When the President of the United States starts executing people on the high seas, the world ought to take note. Almost no one has. Forty-three people dead. Ten boats bombed in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. “Airstrikes” ordered personally by Donald Trump, carried out under Pete Hegseth’s direction.
Trump’s riding rough-shod over all the rules. No declaration of war. No debate in Congress. No verifiable evidence the victims were who Trump claimed they were. Just a string of killings; blown-up vessels, most hit without warning, and a White House press statement calling them ‘cartel operatives.’
Killings are not Murder?
Trump reckons the killings are not murder because he has ‘determined’ the attacks are part of a war between the United States and Latin American drug cartels. This faulty reasoning transforms suspicion into proof and proof into death. It bypasses every safeguard written into US and international law. Once the President slaps on the label ‘enemy combatant,’ there is no trial, no appeal, no need for evidence.
Before Trump, suspected smugglers intercepted at sea were detained by the US Coast Guard, sometimes with naval help, and brought before federal courts. Those found guilty served time.
Today, the same offences carry the penalty of summary execution. It’s swift, lethal and illegal. And the shift is radical, even by post-9/11 standards. Barack Obama’s drone strikes, for all their moral dodginess, operated under legal frameworks. They targeted individuals within declared combat zones, typically under the 2001 AUMF. (Authorisation for the Use of Military Force.) Trump’s maritime executions have no such authorisation. They rely solely on presidential say-so. An improvised war without borders or oversight.
The Legal Black Hole
This operation tears many holes in the fabric of constitutional and international law. Under Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, only Congress can declare war. Trump has not sought consent, nor has he invoked the War Powers Resolution of 1973, originally intended to curb Richard Nixon
The Fifth Amendment forbids depriving anyone of life without due process. The Geneva Conventions, seek to limit the barbarity of war and Additional Protocols prohibit targeting civilians or combatants out of action, even suspected criminal actors, outside the boundaries of an armed conflict.
No credible legal authority recognises drug trafficking as an ‘armed attack’ justifying lethal state self-defence under Article 51 of the UN. Charter. Yet,”airstrikes” are ordered personally by Donald Trump and carried out under Pete Hegseth’s direction.
Nor does the international community accept that drug cartels constitute ‘belligerent powers.’ Trump’s reinterpretation of these statutes would, if sustained, demolish eighty years of legal precedent.
If a head of state can unilaterally decide that criminals are enemy soldiers and kill them without trial, international humanitarian law ceases to restrain anyone.
That is not hyperbole. It is precedent. Once the machinery of summary execution is normalised abroad, history shows, it migrates inward. The justifications used at sea or across borders soon apply at home.
And the strikes themselves do not add up. Most fentanyl enters the United States by land through Mexico, not by sea from Venezuela. The Caribbean route accounts for almost none of the drug traffic Trump claims to be stopping, according to experts. So, what is this really about?
One boat was turning back to shore when it was hit. Families in Trinidad and Tobago and Colombia identify some victims as fishermen, not traffickers. Two survivors from an earlier strike were returned to Ecuador and Colombia. Ecuador released its man immediately, saying it had no evidence of any crime.
The Authoritarian Bridge
Increasingly, Trump blurs the line between abroad and at home with deliberate care. Now he talks of the ‘enemy within,’ a phrase once used by Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon to frame dissent as treachery.
Trump has deployed troops to Chicago and other cities over the objections of state governors, claiming a mandate to ‘protect ICE facilities’ from protest.
The Justice Department, purged of dissenters, now prosecutes Trump’s political foes. Former FBI director James Comey has been indicted for allegedly lying to Congress. New York Attorney-General Letitia James, who pursued civil fraud cases against Trump’s businesses, faces federal bank fraud charges.
Both indictments came after Trump publicly demanded Attorney-General Pam Bondi prosecute them. California Senator Adam Schiff is under investigation.
The lesson is clear. A President who can bomb suspects abroad without evidence can gaol or eliminate opponents at home simply by redefining who counts as an ‘enemy.’
This is how constitutional democracy is destroyed. Not through one coup but through the steady, calculated, bureaucratic legitimisation of violence.
