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TRUMP IS TREATING THE MILITARY LIKE HIS PERSONAL MERCENARIES  
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Tom Nichols
September 19, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ Trump thinks he can pick up the phone and have people blown up at
sea on his personal orders—and so far, no one’s stopped him from
doing exactly that. The military has a responsibility to reject
illegal orders, even if they come from the President. _

President Donald J. Trump disembarks Marine One at Joint Base
Andrews, Md., Sept. 18, 2020, Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour


 

Donald Trump is being cagey about how many people he’s ordered the
U.S. Navy to kill on the high seas. The official toll from American
military strikes on two boats suspected of running drugs from
Venezuela is now 14, but a few days ago, Trump
[[link removed]] teased
the possibility that a third boat had been “knocked off,”
presumably on his orders.

The Trump administration’s justification for these strikes, such as
it is, seems to be that any shipment of drugs connected to the
Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua
[[link removed]] is a
direct threat to the United States. These “narco-terrorists” may
therefore be destroyed on sight, and without the fuss of asking
permission from the U.S. Congress. This argument reflects the
president’s childlike but dangerous understanding of his role as
commander in chief. The United States, once the leader of a global
system of security and economic cooperation, is now acting like a
rogue state on the high seas.

The White House position is wrong on many levels. I taught the rules
and theories that govern the use of force to military officers at the
Naval War College for many years, and every summer for two decades to
civilians at Harvard; I always reminded students that international
law and traditions require states to show that they are acting in some
form of self-defense, either in response to an attack or to forestall
more violence. Moreover, American law does not permit the president to
designate people as terrorists and then declare open season on them in
defiance of international agreements and without any involvement from
Congress. Perhaps Trump’s people are watching too many Tom Clancy
[[link removed]] movies, but he cannot legally
send the Navy out onto the world’s oceans as though they are
seagoing sheriffs with satchels full of death warrants.

No one in the White House seems to care very much about the rules that
govern killing people, at home or abroad, but these rules actually
exist. International law allows interdicting contraband—drugs,
weapons, captured human beings—under many circumstances, and
countries execute such missions
[[link removed]] legally every
day. These activities require great care to limit the danger to the
military and the loss of civilian life, including diligently
identifying suspect vessels, warning them to stop, and sometimes
boarding them to identify and seize their cargo.

Military ships can engage these targets in combat under limited
conditions. If they open fire on American vessels, for example, no one
would deny that they’re signing their own death warrant. But in
general, when states want to initiate the use of force in the
international arena, their arguments are subject to what international
law calls “the Caroline test
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case that led the U.S. to agree that to employ force, a threat must be
“instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of
deliberation.” This is an elegant way of saying that nations can use
violence in self-defense when they have neither the time nor ability
to do anything else. What constitutes an “imminent” threat is an
ongoing debate among international lawyers, but the recent Venezuela
strikes do not appear to fall even remotely under any of this
doctrine.

To understand just how far off the rails Trump has taken the military,
imagine an alternate example. If the boats were carrying, say,
explosives rather than drugs, and headed on a course for American
waters, then yes, U.S. officials could claim that they had no choice
but to act: Each minute would bring the chance of immediate death
closer to American citizens, and no military is going to try to arrest
or quarantine a giant, speeding bomb.

Now let’s return to what Trump is actually doing. The president is
trying to argue that drugs pose a similarly immediate threat to
American lives, because once the smuggling boats unload their
poisonous cargo, Americans will just as surely die as if they had been
blown up in a harbor in Miami, and therefore the Navy must kill the
terrorist-traffickers with the same alacrity it would use to destroy a
bomb-laden paramilitary vessel.

This is nonsense. _If _the boats were carrying drugs (something
Trump hasn’t proved) and _if _the boats were full of terrorists
(something Trump has asserted but without providing names or evidence)
and _if _the boats were headed directly for a U.S. port (which Trump
cannot show), _then_ Trump would _still _be in the wrong to
destroy them without warning. Other presidents
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used drone strikes to kill terrorists, but they acted under narrow
legal conditions, including authority
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by Congress, against targets they could not otherwise apprehend. But
Trump thinks he can pick up the phone and have people blown up at sea
on his personal orders—and so far, no one’s stopped him from doing
exactly that.

