The Trump administration’s continuing strikes on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean are a gross abuse of the president’s military powers, undermining America’s commitment to the rule of law and degrading relationships with key allies.
Now another critique can be added: The lawless attacks have not stopped the flow of narcotics into the United States.
Assessments from the Drug Enforcement Administration concluded that the strikes have not meaningfully affected the supply of cocaine, The Post reported this week.
In fact, one DEA official said that the price of cocaine in Florida has fallen in the last five years, indicating that there may be more of the drug circulating in the U.S.
Purity of the drug has remained consistent in U.S. illicit markets, suggesting that it is not being diluted.
These are bad facts for an administration that spent billions deploying military assets to the region and burning through munitions to stop the flow of drugs.
In total, the U.S. has attacked at least 67 boats and killed more than 200 people since September. It also captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, partly on the grounds that the socialist dictator had weaponized the drug trade against Americans.
Yet cocaine traffickers have easily adapted. Preliminary reports from the DEA in September found that the strikes had disrupted smuggler routes and increased cocaine prices, but that supply shock was temporary. Traffickers have since updated their supply routes, relying more on aircraft and larger boats that cling to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to strike.
The administration remains in denial. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that around 98 percent of maritime drug trafficking has been stopped.
But the whole campaign was predicated on a falsehood. Trump cast the operation as an attempt to combat fentanyl, the main contributor to U.S. drug overdoses, yet fentanyl primarily arrives over land from Mexico, not on smuggling vessels from South America.
This isn’t to suggest that disrupting the supply of drugs is hopeless. Strategies against Mexican fentanyl traffickers and Chinese chemical companies supplying precursor ingredients, first implemented in 2023, have contributed to a dramatic drop in overdose deaths. Those efforts treated the fentanyl trade as a criminal enterprise, not a military threat that can be resolved by blowing things up.
Anybody familiar with the U.S. government’s failed war on the Colombian cocaine cartels didn’t need this lesson. Yet the administration insists on repeating the blunders of the past, to no one’s benefit.
