 "With 2nd strike on boat in Pacific, Trump expands campaign in international waters")
With a second strike on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, US President Donald Trump has expanded the military campaign in the international waters. He also suggested that he could launch military strikes in other countries.
At Trump’s orders, the US military on Wednesday struck a second boat in two days in the eastern Pacific Ocean and killed three people on board. So far, the US military has killed 37 individuals in international waters across nine strikes after declaring them “narcoterrorists”.
The US military has not identified any of those killed nor has it provided evidence that the boats were carrying drugs.
In a post on X, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US military had “carried out yet another lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organisation (DTO)” at Trump’s direction — though he did not name the purported terrorist group. As with previous strikes, he claimed the boat was “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling”, operating on “a known narco-trafficking route and carrying narcotics”.
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Earlier on Tuesday, the US military had similarly struck another boat in the Pacific and killed two people.
The previous seven US strikes —which began on September 2— were all conducted in the Caribbean Sea.
Trump suggests strikes on foreign soil may follow
Following the second Pacific strike, Trump on Wednesday said that he could soon order strikes against land targets abroad, according to The New York Times.
Trump claimed that the US military’s strikes on boats had pushed drug smuggling onto land routes and said he would “probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we are doing” before launching strikes on foreign soil. However, he emphasised that he did not require congressional permission for such actions.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsTrump said, “We will hit them very hard when they come in by land. They haven’t experienced that yet, but now we are totally prepared to do that.”
Trump did not name any countries he might target under such an expanded campaign. However, his actions —such as the deployment of several thousand troops, many warships, at least one submarine, and fighter planes and bombers in the Caribbean Sea around Venezuela— have raised concerns that the campaign against these boats may be a pretext for armed intervention aimed at ousting Venezuela’s longtime ruler, Nicolas Maduro.
While Trump has claimed he has the authority to order summary killings in international waters by treating purported drug traffickers as enemy combatants, legal scholars and former officials have argued that such an approach violates both US policy and international law. Under longstanding US policy, suspected drug traffickers in international waters are intercepted by law enforcement agencies such as the Coast Guard and brought to US soil for prosecution — not killed without identification or evidence.
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