Back in August of 2025, as reports emerged of President Trump's directive authorizing maritime military force against drug cartels operating in the Pacific, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a left-wing human rights advocacy group, published an analysis outlining "Five Reasons Why Trump's Anti-Cartel Military Plan Will Fail." In it, they predicted ensuing carnage from the White House’s plan to incorporate military might into anti-narcotics operations. “Violence would spill over…into Colombia, enmeshing the U.S. in a regional conflict,” the editorial claimed. Four months later, with U.S. forces having conducted at least 26 strikes on narco vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, it appears WOLA’s predictions are far from reality. There’s been no regional spillover; our relationships with Latin American nations remain functional, and both the supply and trafficking routes of narco operations have been disrupted.
Under the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear has carried out strikes on narco vessels since September 2025, with declassified footage of the most recent December 17 strike showing a precise impact on a fast-moving narco-trafficking boat in international waters. The Trump administration describes the persistent operations as pivotal to preventing cartels from shifting routes, and the campaign’s effectiveness is challenging decades of skepticism about the long-term solvency of maritime drug interdiction. The broader strategy targets putting pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, whom investigators say is heading a narco-terrorist regime that funds trafficking through oil revenues. The multi-faceted approach includes sanctioning Maduro's family members and oil shipping networks, seizing a major tanker laden with Venezuelan crude, and ordering a blockade of all sanctioned oil vessels entering or leaving the country.
Left-wing think tanks and Democrats invariably oppose any action against drug traffickers, insisting it's not because they're soft on crime but simply because interdiction is futile. This narrative has fostered a popular opinion that the "war on drugs" is inherently unsolvable, as reflected in national polls where over 80 percent of Americans, including a strong majority of Democrats, deem it a failure. But mounting evidence, like historic cocaine seizures exceeding 500,000 pounds and disruptions in Venezuelan oil production, demonstrates that targeted law enforcement works when executed decisively. Are these “experts” capable of acknowledging they misread the situation, considering the mission success against narco networks?
Evidently not, as Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown has emerged as a leading voice criticizing recent military interdiction tactics of the Trump Administration, offering somewhat of a strawman to NPR recently, saying, "Killing a drug mule has minimal effect on the flow of drugs, or the systems of criminal organizations." Her critiques often frame any American anti-narco law enforcement tactics as futile efforts likely to escalate violence without addressing root causes.
But are her assessments the type of sophisticated analysis we should expect from a Brookings Institution fellow with degrees from Harvard and MIT? The answer lies in a particularly revealing moment from that fall NPR interview, where she downplayed the significance of the Trump administration’s cocaine seizures:
"It is cocaine. So it is not the drug that is killing Americans, which is methamphetamine and, most importantly, fentanyl. There is certainly cocaine consumption in the United States, but that has not led to significant lethal drug overdose."
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Brown’s dismissal couldn’t be more detached from reality; even underclassmen in college who aspire to be social workers understand that fentanyl is mixed into cocaine (often without users’ knowledge) during the street-level distribution stages and not during the maritime drug trafficking phase. This is how the surge of fatal overdoses among people who believe they were only using cocaine has primarily happened. Intercepting hundreds of thousands of pounds of cocaine at the source directly disrupts the very supply chain that enables this deadly combo from ever reaching neighborhoods like yours. For a “scholar” who consistently champions "addressing root causes" over blunt interdiction, her inability to recognize that source-level seizures can be a proactive disruption of systemic impacts is telling. It shows that many think tanks, human rights groups, and politicians alike would rather allow drug trafficking to continue unchecked as opposed to taking any decisive action that prioritizes public health. And they are shamelessly willing to die on that hill.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration remains unapologetic, pushing back directly against the chorus of skepticism from these very think tank elites. Department of War Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson underscored the operations' success in a statement to RedState by noting, "Drugs coming in by sea from narco-terrorists are down.” She added that "The strikes against these narco-terrorists will continue until their attacks on the American people are over, despite what the self-described think tank 'experts' believe." The stance echoes sentiments of defiance from senior officials throughout the administration and highlights a fundamental divide in approach with Democrats.
While ivory-tower analysts cling to nihilistic and outdated narratives of the war on drugs being futile, on-the-ground results say otherwise. Experts believe there’s no such thing as a tangible victory in the fight against the poison flooding American communities, while the Trump administration thinks each tactical strike on a narco boat can save American lives. What would it take for self-proclaimed experts to admit they were wrong? Downward statistics on overdoses? A "Caribbean Spring” where Venezuela ousts Maduro and corruption along with him? It’s hard to imagine the ideological blinders can stay on if any of those fruits come to pass, but like everything, only time will tell.
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