WASHINGTON – Stopping drug trafficking has been a key priority for President Donald Trump.
But his policies – redirecting the focus from routine counter-narcotics operations to shows of military force – have made that goal harder to achieve, according to veterans of the U.S. war on drugs and other experts on drug smuggling.
If anything, the experts say, strikes that put barely a dent in the flow of narcotics have been a gift to the cartels by impeding international cooperation to combat drug trafficking. And as they always do in the perennial game of whack-a-mole, cartels adapted to disruptions in the supply chain.
Since September, the U.S. military has conducted 66 strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean against vessels officials say were transporting narcotics, killing 215 people.
But drug trafficking networks are far more complex than a few dozen boats.
Cocaine prices have stayed roughly the same since the first strike, at $60 to $100 per gram, according to addiction scientists. Fentanyl prices are also stable. Nor do police and federal authorities report shortages on the street.
All of which indicates that supply and demand remain in equilibrium.
It’s impossible to know the quantity of drugs smuggled into the U.S., though both proponents and critics of the boat strikes cite Customs and Border Protection drug seizures as a good proxy.
That data shows fentanyl interdiction on track to drop 6.3% in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, and cocaine interdiction on pace to drop by 5.4%.
Those dips are big enough for Trump and his allies to claim success, and far too modest for critics to give him credit for solving the chronic problem.
“These sporadic, high-profile, theatrical strikes are not really going to address that broader issue,” said Lee Schlenker, a research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, adding there’s no direct evidence the boat strikes reduced the flow of narcotics into the U.S.
Nor has the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January – as evidenced in part by the fact the boat strikes continue even as Maduro awaits trial in New York.
Striking drug boats
The first such strike was on Sept. 2, 2025, when the U.S. Southern Command sank a boat in international waters off Venezuela, killing 11 people. Trump asserted that the boat was transporting narcotics to the U.S., and that those killed were members of a group he described as “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”
“TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere,” he said on Truth Social.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized a follow-on strike against the disabled vessel, killing two survivors clinging to the boat. Reports of the “double-tap” strike provoked an uproar and allegations of unlawful military action.
Hegseth ousted the four-star head of SOUTHCOM, Adm. Alvin Holsey, after he raised concerns about the strikes’ legality.
Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan transnational criminal organization that the Trump administration designated as a terrorist group in February 2025. Elements do traffic narcotics. But it is not a drug cartel in the usual sense, and no large cocaine shipments have been linked to it.
Within a week of the double-tap strike, Trump announced that the military had conducted another strike on an alleged drug boat in international waters off Venezuela, killing three people. The most recent known strike was June 21 in the Eastern Pacific, killing two and leaving six survivors at large in the ocean.
Derek Maltz, a 28-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration who served as acting DEA administrator in the first four months of Trump’s second term, said the strikes show the world that the U.S. treats drug traffickers like other terror groups.
“This is a big deterrent,” he said.
Still, he said, “These bad guys are very knowledgeable on how they strategically move their products around the world.”
No evidence
The Defense Department has not provided evidence of drugs aboard any of the boats.
And there’s no indication that any drugs on most boats sunk so far are destined for the U.S. Instead, they’re most likely headed to Europe, Schlenker said.
Drugs are smuggled throughout the Western Hemisphere by plane, rail, container ship and truck, in addition to the go-fast boats and semisubmersible vessels hit in the strikes.
Drug cartels have increased their reliance on air transport and shipping containers since the strikes began, according to a March report on Operation Southern Spear from the Department of Defense Inspector General.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing that month, acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Humire testified that drug boat traffic has dropped 20% in the Caribbean and 25% in the Eastern Pacific since the first strike.
Traditional interdiction efforts in the Caribbean involve the U.S. Coast Guard seizing narcotics and arresting traffickers.
Airstrikes that kill the smugglers don’t leave that sort of intelligence behind, Schlenker pointed out.
SOUTHCOM has not publicly released metrics of Operation Southern Spear’s effectiveness.
Marine Gen. Francis Donovan, who took over SOUTHCOM in February, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March that the strikes have led traffickers to change their patterns.
He acknowledged that “the boat strikes aren’t the answer,” though, and said the military is moving toward a counter-cartel campaign targeting the full drug transit network.
At a June 2 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to explain the criteria for ordering a strike against a particular boat. Rubio said intelligence must show “true links” to criminal activity.
