The War on Drugs is not a War (Part I): Foreign Military Interventions Against Drug Cartels

[Dr Chiara Redaelli is a research fellow at the University of Geneva, IHL and ICL expert with the International Development Law Organization Ukraine Office and co-editor in chief of the on the Use of Force and International Law]

From Drug Boats to Battlefields? The United States’ Case for Using Force against Cartels

Since early September 2025, the United States has carried out a series of lethal strikes against suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, publicly framed as a campaign against so-called “narco-terrorists.” The operations, announced by the Trump administration and amplified by senior defense officials, have reportedly killed several dozen people across at least ten boat strikes near Venezuela and additional strikes in the Pacific (see e.g. here and here). The administration has also deployed military assets to the region (destroyers, an aircraft carrier group, F-35 deployments) and signaled that ground operations could follow. 

Legally, the administration has advanced a dual-track justification. First, at the jus ad bellum level, it has suggested that the United States may use force in self-defense against drug cartels operating from or near another State’s territory, principally Venezuela, paired with rhetoric that the cartels pose an ongoing armed-attack threat to the United States. Second, at the international humanitarian law (IHL) level, it has invoked the language of armed-conflict vis-à-vis cartels, including statements before Congress and the UN Security Council that U.S. forces are engaged in “armed conflict” against them. If accepted, this framing would trigger the application of rules permitting status- and conduct-based targeting rather than law-enforcement regulations. Leading commentators have questioned both prongs: self-defense against cartels as such remains highly contested, and the factual predicates for an non-international armed conflict (NIAC) designation are thin (see e.g. here, here, and here) .  

These positions fit within a broader policy shift that increasingly merges the drug and terrorism paradigms. On Inauguration Day, President Trump issued Executive Order 14157 directing the designation of cartels and other organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs); the State Department soon designated multiple Latin American groups (including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua) under terrorism authorities. The administration now speaks of “narco-terrorists” and has used military force exclusively to punish trafficking conduct at sea, an historic first for U.S. presidential policy, while hinting that “unwilling or unable” reasoning could justify action within or across foreign territory.  

Independent reporting and assessments, however, challenge this narrative. Reuters and Al Jazeera documented the tempo of strikes and underscored the absence of public evidence linking specific vessels to concrete threats. Experts also note that Venezuela is a comparatively minor vector for U.S. drugs flows, compared for instance to Mexico,, undermining claims of imminence. This opacity has fueled concern among former military lawyers and scholars that legal oversight mechanisms are eroding and that IHL is being applied to criminality rather than armed conflicts (here, here, and here).  

Finally, the administration’s current stance runs counter to long-standing cautionary trends in the literature: expanding the battlefield to encompass “drug activity” risks collapsing the civilian–fighter distinction and producing the very civilian-harm patterns seen in militarized drug wars. 

This two-part post takes a broader view of the “war on drugs.” Part I examines how States have justified and conducted foreign military or law-enforcement interventions against drug cartels, through three distinct legal models: the United States’ claim of extraterritorial self-defense, China’s consent-based cross-border enforcement on the Mekong, and Afghanistan’s joint operations grounded in host-State consent. 

Counternarcotics Playbooks Tested: Military Interventions against Narcos

United States: Extraterritorial Self-defence 

The current U.S. approach appears episodic, externally oriented, and largely unilateral, consisting of a series of air-to-surface strikes against small maritime craft in the Caribbean and, more recently, the eastern Pacific. These operations are publicly justified as defence actions against “narco-terrorist” vessels allegedly linked to Venezuelan or Colombian networks. Since early September 2025, several such strikes have resulted in fatalities, with at least two survivors temporarily detained aboard a U.S. naval vessel before being repatriated. The expansion of the US naval presence in the region, through additional destroyers and surveillance assets, further underscores a deliberate militarization of counternarcotics enforcement. 

