In recent weeks, U.S. politicians, legal scholars, and human rights groups have criticized the Trump Administration’s September 2nd bombing of a boat allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean. After the initial attack, two survivors clung to the boat’s remnants for approximately 45 minutes before being bombed again. The tactic, called a “double tap,” is familiar to anyone who followed the “war on terror” and watched the United States repeatedly use double tap bombings to kill survivors and emergency responders—often bystanders or other locals nearby—who would converge on a bombing site to assist survivors. In fact, double-tap via drones was first authorized on July 6, 2012, when the Obama administration bombed woodcutters and miners having dinner together in Pakistan’s border zone district of North Waziristan. When family members and locals attempted to provide aid at the scene, they too were bombed. In all, 18 people were killed.
The parallels with Obama’s drone campaign don’t end there. As scholars who have studied the “war on terror,” we write to share some of the lessons from a decade ago. Although public scrutiny of the Trump administration’s recent bombing campaign has been greater than it ever was during the height of the U.S. drone program, much of the existing opposition risks two serious pitfalls. First, by focusing on the distinctive elements of the Trump campaign, it risks failing to identify the durable continuities across the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Second, as happened during the Obama era, most recent criticism remains overly narrow, limited to a legal accounting that does not interrogate the reasons for waging war in the first place. We address each in turn.
On the first matter, it was Barack Obama who reformed U.S. counterterrorism policy to quell the opposition produced by the Bush administration’s brutal neoconservative aggression, and who built the military and legal architecture on which the current bombing campaign against Venezuela relies. Obama built the state capacities for a global assassination campaign and cultivated clients in the Global South to wage the American-led war. The Office of Legal Counsel developed novel legal arguments that stretched terms like imminence and due process beyond recognition. Obama’s drone campaign, which claimed an estimated 10,000-17,000 lives between Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria, trained pilots and refined the surveillance technologies necessary for targeting. Biden and Trump made use of these capacities–each carried out attacks during their presidencies, and Trump has now deployed the armature of the GWOT to establish a newer version of the same enemy. From ‘terrorist’ to ‘narco-terrorist,’ from blanket secrecy to chest-thumping spectacle, Trump’s mutation of the ‘war on terror’ is a difference in degree not kind.
Second, while many decried the secrecy and certain excesses of the Obama administration like double-tap bombardments, questions about the first crime of war—whether the US was justified in waging war at all—fell out of the legal vernacular. Human rights groups limited their criticism of Obama’s drone campaign to jus in bello violations. Not a single human rights report during the years of the ‘war on terror’ demanded an end to drone bombardment. They instead restricted themselves to asking about the calibration of violence. The Center for Constitutional Rights’ recent statement on Venezuela is an encouraging sign that frames the attacks as an act of aggression.
Most importantly, it is imperative that we begin with a perspective grounded in the realities of this moment. The Trump administration has been grasping at straws about how to assert itself globally. It is not difficult to see the naked aggression because the legal arguments barely hold together: we are told to believe that fishermen are actually members of a drug cartel on the precipice of invading Venezuela and threatening to do the same in the U.S. Yet the fundamental questions here are not about which body of law to apply—human rights law or the law of war. Instead, as the US opens another front of possible war, we must ask: what interests does it advance, and whose?
Starting with aggression invites us to examine the motivations for and the potential benefits to be reaped from this escalation. We identify a few, knowing that the account is incomplete and schematic. After spending the better half of a year stumbling through an incoherent tariff policy that was supposed to reset the terms of trade and safeguard the United States from a rising China, the White House appears to have signaled that it is changing course. On December 2, it published a presidential message celebrating and revitalizing the Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century. Commentators on the right have interpreted the missive as a retreat in its confrontation with China and an attempt to refocus the America’s efforts on its imperial “backyard.” The demonization of the Venezuelan government and fishermen advances this geopolitical reorientation.
It also serves to justify a domestic border enforcement policy that has designated Venezuelan immigrants as “alien invaders,” while ignoring how U.S. sanctions have produced the migration crisis. The border securitization industry is a multibillion-dollar business that includes for-profit companies for detention infrastructures, logistics, and services as well as surveillance technologies like drones, biometrics, and over-hyped AI tools. Tech companies that run the gamut from the notorious Palantir Technologies to Microsoft are involved on both fronts, domestic and international, a fact that should alert us to the linkages between the longstanding racialized domestic politics of the US and its colonial-settler and imperial ventures.
As the US inches closer and closer to yet another effort to ruin the lives and societies of Venezuelans, Colombians, and Trinidadians, it is imperative to acknowledge and begin with an understanding that the US is an empire that can and does dictate the terms of governance in other sovereign states, can and does undermine the life chances of people beyond its polity, and is a continuing settler-colonial project. In short, we must begin with the presumption that the US does not have a valid legal claim for bombing and destroying others. This is the minimum for left internationalism.
