Trump threatens to ‘wipe cartels out of existence’ in escalation of drug war

President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented war against drug cartels and threatened narco-terrorists, saying he will “wipe you out of existence” as his administration seeks to curb the flow of drugs into the United States.

The White House sent lawmakers a memo on September 30 informing them that the United States was now engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug traffickers — in addition to launching four deadly strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean since September.

The War Department recently announced the formation of a new Joint Drug Task Force in the Southern Command area of ​​responsibility, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The task force’s goal is to “crush the gangs, stop the poison, and keep America safe.” Hegseth wrote on Friday the 10th. “The message is clear: if you smuggle drugs towards our shores, we will stop you.”

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These latest developments suggest that Trump is eyeing targets inside Venezuela, not just those within international waters, according to Jeff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Center for International Affairs think tank.

“This is a sign that President Trump is taking the US war on drugs in Latin America to the next level,” Ramsey said in a Monday email to Fox News Digital. “By engaging the military, the president is going after drug cartels in a way that no previous U.S. administration has dared to do yet. I think it’s likely we’ll see the Pentagon assessing targets inside Venezuela.”

Additional strikes could target more drug shipments or drug flights, which often take off from secret airports near the Colombian border, Ramsey said.

“It’s a bad time to be working in a guerrilla camp on the Colombian border or running a safe house in Tren de Aragua along a smuggling route in the Caribbean,” Ramsey said.

However, Ramsey said it would be difficult to strike inside Venezuelan territory. He said doing so would require the United States to dismantle Venezuela’s air defense system, which would escalate hostilities by openly clashing with the Venezuelan military.

Ramsey said this is a departure from the current approach, in which the United States has deliberately avoided targeting Venezuelan military assets.

“When two Venezuelan F-16s flew over a US destroyer last month, the fact that those two planes did not explode in the sky indicates that the United States is not interested in a shooting war with the Venezuelan military,” Ramsey said.

Trump himself has not ruled out strikes inside Venezuela, and indicated such strikes could happen when he told military commanders in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30 that his administration would “look very seriously at cartels coming in by land.”

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So far, the Trump administration has used naval forces to address drug threats, beefing up naval assets in the Caribbean in recent months. For example, Trump agreed to send several US Navy guided-missile destroyers to bolster the administration’s counternarcotics efforts in the region starting in August.

“I expect these deployments to last for months or more than a year, with new ships rotating in to replace those that need to return home for maintenance or crew rest,” Brian Clark, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, told Fox News Digital in September.

Nathan Jones, a nonresident scholar in drug policy and Mexico studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, predicted that the strikes are unlikely to affect the flow of fentanyl into the United States, because fentanyl precursors originate in China, then are produced in laboratories in Mexico before heading north without a route to the Caribbean.

“I don’t expect your drug flow to be affected by these strikes,” Jones told Fox News Digital on Tuesday. “However, this may make transnational criminal organizations feel a little fearful in terms of what the administration will do.”

However, Jones said he expects drug flow routes to adapt, and for land or air drug routes to take precedence over sea routes in the Caribbean.

The strikes have led members of Congress to question their legality, and Senators Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, introduced a war powers resolution in September that would prevent U.S. forces from engaging in “hostile actions” against certain nongovernmental organizations.

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“There was no authorization for the use of force by Congress in this manner,” Schiff told reporters on Wednesday. “I feel that this is patently unconstitutional. The fact that the administration claims to have a list and has put the organizations on the list does not somehow enable the administration to usurp Congress’s authority to declare war or refuse to declare war or refuse to authorize the use of force.”

However, the measure failed in the Senate by a 51-48 margin on Wednesday. However, the measure attracted support from Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted alongside their Democratic counterparts in favor of the resolution.

Other Republicans, however, defended the strikes, and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Jim Risch, of Idaho, said Trump’s actions were within his rights and that the decision was “unconscionable.”

“When he sees an attack like this coming — an attack with drugs or explosives or anything else that would kill Americans — he not only has the authority to do something about it, he has a duty to do something about it,” Risch said Wednesday before the vote.