Yet, public record offers more assertions than evidence as claims of cartel links and imminent threats remain without verifiable substantiation. Unanswered questions persist regarding the target identification, the factual basis for imminence assessments, and the existence or absence of host-State consent. Unsurprisingly, legal commentators have subjected both the jus ad bellum and jus in bello dimensions of these operations to close scrutiny, emphasizing the risks of opacity and selective invocation of IHL (see here, here, and here).

Several authors highlight the absence of any clear attribution of an armed attack to a State, the tenuous and undisclosed factual foundations linking specific vessels to imminent threats, and the conceptual dangers of extending NIAC frameworks to transnational criminality. Even assuming the existence of a NIAC, international humanitarian law would require strict standards of membership determination and individualized targeting assessments, precluding role-based or activity-based designations such as “drug trafficker equals target”. These analyses largely rebut more permissive policy arguments that have sought to justify militarized responses through expansive interpretations of self-defense doctrines.

China and the Mekong Region: Consent-Based Cross-Border Use of Force

China’s operations along the Mekong River illustrate a distinct, consent-based model of cross-border law enforcement, standing in sharp contrast to the unilateral uses of force increasingly justified elsewhere under “unable or unwilling” doctrines. The turning point came on 5 October 2011, when two Chinese cargo vessels were ambushed in the Golden Triangle—a region spanning Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand and one of the most notorious regions for drug trafficking worldwide. All thirteen Chinese crew members were killed. The episode, soon dubbed the Mekong massacre, triggered unprecedented domestic outrage and catalyzed a new framework for regional security cooperation.

In the immediate aftermath, China convened high-level consultations with Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand, leading to an agreement to conduct joint law enforcement patrols along the river. By December 2011, China’s armed police had begun coordinated riverine operations with their regional counterparts, while the four States jointly investigated the killings. The capture of Naw Kham, the alleged ringleader, in Laos in early 2012, followed by his extradition, public trial, and execution in China in 2013, symbolized both the reach and legitimacy of this new cooperative framework.

Since then, the Mekong patrols have evolved into an institutionalized arrangement. The four participating States—China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand—have conducted dozens of joint patrols annually, supported by shared command centers, intelligence exchanges, and operational coordination mechanisms. Analysts generally credit these patrols with reducing river criminality and improving navigational safety, though they have had little effect on the broader narcotics trade in the Golden Triangle, which remains one of the world’s main drug-producing regions.

From a legal standpoint, the Mekong framework operates on explicit host-State consent, a recognized exception to the U.N. Charter’s Article 2(4) prohibition on the use of force. Where the territorial State authorizes foreign officers to conduct enforcement functions, the resulting operations do not constitute unlawful intervention or breach of sovereignty. In practice, consent also imposes real operational limits: Chinese vessels, for instance, have avoided patrolling within Thai waters without specific authorization, demonstrating the self-restraining effects of consent-based cooperation.

The Mekong precedent is thus significant for two reasons. First, it exemplifies how States can address transnational criminal threats through multilateral, law-enforcement-centered mechanisms rather than unilateral military action. Second, it shows that such cooperation, anchored in consent and reciprocity, can enhance security without eroding the foundational distinction between law enforcement and warfare. In a regional landscape marked by fragile sovereignty and porous borders, Mekong patrols remain a rare example of cross-border counter-narcotics operations normalized under a lawful and cooperative framework, rather than justified through coercive interpretations of self-defense.

More broadly, this consent-based model underscores that effective counternarcotics enforcement need not undermine the collective security system established by the U.N. Charter. By anchoring cooperation in consent, China and its partners have maintained operational effectiveness while preserving the rule-based limits on the use of force that unilateral doctrines tend to erode.

Afghanistan: A Consent-Based Precedent for Joint Counter-Narcotics Operations

Afghanistan offers an important jus ad bellum precedent for the use of force against drug cartels and narcotics infrastructures, not because it inaugurated a new armed conflict, but because it demonstrates how counter-narcotics operations can be lawfully conducted through host-State consent. Unlike more recent cases in which Washington has hinted at unilateral strikes against “narco-terrorist” networks abroad, U.S. actions in Afghanistan were carried out with the explicit authorization of the Afghan government, firmly grounding their legality in the consent exception to Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter.

