U.S. Strikes on Venezuelan boats raise questions about policy, purpose

By Gwynne Dyer

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently offered a blunt standard for determining who constitutes a threat to the United States.

“If you're on a boat full of cocaine or fentanyl or whatever, headed to the United States, you're an immediate threat to the United States,” Rubio said.

Taken at face value, that definition appears to justify the U.S. military’s destruction of 22 small boats off the coast of Venezuela and the killing of 87 people aboard them. U.S. officials have said the vessels were involved in drug trafficking.

The problem is that it is virtually impossible for small motorboats operating off Venezuela’s northern coast to be “headed to the United States” in any meaningful sense.

The shortest distance between Venezuela’s Maracaibo region and the Florida Keys is roughly 1,000 nautical miles. The boats shown in U.S. drone footage appear to be modest craft powered by twin outboard engines, with fuel capacities likely in the range of 200 gallons.

At cruising speeds of about 20 knots, such vessels would run out of fuel after travelling between 120 and 200 nautical miles. Reaching the United States would require five to eight refuelling stops, along with numerous detours and border crossings. That is not a viable smuggling route.

The only alternative would be to carry massive quantities of extra fuel. Roughly 1,000 additional gallons would be required, weighing about three tonnes. Boats of that size are not designed to carry such loads. The idea collapses under the most basic arithmetic.

This is not how drugs reach the United States. Large-scale narcotics trafficking relies on aircraft, container ships and established land routes through Central America and Mexico. Small open boats making thousand-mile journeys are not part of that supply chain.

Which raises an obvious question: if these vessels were not realistically bound for the United States, why were they destroyed?

The answer may lie less in drug enforcement than in geopolitics. The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to escalate pressure on Venezuela, including the possibility of air strikes or military intervention. No invasion has been confirmed, but the rhetoric has been persistent.

The strikes can be read as performative violence, intended not only for Venezuelans but for a wider audience. They echo a much older view of the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive U.S. sphere of influence.

In 1895, then-U.S. secretary of state Richard Olney described the United States as “practically sovereign on this continent,” invoking the Monroe Doctrine. That mindset appears to be resurfacing, explicitly, in modern policy documents.

The Trump administration’s newly released U.S. National Security Strategy calls for the United States to “assert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine” to restore American pre-eminence and protect access to what it terms “key geographies” in the region.

It also pledges to deny non-hemispheric powers the ability to control strategically vital resources in the Americas, framing this as a restoration of American power consistent with U.S. security interests.

There is little subtlety in that message. The world it describes is one in which great powers do what they can, and smaller countries do what they are told.

U.S. military activity in and around Venezuela is expected to continue in the coming days. If so, it may help answer the lingering question of why Washington remains so focused on a country whose oil is no longer indispensable and whose political system inspires little genuine concern for democracy or human rights among U.S. decision-makers.

As a demonstration project — a warning to any government tempted to defy U.S. authority — Venezuela will do.

In that light, the destruction of small boats and the people aboard them looks less like law enforcement and more like a message, delivered with missiles.