Trump’s War of Words in the Caribbean

Hello, everyone. Today at WPR, we’re covering the dangerous implications of a U.S. return to testing nuclear weapons, and escalating diplomatic tensions between Japan and China over Taiwan.

But first, here’s our take on today’s top story:

President Donald Trump’s ongoing military campaign against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific has an official name. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced “Operation Southern Spear.”

“This mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X. “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”

So far, Trump has ordered 20 publicly known strikes on boats in the region, killing 80 people that the Trump administration has called “narco-terrorists” without offering any evidence. A recent AP investigation found that at least some of the crew on the targeted boats were indeed running drugs, but were far from members of an organized cartel or gang. They included day laborers, fishermen and low-level criminals.

Even setting aside the question of the boat operators’ identities, there are no grounds for these strikes in either U.S. or international law, WPR’s Charli Carpenter wrote last week. That has not stopped the Trump administration from trying to cobble together a legal justification for them by referring to the alleged traffickers as “unlawful enemy combatants.”