Unjust Military Strikes in the Caribbean

A Christian Just-War Analysis

In his anti-Manichaean tract Contra Faustum, the 4th-century bishop and theologian St. Augustine of Hippo states, “A great deal depends on the causes for which men undertake wars, and on the authority they have for doing so” (22.75). Here Augustine introduces two of what later came to be regarded as the principles or criteria of the just-war theory, the ethical framework that most Christian churches have drawn on for morally evaluating war and which has served as the basis for the modern international laws of war. Augustine’s concern for the causes of war and the authority for waging it, as well as the examination of war’s conduct introduced by later Christian thinkers, remains pertinent today.

Over the past few weeks, the US military has carried out three strikes against what the Trump administration alleges are drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean. The administration further alleges that the vessels were traveling toward the United States and were operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

These strikes were highly unusual because, in cases where a boat engaged in drug smuggling are encountered, the US Coast Guard typically intercepts and boards the vessel, taking its crew into custody. Although the Coast Guard may use warning shots or disabling shots in cases where the suspect vessel attempts to avoid interdiction, Coast Guard ships never fire directly upon the ship’s crew or attempt to destroy the vessel. These recent strikes, then, break with these established rules.

In a September 4 letter sent to Congress providing a rationale for the first strike, which took place on September 2, President Donald Trump provides two justifications. First, he refers to the fact that he had designated Tren de Aragua (along with other gangs and drug cartels) as a foreign terrorist organization in an executive order signed on January 20, his first day in office. Second, he argues that the drug smuggling carried out by Tren de Aragua and other gangs is a national security threat to the United States that demands a military response. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had earlier claimed that the US resorted to military strikes because interdiction does not sufficiently deter drug smugglers.

As Brian Finucane, a former attorney-adviser to the US State Department, explains, however, the designation of a group as a foreign terrorist organization does not in itself authorize the use of military force against that group. In a March executive order, President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law (part of the Alien and Sedition Acts) that allows the president to arrest and deport foreign nationals from a country with which the US is engaged in armed conflict, in order to claim that Tren de Aragua had undertaken an “invasion” of the US and was engaged in “irregular warfare.” This executive order was used to legitimize the deportation of several Venezuelan migrants, alleged to be members of Tren de Aragua, and their deportation and detention in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). In May and June, however, three federal courts ruled that the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was inappropriate because Tren de Aragua’s activities did not constitute an “invasion.”

In his letter to Congress justifying the recent military strikes on drug-smuggling vessels, President Trump appeals to his inherent authority under Article II of the US Constitution to engage in military actions short of war (the Constitution assigns Congress the right to declare or authorize war). He argues that the threat to US national security posed by Tren de Aragua’s activities, and the failure of other states in the region to curtail it, justify the strikes.

The problem for the Trump administration, however, is that international law permits the resort to force in self-defense only in cases of an armed attack (or an imminent armed attack). And Tren de Aragua has not engaged in an armed attack against the US. As John Yoo, an attorney at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, during the George W. Bush administration, points out, the drug trade has inflicted serious harm on the American populace, but harm alone does not justify the use of force:

[T]he U.S. cannot wage war against any source of harm to Americans. Americans have died in car wrecks at an annual rate of about 40,000 in recent years; the nation does not wage war on auto companies. American law instead relies upon the criminal justice or civil tort systems to respond to broad, persistent social harms. In war, nations use extraordinary powers against other nations to prevent future attacks on their citizens and territory.

And regardless of whether the US was engaged in an armed conflict with Tren de Aragua, by the administration’s own account, the crew aboard these boats were civilians engaged in criminal activity, not combatants. In international law, deliberately targeting civilians is always a war crime. As Finucane explains, US domestic law also prohibits assassinations or targeted killings.

All that being said, the Trump administration has not yet provided evidence that the crew aboard the three vessels were members of Tren de Aragua or that they were in fact engaged in drug smuggling. After all, the administration also lied about the gang affiliations of the Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador. Indeed, both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have suggested that the US military may be acting indiscriminately in the Caribbean, with both seemingly joking that fishermen in the region are afraid to go out to sea. But why would they be afraid if the US is carrying out carefully targeted attacks against drug smugglers?