The president’s actions and rationalizations flunk the smell test
both for international and American law. You don’t have to take my
word for it: The former George W. Bush–administration lawyer John
Yoo weighed in on this a few days ago. (Yoo came up with the legal
justification for using “enhanced interrogation techniques”
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called “torture”—against captured terrorists after 9/11.)
“There has to be a line between crime and war,” Yoo
told _Politico_ a few days ago
[[link removed]].
“We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a
matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every
crime.”

A former senior military lawyer, Charles Dunlap
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likewise told _Politico_ that “there might be paths where the
strikes could be legal,” if the Trump administration would share
evidence about the targets, which it won’t. Trump says the proof
[[link removed]] is
“spattered all over the ocean, big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all
over the place,” a convenient excuse that still doesn’t answer how
the ships posed such an imminent danger that they had to be destroyed
at sea and their crews killed.

None of this seems to bother Trump or his circle. Almost two weeks
ago, Vice President J. D. Vance
[[link removed]] posted on X:
“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the
highest and best use of our military.” (I think, having taught
hundreds of them, that most military officers would say that defending
America and the Constitution is their highest duty, not being the
world’s most brutal vice cops.) When one X user replied that what
Trump is doing is a war crime, Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School,
shot back: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

Meanwhile, White House officials are having a good laugh at how much
they’ve scared innocent people in the region. Trump smirked this
week that “no boats” are taking to the water in the Caribbean now.
“I mean, to be honest, if I were a fisherman
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I wouldn’t want to go fishing, either,” presumably because the
United States might think the boat is carrying drugs. Vance tried to
run with the same joke a few days ago, yukking it up with Secretary of
Defense Pete Hegseth at a Michigan rally. “I would stop too,” he
said, laughing
[[link removed]].
“Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the
world.”

David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s war of words
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Not everyone is smiling. Despite Trump’s firing of the top legal
advisers
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the military, the Pentagon still employs attorneys, and they’re
worried. According to _The_ _Wall Street Journal_, military lawyers
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concerned not only about the justification for the strikes on the
boats—something any other president would have worked
out _before_ ordering the attacks—but also the “legal
implications for the U.S. military personnel involved in the
operations.”

Trump may have a special Immunity Necklace
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Court, but others do not. The military has a responsibility to reject
orders that break American or international law, even if those orders
come from the president himself. But the bar for disobedience is high:
The military, as a general legal principle
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must presume that orders coming down the chain of command
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legal and must be executed. Nor are officers getting much guidance;
attorneys and other officials in the Pentagon who have raised such
objections, the _Journal_ reported, are “being ignored or
deliberately sidelined.”

A more worrisome problem here is that Trump’s illegal orders to kill
drug smugglers could acclimate the American public to the sinister
idea that the military is the president’s personal muscle and that
it must do whatever he says. Earlier this week, he
declared “antifa”
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loose affiliation
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identify themselves as “anti-fascists”—to be a “major
terrorist organization.” But because “antifa” isn’t a single
group with a headquarters and identified leaders, Trump could apply
the label to anyone he thinks opposes him. The president has now
claimed he can kill terrorists at will, and he has designated many of
his American opponents as terrorists.

The Supreme Court majority, in its _Trump v, United States_
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didn’t seem very worried about Justice Sonia Sotomayor
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hypothetical objection that the president, bolstered by absolute
immunity, could order the military to assassinate a political rival.
But if he can order the Navy to operate as a presidential hit squad on
the high seas, any number of grim hypotheticals could become reality
sooner than Americans might expect.

_Tom Nichols [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at The Atlantic and a contributor to
the Atlantic Daily newsletter
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_Let the best of The Atlantic come to you. Select from our free
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