Trump’s Lawless Narco-War

Much of the criticism has centred on the role of Secretary of Defense — ahem, War — Pete Hegseth’s decision to “double tap” the alleged traffickers: hitting survivors a second time to ensure death — after they’ve already been incapacitated. Such conduct is indeed ethically troubling, however, the current controversy elides the larger issues.

I should know. After a stint in the army, I served as a targeting analyst attached to the Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2013, helping to identify Taliban targets for elimination or capture. For all the flaws of what used to be called the Global War on Terror, my comrades and I acted according to tight restrictions, guided by the laws of war. Furthermore we conducted our operations against armed combatants and under the authority of an Authorization for Use of Military Force voted on by Congress.

The current controversy misses the bigger flaw in the administration’s hemispheric operations: contrary to Vance’s arguments, the extralegal operations against trafficking don’t repudiate “permanent Washington” — but offer it succour. The military-industrial complex and the hawkish security establishment want nothing more than to see the nation embroiled in yet another long and constitutionally dubious conflict with unclear goals and the potential to topple yet another government willy-nilly.

In the two decades after 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations launched several wars of this kind, wasting thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars — for what, exactly? In 2016, Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination by condemning this enormous waste. Now, by embracing a state of never-ending war and state of emergency, a condition declared by an omnipotent executive branch, the second Trump administration has embraced essential elements of the deep state, the very machine the Trumpians were twice elected to dismantle.

Once upon a time, American conservatives were deeply committed to resisting the expansion of presidential war powers. Indeed, “Mr. Republican” himself, Sen. Robert A. Taft, commenting on the state of American pseudo-belligerency in the North Atlantic in 1941, argued that “if the President can declare or create an undeclared naval war beyond [Congress’s] power to act upon, the Constitution might just as well be abolished”.

Conservative Republicans similarly balked at President Truman’s unilateral use of military force in Korea and other trappings of the early Cold War state, arguing that the condition of permanent emergency empowered their liberal political enemies, “the war party” at the expense of constitutional norms and limited government.

They lost that political fight, and a new paradigm of an empowered presidency, tasked with securing an ever-expanding set of “national-security” interests, was born. Over the course of the Cold War and afterward, presidents from both parties upheld this new model, one that sanctioned a massive, permanent military bureaucracy. Americans became inured to a chief executive who could order US troops into combat with little to no congressional input, seeing the empowered presidency as an essential component of a modern state. The imperial presidency, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it, became the core political supposition of postwar America, one that survived the interregnum of Watergate and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. 

“My comrades and I acted according to tight restrictions, guided by the laws of war.”

Throughout the Global War on Terror, successive presidents from both parties leaned on this legacy to justify military action in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria — wars conducted without explicit congressional authorisation or clear, achievable political ends. Indeed, the open-endedness of these “forever wars” made possible by unbounded executive authority provided an essential plank for the MAGA platform, one that the Trump administration is now ripping up. The White House is instead doubling down on the original endless war, on the assumption that attempting the impossible in one’s neighbourhood — winning the war on drugs — is somehow more prudent than attempting “the impossible all over the world”.

Southern Spear, as with the War on Terror and the Cold War before it, conserves another component of permanent Washington: namely, a permanent emergency based on emotionalism and obfuscation. Under the imperial presidency, America’s wars have been sold via slippery language and amorphous geographical and conceptual boundaries. Washington inched its way into both world wars based, in part, on open-ended conceptions of neutrality and shifting boundaries of the Western Hemisphere. In both Korea and Vietnam, such quagmires were deepened through incremental escalation, crises that silenced debate and left tens of thousands of American dead.

More recently, the Global War on Terror, a quixotic war against a tactic — terrorism — yielded a 20-year morass without an achievable political objective, all the while furthering the growth of the security state at home. Throughout the War on Terror, the security state sold adventurism abroad by personalizing and inflating the threat of terrorism at home, making individual Americans unduly afraid that they could be the victims of terror. In all of these wars, the real winners were the Beltway bureaucrats — Vance’s permanent Washington — who administered them, often in careers that spanned eras, thereby preventing genuine national-security reform.

In Latin America, the Trump administration is conserving the core interests of permanent Washington. The White House has not only preserved the imperial presidency, but expanded its powers. While Trump’s recent predecessors pushed the boundaries of existing Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, the Trump administration, through a novel interpretation of the terrorism designation, has given itself the authority to commit acts of war. The administration’s obscurantism about the strikes and its guiding strategy for them are another inherited facet of permanent Washington’s predilection for secrecy in the service of unachievable goals.

The Trump administration is employing the same narrative games used by previous administrations. The primary rhetorical vehicle, the fluctuating label of “narcoterrorism”, once applied to acts of terror in service of the drug trade, has been applied to the trade itself. Similarly, the administration and its supporters have spuriously compared overdose deaths — tragic as they are — to American combat casualties. Associating an overdose of American at home to the death of an American draftee in the rice paddies of Vietnam is an absurd conflation that strips the drug epidemic of its context. This narrative slippage is but the latest example of Washington’s shameless shifting of symbols to prep the public for another unwinnable war like the ones that defined much of my career as a soldier and intelligence professional.

Someday in the near future, the Trump era will end. Betraying its campaign pledges, the Trump administration has not served as a disruptive force for permanent Washington, the deep state, or whatever euphemism one favours for the suite of institutions and assumptions that guide American geopolitics in the postwar era. By remilitarising the War on Drugs — to say nothing of a potential regime change in Venezuela — the White House is breathing new life into the political forces that it claimed to oppose.

Southern Spear is not a break with permanent Washington — it is its logical conclusion.