The War On Anything
The War On Anything
Since 1 September 2025, the USA has killed 85 people without trial. The US ordered 22 strikes on 23 boats. These boats were allegedly shipping drugs to the USA, and the USA, having declared ‘war on narco-terrorists’, sunk them. Two people were captured and sent back home. The US Navy rescued them and held them on a US ship. Within a few days, the US flew them back home: one to Ecuador, and the other to Colombia. These alleged terrorists, conducting a war on the USA, were simply flown back home. They were not arrested and put on trial for their war on the US, but sent home. For the US government, charging them without evidence was too risky.
The campaign — dubbed Operation Southern Spear — began in the Caribbean Sea in September 2025. Soon after, the strikes expanded to include boats in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The US government says these attacks were on boats “allegedly carrying illicit narcotics” or “trafficking drugs”, but they have shown no verifiable evidence to support their statements.
On Thursday, 4 December 2025, four people were killed by the US military. The Pentagon said the boat and the people on board were suspected of shipping drugs to America, and the US Southern Command said in a statement: “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organisation”.
The US Southern Command posted a video of the killing on social media. A grim video with a proud caption. The alleged criminals were not arrested and tried. They were killed, and a sanitised snuff clip was released. A government that kills without trial and then posts its killings proudly on social media as performance art seems off.
Trump discovered that labelling something, anything, a ‘war on’ gives him the opportunity to use force. It also gives him a way to bypass due process. Once this is discovered by a leader like Trump, the temptation is there to create more ‘wars’. Social issues: ‘war’. Economic issues ‘war’. A different culture: ‘war’.
A politician can take almost anything they dislike and wrap it in the language of war. Once governments do this, suspects become ‘terrorists’, people become ‘hostile forces’, and courts become optional. The mechanism is simple. The government declares some categories of people a threat to “national security” or “the homeland”. They then invent a label like “narco-terrorists” or “information warriors”, and they then argue that normal legal channels are too slow or too weak to deal with this threat. Once the public buys this framing, it becomes significantly easier for the government to normalise extreme actions.
Nations have mechanisms to guard against the leader behaving like a king. In the case of the USA, courts and Congress must be the guards. But when they fail, authoritarianism slowly takes hold. When they fail, there is a thin line to cross between killing suspected drug traffickers and declaring a ‘war’ on anyone who disagrees with the leader.