Following years of evidence that the opium economy provided substantial financing to the Taliban insurgency, the United States and Afghanistan jointly launched a series of operations targeting drug-processing sites in 2019, particularly in Farah and Nimroz provinces. These were not unilateral enforcement actions across borders, but cooperative measures undertaken within the territory of a consenting State. Kabul authorized U.S. forces to assist Afghan counterparts in striking sites believed to generate significant revenue for insurgent activities, effectively integrating counternarcotics operations into the broader counterinsurgency framework.

From a jus ad bellum perspective, this arrangement was straightforward: valid host-State consent removes the element of coercion that would otherwise render a foreign intervention unlawful. The decisive factor lies in the voluntariness, clarity, and continuity of the territorial State’s authorization. So long as consent is genuine, informed, and not withdrawn, the foreign State’s use of force remains consistent with international law.

This model stands in sharp contrast to recent rhetoric suggesting that the United States might invoke self-defense to justify cross-border operations against drug cartels based in other States, such as Venezuela or Mexico. In Afghanistan, by contrast, the legal foundation rested on bilateral cooperation within an acknowledged armed conflict, supported by formal agreements and operational coordination mechanisms.

Moreover, the Afghanistan experience underscores an additional point: even within a recognized NIAC, the targeting of drug infrastructure or personnel must still meet the strict IHL requirements of military necessity and direct participation in hostilities. Revenue generation, in itself, is too indirect to qualify as direct participation, and objects may be targeted only if they make an effective contribution to military action.

Thus, the Afghanistan precedent illustrates a key distinction in jus ad bellum and operational practice: when conducted with host-State consent, counter-narcotics operations remain within the bounds of international law; when carried out unilaterally, they risk contravening the Charter’s central prohibition on the use of force.

At the same time, Afghanistan highlights the limits of the consent model. Subsequent United Nations and NGO reports, including those by UNAMA (2019–2020), documented significant civilian casualties during airstrikes on alleged drug labs, raising questions about the adequacy of proportionality assessments and post-strike accountability. Consent may justify presence, but it does not diminish the obligation to comply with IHL in targeting decisions.

Conclusions

The three cases examined—those of the United States, China, and Afghanistan—illustrate how counter-narcotics enforcement has become a testing ground for the limits of the jus ad bellum. Each reflects a different reading of the UN Charter’s central rule: that force may be used only in collective or individual self-defense, or with the consent of the territorial State.

The U.S. approach, justified as self-defense against non-State actors, pushes the Charter framework toward dangerous elasticity. By treating drug cartels as armed attackers capable of triggering Article 51, Washington risks normalizing the use of force for law-enforcement purposes and weakening the collective security system itself. What begins as an exceptional measure against “narco-terrorists” could, if accepted, legitimize a broader erosion of the prohibition on the use of force—transforming criminal justice problems into open-ended security campaigns.

In contrast, China’s operations along the Mekong River show that effective cross-border enforcement can be conducted within lawful parameters when anchored in consent. The post-2011 framework with Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand demonstrates that regional cooperation—rather than unilateral coercion—can enhance security while respecting sovereignty. Consent transforms intervention into cooperation, maintaining the balance between enforcement and non-intervention that underpins the collective security system.

Similarly, Afghanistan’s consent-based framework demonstrates that shared action against narcotics networks can remain lawful so long as authorization is explicit and ongoing. Consent does not simply permit intervention—it preserves the legal and political balance on which the international order rests.

Together, these cases reveal a clear fault line in contemporary practice: unilateralism erodes legality, while cooperation sustains it. Preserving the Charter’s boundaries is not a matter of formalism but of restraint—an acknowledgment that the legitimacy of global counter-narcotics efforts depends on keeping the use of force exceptional, transparent, and collectively regulated.

Part II will turn to domestic contexts where violence linked to organized crime has tested the boundaries between armed conflict and criminality—focusing on Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico—and will reflect on how these cases reveal the erosion of the line between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL), and on the need to re-center the law’s restraining function in counter-narcotics governance.