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.

This is triggered by a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Gerard Baker. Baker argued that the Trump administration might be going too far with its seeming deviation from purported rules of war [emphasis added].

Waging war according to legal principles seems designed to hobble us. We play by a code of conduct, that nebulous thing we have reified as “international law.” Our enemies murder civilians wantonly, fly passenger planes into buildings, kill captured prisoners, ship arms and poison to our shores that ruin innocent lives. Yet we somehow feel obliged to give them the due process and benefit of law they laugh at. It can seem, to echo a phrase used in another cinematic setting, as if we are constantly bringing a knife to a gunfight.
That is why I suspect most people aren’t too troubled by what the US military has been doing in the Caribbean the past three months. They should be.

But not to the extent of calling off the operations. To modify an old saw somewhat for clarity, the ends provide the excusal or lack of it in the means used. Bigger ends—the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan vis-à-vis firebombing entire cities, stopping or vastly reducing the flow of population killing drugs like fentanyl from terrorist or drug cartel-controlled nations by shooting up their smuggling boats on the high seas—excuse bigger deviations.

I do not entirely agree with Baker, and I do not entirely disagree. My own view is this (and full disclosure: I’ve written a book on the matter: A Conservative’s View of the Conduct of Just Wars).

Rules of war, rationales for starting or responding to one and allowed techniques for fighting one once joined, are for opposing combatants who substantially agree on the rules and follow them. When one of the combatants eschews those rules, following their own procedures that have little to no confluence with civilization, then those rules of war should cease to be strictures and should become, instead, mere guidelines, limits on how to fight that should be used to the extent possible, but never allowed to cost victory, whether of any battle, offensive, or campaign or of the overall war.

Blindly adhering to the rules of war and therefrom losing the war is far more costly, not just secularly, but morally as well. The loss, with subsequent conquering by the barbaric fighter, enshrines the barbarian’s “rules” in adamantine for generations. The barbarians’ victories in mid-5th century Europe and in mid-15^th century western Asia were followed in both regions by centuries of dark age barbarity.

The area between adhering to laws of war too assiduously and going too far in violating them is a very broad gray area, obscured in real time by Clausewitzian fog of war. That fog exists in the political dimensions of the decision to go to war and its subsequent prosecution as much as in the military dimensions of preparing for war and then fighting it.

We should be watchful more than concerned about what the US military has been doing in the Caribbean the past three months.

The nations of Europe are concerned about any peace deal regarding the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine leaving Ukraine and those European nations vulnerable to later attacks on either.

The leaders of the UK, France, and Germany met in British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Downing Street residence with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday, their latest effort to influence negotiations as the US pushes for a swift agreement to end the war.

Zelenskyy’s concern should be Europe’s as well:

“Russia is insisting we give up land, we don’t want to give anything away.” Zelensky added that he couldn’t cede land legally or morally.
“This is what we are fighting for[.]”

If Europe wants the Influence in US-Led Peace Talks on War in Ukraine that the headline mentions, the best and fastest way to achieve that influence is to bypass the US proposals and simply to start transferring to Ukraine the equipment, logistics, and financial support that the UA and the Ukrainian government personnel say they need, in the amounts they need them, and on the schedule they say they need them. Stop waiting on the US to make the first move. Stop worrying about what the US might think of them for seeing to Ukraine’s and to their own interests first.

After all, the only reliable peace with the barbarian that’s achievable is a defeat of the barbarian that includes his being driven entirely out of Ukraine.

It’s true enough that European military equipment isn’t as good as American. It is, though, a generation or two better than what the Russians are putting into the field. That difference is heavily magnified when put into the hands of Ukrainian fighters, who themselves are better and more determined then the barbarians they’re facing, especially as they are fighting for their nation’s—and their wives’ and children’s and mothers’ and sisters’—survival.

On the other hand, it would fit snugly the premise of some that Europe’s nations don’t give a fig about Ukraine—viz., their reluctance to act without US approval or first move—only concerning themselves with their own security. The nations’ concerns about their own safety are valid in themselves. They know the solution, and it’s the same as for Ukraine.