In terms of the just-war theory, then, these recent military strikes violate the principles of proportionality, last resort, and noncombatant immunity. The principle of proportionality states that military action can only be justified in response to a proportionate provocation, and international law reflects a consensus that only an armed attack provides a proportionate reason for an armed response. The fact that the US could have intercepted the vessels rather than destroying them shows that military force was not the last resort. And the principle of noncombatant immunity prohibits the deliberate targeting of civilians, a principle which was likewise violated with these strikes. Christians committed to the path of discipleship, therefore, should oppose these and any subsequent strikes, and the military personnel who participated in carrying out these strikes may, someday, face legal ramifications.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (Photo: Official White House Photo by Molly Riley, public domain)

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I think it’s also important to place these recent strikes in the context of the Trump administration’s permissive attitude toward war crimes. During his first term in office, in 2019, President Trump pardoned or granted clemency to three soldiers who had been convicted or accused of committing war crimes. Army First Lt. Clint Lorance had been convicted of the murder of two unarmed Afghan men and the attempted murder of a third (he had ordered soldiers under his command to fire on the men). Army Maj. Matt Golsteyn admitted to killing a Taliban member in US custody and burning his body to hide the evidence; he was awaiting trial when he was pardoned. Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher was accused of stabbing to death an ISIS detainee who was being treated by an American medic and then posing for a photograph with the dead body. Gallagher was court martialed for the latter act but acquitted of the former after another SEAL claimed he had in fact killed the detainee by covering his breathing tube, and Gallagher had only stabbed the body after the detainee had died (this testimony contradicted that of other witnesses, however). As a result of his court martial, Gallagher was demoted in rank, but President Trump reversed the decision. Gallagher was also alleged to have engaged in other misconduct like threatening potential witnesses before his trial, killing an unarmed elderly man and a young girl while serving as a sniper, and firing indiscriminately into urban areas without a known enemy presence.

Pete Hegseth, now the Secretary of Defense (or War) but then a regular co-host on the Fox News channel’s Fox & Friends Weekend, frequently advocated for the three soldiers on air while also privately lobbying President Trump to pardon them. At the time, Hegseth argued that the US military is too constrained by lawyers, negatively impacting its warfighting capability.

As the Secretary of Defense, Hegseth has set about institutionalizing this perspective. Secretary Hegseth has stated that his goal is to restore the “warrior ethos” of the US military, which includes loosening the constraints of the laws of war, but also downplaying humanitarian missions and the Pentagon’s longstanding concern with the impact of climate change on national security, among other things. For example, Hegseth has reshaped the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) corps, diminishing the influence of the lawyers who advise the military on compliance with the laws of war.

Last week, Hegseth also declared that the Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who participated in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre would not be rescinded. At Wounded Knee, US Army soldiers killed about 250 Lakota Sioux, many of them women and children, after the warriors in the community had surrendered, Congress had recommended rescinding the medals in a 2022 defense spending bill, and former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had established a commission to consider the issue in 2024. Hegseth stated the soldiers “deserve those medals” and “their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.” This decision not only reflects the administration’s acceptance of war crimes as a legitimate part of warfighting, but also its repeated efforts to whitewash the darker aspects of US history (including the renaming of US military bases and naval vessels).

In the America article already cited, I argued that Trump’s 2019 pardons “threaten[ed] to undermine the ethic of professionalism that has been cultivated by military leaders.” I also concluded that “[B]ecause of the Christian roots of this ethic and the important role of faith in instilling military professionalism, Christians should be especially concerned that the notion of the soldier as the protector of the innocent and servant of the common good is being eroded.” I still agree with these statements, but given the institutionalization of this disregard for the laws of war, I think a deeper theological reflection is warranted.

St. Augustine, in Contra Faustum, argues that a war is unjust when it is conducted with “love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power [libido dominandi]” (22.74). In contrast, as he would later write in the City of God, the wise man who wages a just war laments its necessity (19.7). Although these passages helped lay the groundwork for the Christian just-war tradition, they are also closely connected with Augustine’s more extensive, critical reflections elsewhere in the City of God on the role of the libido dominandi in Rome’s rise to power and the alternative way of life demonstrated by the City of God, that is, the community of those whose lives center around the love of God. In a later essay, I will attempt to show how those reflections can provide us insight into the Trump administration’s attitudes toward war crimes and the nature of the military profession.