Why current U.S. actions in Venezuela and beyond reflect more than anti-drug policy and how this recalls the Monroe Doctrine
Since Trump returned to power, anti-drug rhetoric has once again been used to justify a broader set of foreign policy and security actions whose effects extend far beyond interdiction statistics in U.S. law enforcement reports.
The recent surge of U.S. military and legal actions targeting alleged narcotics trafficking in and around Venezuela has refocused global attention on the long-standing idea of a “war on drugs.”
In late 2025 and early 2026, the Trump administration publicly linked strikes against suspected drug facilities and vessels with broader strategic goals. On December 29, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that U.S. forces had struck a marine dock in Venezuela, alleged to be used for loading drugs, characterizing it as part of an ongoing anti-narcotics push.
Yet the same operations have been described by administration officials, with varying degrees of specificity, as steps in what the administration frames as an “armed conflict” with drug traffickers.
Meanwhile, Maduro’s capture and transfer to the United States to face narco-terrorism charges underscores this strategy’s legal and political dimensions, as U.S. federal prosecutors have accused the Venezuelan president of leading a cocaine trafficking network involving multiple regional criminal groups.
From “War on Drugs” to Geopolitical Action
“We knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua … trying to poison our country with illicit drugs,” said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth the past September of a strike on a boat in Caribbean waters. This political maneuver was part of a more general attempt to connect drug trafficking, traditionally a law-enforcement domain, with military force projection, an antechamber to the operation that took Nicolás Maduro prisoner.
They also coincide with a heightened diplomatic push for the extradition and prosecution of officials in neighboring countries with alleged cartel ties. For example, the U.S. government has been pressuring Mexico to prosecute and extradite politicians accused of such links, as reported by Reuters.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio reinforced that logic, “we’re at war against drug trafficking, not Venezuela,” even as he argued that non-cooperative governments should expect harsher treatment, while allies would be spared because “those governments are going to help us find these people and blow them up, if that’s what it takes.”.
It reflects a shift in how drug trafficking — one of the most consequential political and economic forces in the Western Hemisphere — is being framed and acted upon by the U.S. state.
But it is also more plausibly linked to a broader geopolitical contest in a destabilized global order, as Trump has signaled renewed intent to assert U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine
To understand that broader framework, it helps to recall the Monroe Doctrine, articulated in 1823 by President James Monroe. At the time, Monroe declared that the Americas should be free from European interference and that any attempt by external powers to control independent nations in the Western Hemisphere would be considered hostile to U.S. security interests.
Over the 19th and 20th centuries, that doctrine evolved to become a key justification for U.S. intervention in Latin America to counter communism, especially during the Cold War. Framing it as a dangerous “foreign” ideology threatening the hemisphere, it was invoked to justify interventions and influence across the region in pursuit of strategic interests.
“Anyone that makes drugs and sends them to our country is subject to attacks.” said Trump, who seems to be mixing two narratives: allies vs non allies countries (linking social democratic regimes with communism/socialism) and drugs-security narrative.
What binds these moments is the idea of external danger used to justify incursions or influence over sovereign nations.
In Monroe’s original formulation, the danger was European colonial powers; for Kennedy and Reagan, it was communism. Today’s narratives cast illicit trafficking, hybrid criminal networks, and left-leaning governments as overlapping threats that supposedly justify military displacement and interventions.
Also notably, in Trump’s second administration there’s been a change of substance since the intervention in Venezuela.
The intervention showed how drug-related policy can be deployed as a justification for broader aims. Whether framed as protecting American citizens from drugs, such narratives serve multiple functions beyond reducing supply. They mobilize military and intelligence assets beyond national borders, justify diplomatic pressure and legal tools such as extradition or terrorism designations, and reframe geopolitical competition as an existential security threat requiring sustained engagement.
Nevertheless, counternarcotics measures were always hybrid instruments of security policy with effects on sovereignty, alliances, and regional dynamics, where anti-drug language interacts with geopolitical logic.
Counternarcotics Policy in Never Neutral
Historically, drug enforcement has always been a hybrid instrument, shaping institutions, alliances, and state capacity both inside the U.S. and abroad. Scholars such as Lina Britto have shown how earlier phases of U.S. drug policy in Latin America emphasized institutional embedding rather than overt threats of force.
Power was exercised through bureaucratic, diplomatic and military channels.
In fact, military operations and the anti-drug narrative have a hard time being justified in the case of Venezuela. From an empirical standpoint, supply chains for cocaine do not meaningfully depend on Venezuela. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, cocaine production is concentrated in three countries, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, while trafficking routes into the United States overwhelmingly move through Central America and Mexico. The dominant vectors are land corridors across Mexico and maritime routes along the Pacific coast, managed by Mexican-US organizations that control wholesale distribution inside the U.S.
Venezuela does appear in drug-flow maps, but primarily as a secondary transit zone, not as a production hub and not as a decisive gateway to U.S. markets. This is precisely why Venezuela’s elevation to a central villain in the drug narrative is analytically revealing. It signals that the issue at stake is not drug control in a narrow sense, but geopolitical positioning.
One can only conclude that Venezuela’s importance derives not from its actual weight in the drug economy, but from its symbolic and strategic position as an oil-rich, openly hostile state in the U.S. hemisphere, aligned with China, Russia, and Iran.
Editor’s note: This article analyzes drug policy as a framework for foreign intervention. It does not endorse any government or political actor.
Cover image made with AI.
