“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
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The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
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Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
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The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
Putin doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons. If he did, he risks the destruction of his country. Putin, like the Soviet Union in history, uses nuclear weapons as bluster to threaten countries whose leaders and people believe the likelihood of Russia using nukes is higher than it is. Trump is scared. He’s happy to use or threaten military force against countries without nukes, but Russia invades its neighbor in a war of conquest while committing many atrocities, and Trump is obsessed with peace, even, at times, weakening support to Ukraine to appease Putin. Letting Russia gain things with nuclear threats increases the incentive for other countries to get nukes, and one of those countries may be more willing to actually use them.
On the international stage, the United States is acting like brash huns, its president receiving gifts of gold as countries complement him and shower him in gifts in hopes of corruption as they beseech Trump to lift tariffs. In the short term, the U.S. has higher taxes on goods they import and difficulty selling abroad where foreign countries tariff back and where tariffs on imports into the U.S. make U.S. goods more expensive. In the long term, the U.S. reputation is tarnished and countries may never trust the country again as the country already elected Trump twice, and may always elect another one in the future. A world where the United States can’t be trusted is a worse world for the United States and Americans.
“Attacks include: accusations that a notorious Russian military intelligence hacking group targeted defense, transport and tech firms involved in helping Ukraine; arson attacks on depots containing equipment destined for Ukraine in Poland; Russian ally Belarus weaponizing migrants to destabilize Poland; drones of unknown origin buzzing airports across the continent; and Moscow being accused of undermining the presidential election in Romania.
Poland called a Sunday rail line explosion “sabotage” and on Tuesday blamed two Ukrainians working for Russia.
Globsec, a Prague-based think tank, calculated there were more than 110 acts of sabotage and attempted attacks carried out in Europe between January and July, mainly in Poland and France, by people with links to Russia.”
We can’t assume other people in history and in the current world think like us. Not everyone is a reasonable person who can be reached with diplomacy. Some people are ideologically psychopaths and are willing to kill many many people to get what they want. Such people can only be stopped by force.