The Global Fallout
If America’s allies are unsettled, they mainly keep it to themselves. Latin American states, dependent on US. trade and security aid, have issued muted complaints about ‘violations of sovereignty.’ Colombian President Gustavo Petro has called the strikes murder. The United Nations human rights experts have warned the strikes violate international law. Even those modest protests have been met with US threats.
China and Russia, meanwhile, have seized the moment. Beijing positions itself as defender of ‘international order,’ a geopolitical irony too rich to miss. Moscow’s state media call it proof that Washington is the world’s true rogue power.
The result is a dangerous inversion. A global narrative in which authoritarian states appear to defend legality while democracies quietly excuse its destruction. The moral authority of the post-war order, the one that outlawed extrajudicial violence, is being dismantled by the very nation that created it.
Australia’s Dilemma in the Pacific
For Australia, the consequences are neither abstract nor distant. Under AUKUS, Canberra has effectively pledged to serve as Washington’s gopher: regional deputy sheriff, compliant squire or water boy. Joint naval operations, intelligence sharing, the rhetoric of ‘strategic alignment’ bind Australian defence policy ever more tightly to US Doctrine. A doctrine of shoot first, ask questions afterward. Might is right.
What happens as that doctrine slides into illegality? If US aircraft or vessels operating within Pacific exercises are part of torching fishermen and their flimsy boats with anti-tank missiles, Australia’s complicity may move from moral to legal. Even silence carries weight. Canberra cannot champion a ‘rules-based order’ in the South China Sea while ignoring its demolition in the Caribbean.
So far, neither Prime Minister Anthony Albanese nor Foreign Minister Penny Wong has commented publicly on the strikes. Their silence speaks volumes.
Wong has condemned arbitrary detentions in Myanmar and civilian bombings in Gaza but remains mute on America’s maritime executions. Clayton’s Opposition leader Susan Ley, eager to appear unflinchingly pro-American, will likely praise Trump’s ‘decisive action.’ But bipartisan loyalty is not patriotism when it subordinates Australian law and values to Washington’s expediencies.
Analysts within Defence and DFAT warn that aligning uncritically with the US. on security, while diverging morally on law, risks alienating Pacific partners. Countries like Fiji, PNG and Samoa, historically wary of imperial posturing, may see Australia as complicit in US vigilantism and at best a compromised ally.
The Meaning of Silence and Kinetic Interdiction
Every age has its Orwellian euphemisms for power without conscience. Once it was ‘pacification.’ Then ‘counter-insurgency.’ Now it is ‘kinetic interdiction.‘ The effect is the same. People die without trial, and their killers call it policy. Or even “mowing the lawn” in Tel Aviv. All life is cheapened; humanity denied.
Trump’s dirty war at sea is not an aberration. It is the logical conclusion of decades spent normalising remote, impersonal killing as a tool of governance. What began as drones in Waziristan has become missiles over the Caribbean. Yet the difference is alarming. Obama’s drones operated in secrecy. Trump’s sudden deaths are out in the open, flaunted as theatre. Joked about. The aim is shock and obedience.
Australia’s silence in that context is not neutrality. It is consent. It marks a transition from ally to accessory. When we look away, telling ourselves ‘America knows what it’s doing,’ we echo the same moral evasions heard during every imperial misadventure of the past century. And when the rule of law collapses on the high seas, it will not stay there. Law, once broken, washes back with the tide.
If the moral architecture of the post-war world is still salvageable, this is the moment to prove it. Not by breaking alliances, but by reminding allies that law binds everyone, even superpowers. Australia has leverage it rarely uses: diplomatic candour. To remain silent now is to endorse a doctrine where the world’s mightiest military conducts summary executions under a flag that once stood for freedom.
That may serve Trump’s interests. It will not serve ours.
Urban Wronski Writes 
So true David, and so very well explained.
Now is the time for the world’s population to realise what those evil swine who actually manipulate America behind the scenes are really like.
Toxic.
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The ongoing criminality of the White House cabal in its ‘operations’ in the Caribbean draws no opinion from either major party group in this country, meaning our ever-closer ties make us implicitly ok with it. Not even tepid criticism will escape the lips of Albo and Wong, while Marles is embarrassing in his obsequiousness. Our alleged opposition parties, of course, are as one with the government in this, only more so, so it seems the course is set. All the way with the T-man. This will rebound on us.
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