, against a different kind of threat. And in doing so, he drew the military even deeper into crime fighting, work that has traditionally been outside its scope.

Both domestically and internationally, the U.S. armed forces are tackling threats once assigned to police officers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, Coast Guardsmen, and other law-enforcement personnel. They are escorting immigration officers as they arrest undocumented immigrants in American cities, combatting crime with their presence in the U.S. capital, and stopping drugs at the southern border. Off the shores of Venezuela, U.S. ships are massing in a show of force against drug traffickers, a threat long addressed through interdiction at U.S. points of entry or in international or U.S. waters—not through lethal strikes.

“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up—and it’ll happen again,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters today. “Maybe it’s happening right now.”

The new tactics represent a shift away from the vision, dating back to the colonial revolt against an overbearing superpower, that U.S. armed forces should defend the country from external threats but not be used to routinely enforce the law.