These deadly US boat strikes are the latest example of a president corrupting both the law and morality
Fri 5 Dec 2025 18.12 GMT
The Trump administration looks ever more like a criminal enterprise – and now it seems to have added war crimes to its repertoire. Though even that may be too generous a description.
On Thursday, word came that the US military had launched yet another deadly strike on a small boat moving through international waters. This time the attack killed four people, bringing to at least 87 the number of people the US has killed in a series of 22 such strikes on what it says are drug boats – vessels carrying illicit narcotics in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific.
This has been happening for months, but the issue has only just drawn political heat thanks to a Washington Post investigation of the first such attack on 2 September. The paper reported that US forces hit the targeted boat once, then hit it again – the second strike killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage. According to the Post, the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had issued a verbal command to “kill them all”.
Now that incident is under congressional scrutiny, with even some Republicans uneasy about what appears to be a clearcut case of a war crime. The defence department’s own Law of War manual forbids precisely this kind of action, spelling it out in black and white on page 448: “Members of the armed forced and other persons … who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances.” Not that you should need a manual to tell you that. The law of the sea demands that you rescue those at risk of drowning; basic human decency demands that you don’t fire on them.
Trump loyalists have denied that Hegseth gave an explicit order that everyone on board be killed and have tried to argue that the two men in the water were legitimate targets because they had proved themselves to be still “in the fight”, perhaps by calling in help from fellow “narco terrorists” nearby. Democrats who have seen the same classified footage of the incident say that, on the contrary, the video shows the killing of men in distress, their vessel destroyed and posing no threat.
That would constitute a war crime, but for one thing: there is no war. The Trump administration says that the boats in its sights are ferrying drugs – fentanyl and the like, which kill Americans – from Venezuela to the US and that the traffickers are part of a “designated terrorist organisation”. In effect, it argues that the “war on drugs” is an actual war, in which the US military has the right to act as it would against any other armed enemy.
But the laws of war don’t work like that. As Sarah Yager of Human Rights Watch explained to the Guardian, a US president “can’t just make up a conflict”. Of course, Donald Trump would dismiss the demand that for a war to be legal it has first to be declared by a congressional vote, but harder to brush off is the fact that the supposed enemy in this case poses nothing that could reasonably be described as a military threat. These are small boats that may or not be carrying drugs, with no serious means of defending themselves. The right way to deal with the danger they represent is the way they were dealt with under previous administrations – as a policing operation involving interception and arrest.
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In other words, the problem here is not just the “double tap” incident that killed those two shipwreck survivors. It is the entire, months-long operation which has killed 87. In Yager’s words: “Nobody on those boats can be killed legally by the United States military.” Viewed like this, we are not contemplating a war crime on 2 September so much as a string of crimes: extrajudicial killings that, simply put, look like murder.
There could hardly be a graver charge, yet how has Hegseth himself responded? By posting a mocked-up cover of a children’s book, depicting the much-loved character Franklin the Turtle apparently aiming a rocket launcher at a group of boats, under the imagined title, Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists. As Logan Roy might put it, this is not a serious person.
There is no need to pretend that Hegseth’s actions amount to the sullying of a previously clean reputation; no one is under any illusions as to the long and appalling record of the US in Latin America. Even so, the Trump administration is somehow managing to plumb new depths – and not only in that part of the world.
Europeans have long been alarmed at Trump’s lopsided approach to the Ukraine war, evinced most recently by his unveiling of a supposed peace plan that the White House was compelled to deny had originated in Russia, so closely did it resemble a Kremlin wishlist. The sixth and latest visit to Moscow of Trump’s golfing buddy and personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, this week, and his chumminess with Vladimir Putin, did little to dispel that impression.
For a while, this closeness to Russia intrigued observers. Could the explanation really be that Putin held damaging kompromat on the US president? It seems the answer centres on a lust that is almost as basic: not sex, but money.
What’s driving Team Trump’s push to end the war is not the hope of restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence but rather the desire to cut a deal that would bring US businesses hundreds of billions of dollars. According to a major probe by the Wall Street Journal, what Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s handpicked envoy, have been negotiating in closed-door meetings in Miami and elsewhere is a grand bargain that would “bring Russia’s $2tn economy in from the cold”, while giving the US a slice of the action, whether access to $300bn or so of Russian central bank assets frozen in Europe or joint US-Russian ventures to exploit the enormous mineral wealth of the Arctic. Russia would end its isolation, Americans would get even richer and – an added bonus for Moscow – those pesky Europeans would be cut out. In the words of the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.”
And to be clear, that business motive is not solely about enlarging the coffers of the US Treasury to benefit the hard-pressed US taxpayer. Note how Jared Kushner, who joined Witkoff in Moscow this week, saw his investment fund, Affinity Partners, enjoy billion-dollar cash infusions from the very Gulf monarchies with whom he negotiated as a White House official during his father-in-law’s first term. In Trump world, the boundary between public and private does not exist: what profits the US profits Trump and his circle.
A favourite example, if only for its vivid clarity, was the meeting this summer on board a superyacht moored off the coast of Sardinia. Present was Witkoff and a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates in charge of $1.5tn of the UAE’s sovereign wealth. The two men had much to celebrate. In May, it had been announced that one of the sheikh’s investment firms would deposit $2bn into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency outfit founded by the Witkoff and Trump families. Two weeks later, the White House granted the UAE access to specialist AI computer chips that had previously been off-limits, thanks to national security fears that the chips might find their way to China. What a happy coincidence it was that those two unrelated events followed each other so swiftly, and how convivial that encounter in Sardinia must have been.
The word corruption can be used in two ways. In its legal sense, it can refer to dishonest conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery. But it can also have a deeper meaning, referring to the corrosion of standards, the decline of norms and the removal of moral restraints. If and when Donald Trump and those who serve him, and themselves, are eventually called to account, they will be confronted by that single word, in all its shades – and all its force.
- Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist