Daily Archives: 19 December 2025

Convenient Misunderstanding

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The Trump administration is pressing its campaign in international waters against those entities smuggling deadly drugs into the United States. The Left and too many politicians, the latter from both parties, claim worry about the rights of these smugglers. Others criticize the tactics being used against them.

Critics say the alleged criminals aren’t in an armed conflict with the US, making strikes on them illegal and a possible war crime.

This is a denial flowing from a convenient misunderstanding of the facts of the matter. Last February, the State Department made no bones about who and what these…smugglers…are.

Today, the Department of State announces the designation of Tren de Aragua (TdA), Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Cártel de Sinaloa, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Cártel del Noreste (CDN), La Nueva Familia Michoacana (LNFM), Cártel de Golfo (CDG), and Cárteles Unidos (CU) as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs).

Of course these smugglers, these terrorists, are in armed conflict with the United States; that’s what terrorists do vis-à-vis the nations they target. Heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, today’s marijuana carefully bred to drastically increase its potency—all of these are smuggled in with two purposes: make money for the terrorists and hook our population on them to the detriment of our people’s ability to function.

Those are chicken feed attempts, though, and by themselves devastate thousands of lives but present no serious threat to our population as a whole or to our national security. However, that’s not all the terrorists are smuggling in. The terrorists are busily smuggling fentanyl into our nation in truly alarming, security-threatening amounts. In 2024 alone, government agents seized 23,256 kilograms of fentanyl. With a single kilogram being enough to kill 500,000 Americans, that would have been enough to kill more than 11.6 billion Americans—34 times our population.

Wars aren’t fought exclusively with guns and bombs. They’re also fought cybernetically…and with drugs designed to poison whole populations. Fentanyl smuggling, much more than the petty smuggling of those other drugs, is a direct attack on our nation, and these smugglers are soldiers in that war. Keep in mind, too, that the terrorist organizations managing this war assemble the fentanyl that their soldiers smuggle from constituent precursors they import from one of our enemy nations: the People’s Republic of China. The PRC is actively aiding and abetting this attack.

It is no war crime for us to defend ourselves in this war, and killing the enemy soldiers is entirely justified, right along with destroying the weapons themselves. It’s also safer for us to do this on the high seas than waiting for the weapons to enter our nation. The seizures outlined above are only a fraction, if apparently a major fraction given the fentanyl-related deaths actually occurring, of the weapons smuggled in. Like any other weapon of mass destruction, though, it would only take a very few successful mass smugglings to cause vast, national-security threatening damage.

An Empty Promise?

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Supposedly, the US has offered a security guarantee to Ukraine in the form of support[ing] European security guarantees and seek[ing] Senate backing for Washington’s promised role as a means of breaking the current peace talks impasse.

This supposed guarantee

would include monitoring, verification, and deconfliction, the officials said, and would lay out the role the US would play if Russia breached a peace deal and came back to attack Ukraine. They would also include the provision of weapons to deter a Russian force.

Yeah, sure. “Monitoring:” we see you, Russia, resuming your invasion, we’re watching the hell out of you. “Verification:” Yup, Russia really is resuming its invasion. “Deconfliction:” What does this mean? European forces entering Ukraine to fight the barbarian alongside Ukrainian forces? Traffic control to deconflict traffic jams on Ukrainian roads for Ukrainian forces and civilians moving in the other direction? Something else?

“Provision of weapons for deterrence:” This is risible. Europe already is refusing to provide the weapons the UA needs, in the numbers it needs them, or on the schedule it says it needs them. Excuses range from fear of provoking the barbarian to insisting the UA doesn’t really need them like that to claims they don’t have the weapons to provide the UA, having drawn down their armories already with transfers. That last, given Europe’s disdain for any thing military, at least has a measure of plausibility.

The supposed guarantee also purports to include

legally-binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event of a Russian attack.

What is the timeline for implementation of a related peace agreement? Would the agreement go into effect before or after “Senate support” had been secured? If after, what support for Ukraine’s continued fight for its survival would be in the offing pending that Senate agreement? If before, how would Ukraine recover or be aided in recovering, from the barbarian’s virtually guaranteed violation of the terms? What would be the Or Else should the barbarian violate the agreement—more monitoring, verification, and…”deconfliction?” All the nations’ governments—including, shamefully, our own—have already been slinking away, their tails covering their crown jewels, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nattering on about nuclear weapons.

However sincerely offered, this seems like an empty promise. There’s no guarantee that the Senate, with its two-thirds majority treaty ratification requirement, would support such a thing. A simple Senate majority-voted resolution of support would be meaningless, legally, politically, and morally. Nor is there any guarantee that an alternate path to securing support—bills passed in both the House and Senate, which would require only majority votes (after a 60-vote cloture success in the Senate)—would succeed.

There’s this bit, too, that overhangs any security “guarantee” that might be offered Ukraine. Three of the participants in the Budapest Memorandum—the US, the UK, and France via its separate individual assurance—already have betrayed Ukraine by dishonoring the security and territorial integrity guarantees contained in that document. The Memorandum also was a legally binding commitment.