From Terror Sanctions to Military Strikes? Trump's Cartel Policy Sidesteps Congress

Sometimes the slide down a slippery slope is very fast. Soon after taking office, President Donald Trump designated several Mexican, Salvadoran, and Venezuelan gangs as terrorist groups. Many observers, including myself, thought that the listing could be a pretext to start an unauthorized war in Latin America. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Trump was doing exactly that.

The president “has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations,” according to the Times. It’s not clear exactly which cartels will be targeted or what kind of U.S. military force will be brought in; the Times reports that the military is drawing up plans for “direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.”

As usual, Congress and the American people aren’t being given a chance to deliberate on the war they’re being committed to, and the media has to play guessing games about what that war will look like.

It’s possible that these attacks on cartels would be carried out in cooperation with friendly governments, along the lines of the joint U.S.-Columbian hunt for cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar in 1993. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is quite eager to be in Trump’s good graces. Although Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has denounced foreign “interference” in Mexico’s war on drugs, she has also brushed off reports of U.S. drone overflights as just a “little campaign.”

But Trump could also be opening the door to hostile acts of war. In 1989, the U.S. used Panamanian President Manuel Noriega’s ties to the drug trade as a pretext for a regime change war in Panama. The Trump administration certainly seems like it could be ginning up similar justifications for action against Venezuela.

Despite intelligence to the contrary, the Trump administration has claimed that the Venezuelan government is controlling the Tren de Aragua gang as part of a hostile invasion force. Two weeks ago, it added the Cartel de los Soles gang to the terrorist list, accusing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of running it. And on Thursday, the Justice Department announced a $50 million bounty for information leading to Maduro’s capture.

The terrorism designation “gives us legal authorities to target them in ways you can’t do if they’re just a bunch of criminals. It’s no longer a law enforcement issue. It becomes a national security issue,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told EWTN, a Catholic news channel, on Thursday. “It allows us to now target what they’re operating and to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it. We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug-dealing organizations.”

The Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) lists were not originally meant to be a war authorization. Instead, they’re an economic sanction. In 1996, Congress made it illegal for Americans to give “material support” to an FTO, as defined by the State Department. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration tasked the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control with seizing the property of SDGTs.

But hawks have been trying to turn these designations into war authorizations for years. Perennial war enthusiast Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) tried (and failed) in 2020 to pass a blanket declaration of war against any group on the FTO list. At the time, Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) pointed out the circular logic behind authorizing the president to attack any enemy defined by the president.

“The FTO list has never been a war authorization,” Kaine said. “It’s created by the administration. It adds the names to it.”

Whatever the label means legally, calling someone a terrorist is still a powerful political tool. Instead of asking Congress for proactive permission to go to war, the past few presidents have simply started wars and dared Congress to stop them. Since nobody wants to be seen as “soft on terrorism,” Congress has been reluctant to push back on wars in progress.

Again, it’s hard to know exactly how Trump’s secret directive will play out on the ground. However, it’s not hard to guess how it will play out inside Washington. The administration will continue to tease out just enough information to show that it’s taking tough action, but not enough information to debate whether that action is a good idea—until it’s too late to stop.

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