But he conceded that evidence that drugs are aboard is not one of the three criteria, all of which remain classified.
“How odd it is that the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria,” Kaine said.
Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said that destroying boats or seizing drugs make for good optics but are just a cost of doing business for traffickers.
The boat strikes can certainly inconvenience cartels, he said – while also failing to deliver a significant blow to the trafficking network.
“There are many other ways of moving the drugs from point A to point B,” he said.
Much of a drug’s street price stems from the risks and costs of transportation. Early in the journey, the product is relatively cheap and the cartels can absorb losses fairly easily.
“Often the more valuable contribution is destroying the throughput capacity of the network,” Caulkins said.
Unless authorities can make the business unprofitable, the revenue continues to fuel the drug trade, he said, so the key metric is whether a network remains intact after a seizure by authorities. If so, he said, “the network will continue to supply drugs.”
Seizures also can’t eliminate drugs from the market if cartels can scale up production. South American cocaine production grew fourfold from 2014 to 2024, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Capturing Maduro
Maduro’s capture is another element of Trump’s drug strategy that experts view as more theatrical than effective.
Enrique Desmond Arias, a professor of Western Hemisphere affairs at Baruch College, said the institutional corruption that allowed drug trafficking to thrive in Venezuela persists.
“Nothing in what’s happened in Venezuela suggests to me a more profound change,” Arias said.
Annette Idler, a professor of global security at the University of Oxford, wrote in January that Maduro’s capture could even cause disorder that would benefit organized crime.
“Decades of evidence show that militarized drug policies do not reduce supply or demand – they fragment violence and expand illicit networks,” she wrote.
The wrong drug
Another knock on Operation Southern Spear is that it almost exclusively addresses the flow of cocaine while ignoring fentanyl.
That’s “the primary cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.,” the Government Accountability Office reported on the same day as the first boat strike.
Synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, accounted for 69% of overdose deaths in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cocaine was responsible for 28%.
Nearly all illicit fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico.
Despite that, Trump claimed in an address to military leadership in Quantico, Virginia, in late September that the boats were “stacked up with bags of white powder, that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.”
Following Maduro’s capture, the White House characterized him as “the kingpin flooding America with deadly fentanyl.”
There is no evidence of that, and the claim has been debunked.
Coast Guard announcements of drug seizures in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific routinely describe discoveries of cocaine and marijuana. The press releases make no mention of fentanyl.
A check of Coast Guard press releases dating to 2022 find no mention of fentanyl interdiction in the region.
Most fentanyl that reaches American streets is manufactured in Mexico with chemicals from China, according to the 2025 International Narcotics Control Strategy report.
“The supply chains providing fentanyl to American consumers do not pass through South America,” Caulkins said.
In general, Venezuela is not a major producer of illicit drugs. According to a 2024 DEA report, Colombia produced 84% of cocaine seized by the U.S., but the UNODC categorized Venezuela as a major transit country hotspot in its 2025 World Drug Report.
International cooperation
The boat strikes are also problematic because they have alienated key allies and partners in the war on drugs.
“Whatever potential short-term benefits from a strike would be more than offset if that strike were to damage the willingness of the other country to cooperate with us in the long run,” Caulkins said.
In November, reports emerged that the United Kingdom stopped sharing intelligence about suspected drug boats with the U.S.
Canada placed limits on how the U.S. can use its intelligence, and the Netherlands restricted information sharing over feared human rights violations.
The strikes also created tensions between Trump and outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
In October, Petro accused the U.S. of killing Colombian nationals in one of the strikes. When Trump threatened to raise tariffs and cut aid, Petro recalled Colombia’s ambassador.
Petro ordered Colombia’s intelligence agencies to halt cooperation with U.S. counterparts until the strikes end. He later clarified intelligence would still be shared if it is used only for non-fatal drug seizures.
A new Colombian president backed by Trump, Abelardo De La Espriella, takes office in August.
Maltz said that during his time at DEA, extensive intelligence sharing and cooperation with the U.K., Canada and Colombia was integral to U.S. counter-narcotics operations. He blamed the breakdown of coordination on shifting domestic politics in those countries, rather than on U.S. military action under Trump.
Schlenker said antagonizing international partners is counterproductive.
“These are comprehensive, complex public policy interventions that we’ve been studying for decades,” he said. “But those effective policies run up against and are contested by the spectacle and theatrics of drug war politics.”
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