National News
US Navy targets Venezuelan drug ships while avoiding Mexico raids
NEWNow you can take heed to Fox Information articles!
Someplace off the coast of Venezuela, a US Navy radar focuses on a fast-moving ship skimming by means of the Caribbean. The ship, believed to be carrying cocaine sure for america, is certainly one of dozens of targets in Washington’s revived maritime anti-narcotics marketing campaign – a sequence of lethal interdiction measures which have introduced the US navy again to the Western Hemisphere.
However now that the US is answerable for the ocean, the cartels are already adapting. “They are going to attempt to keep alive by carrying cargo on airplanes,” mentioned Brent Sadler, a senior fellow on the Heritage Basis and a former Navy officer. “Nevertheless it’s dearer and when it comes to quantity you may’t transfer as a lot, so it may harm their enterprise mannequin.”
Sadler mentioned the shift reveals how U.S. strain on maritime smuggling routes is forcing traffickers to seek out new methods to maneuver their product — and new vulnerabilities that Washington can exploit.
However simply throughout the Gulf, the place nearly all of America’s fentanyl provide comes from, the American navy presence is fading into silence. There are not any naval assaults on Mexican ports, no drone strikes on cartel complexes, no “narco targets” on Mexican soil. The battle stops there – by design.
TRUMP’S STRIKE ON CARTEL SHIP OFF VENEZUELA SENDS WARNING TO MADURO: ‘NO SANCTUARY’
The suspected drug smuggling ship is proven on the left, moments earlier than it was destroyed in a US assault on Tuesday, October 21, 2025. (X.com/SecWar)
A 2024 Drug Enforcement Administration report discovered that “practically all methamphetamines bought in america right this moment are manufactured in Mexico, and they’re purer and stronger than in years previous.” U.S. Customs and Border Safety reported that 27,275 kilos of fentanyl had been seized alongside the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023.
Border Patrol brokers reported the bottom variety of apprehensions in fiscal 12 months 2025 since 1970, at 283,000.
China stays a significant supply of the precursor chemical substances for fentanyl and methamphetamine, however Mexico serves as the primary manufacturing and buying and selling base. Exports from Venezuela and neighboring Colombia are nonetheless dominated by cocaine.
“When you go ashore, you are going to have sovereignty points, collateral harm and all types of problems,” Sadler mentioned. He argues that the US ought to concentrate on the place its authorized base is strongest – at sea and in worldwide airspace – and lower off the cartels’ funds and commerce routes. “The cartels will collapse underneath their very own weight if their cash provide is lower off,” he mentioned.
US STRENGTHENS MILITARY PRESENCE IN THE CARIBBEAN NEAR VENEZUELA AGAINST TRUMP’S EFFORTS TO STOP DRUG TRAFFICKING
Throughout his first time period, Trump is claimed to have been in favor of bombing Mexican drug laboratories, in accordance with a memoir by former Secretary of Protection Mark Esper. Some Republicans have since mentioned utilizing navy power for counter-drug missions in Mexico.
However analysts say these calls conflict with authorized and political realities that make Mexico essentially completely different from nations the place the US has exercised navy energy.
“The Venezuelan navy is comparatively weak,” mentioned Mark Cancian, senior adviser on the Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research. “And Congress handed laws a number of years in the past declaring them narco-terrorists. None of that exists for Mexico… A lot much less justification you’ll have.”
Lester Munson, a former congressional overseas coverage aide, mentioned the broader U.S.-Mexico relationship additionally makes overt violence politically unlikely. “Mexico could be very completely different from Venezuela,” he mentioned. “Now we have a wonderful relationship with Mexico general.”
Customs and Border Patrol brokers seize medicine on the US-Mexico border. (Loren Elliott/Reuters)
That relationship, Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne added, extends far past safety. “Mexico has a variety of relations with america, together with being our largest buying and selling accomplice,” he mentioned. “That makes it very completely different from Venezuela and even very completely different from Colombia.”
Specialists agree that any navy strike or unilateral operation in Mexico would danger unraveling that partnership — and with it the U.S. migration and drug enforcement cooperation that Washington is dependent upon to maintain the border steady.
WAR SERVICE LAUNCHES NEW NARCOTICS TASK FORCE UNDER TRUMP DIRECTIVE TO Crush CARTELS
Even with out overt navy assaults, US officers are usually not standing nonetheless. The drug battle has moved to quieter fronts — at sea, within the air and within the intelligence channels connecting Washington and Mexico Metropolis.
“You may put the cartels out of enterprise by hitting them the place they’re most weak and the place the authorized precedents are strongest,” Sadler mentioned. “That’s at sea and in worldwide airspace.”
These domains, he added, give the US room to behave with out crossing the political purple traces related to operations on Mexican territory. “When you go on land, you now have native populations, you may have collateral harm potential, you may have sovereignty points,” he mentioned. “That’s not crucial: the cartels will collapse underneath their very own weight if their cash provide is lower off.”
US MILITARY BUILD-UP IN THE CARIBBEAN SEES BOMMERERS, MARINES AND WAR BOXES TOGETHER NEAR VENEZUELA
The method has strengthened a rising sample of cooperation. Wayne mentioned the Mexican authorities is “making an attempt to be very cooperative on each migration and drug trafficking.” He mentioned Mexican authorities have allowed U.S. surveillance and intelligence sharing to help operations, however it might be politically untenable for Mexico to ask U.S. participation in direct assaults on cartels.
“We have seen instances up to now the place overflights have been doable for US surveillance, satellites and different issues,” Wayne mentioned. “However the primary operations have remained within the fingers of the Mexicans.”
Analysts counsel Washington’s selective anti-narcotics marketing campaign within the Caribbean is extra than simply drug interdiction; additionally it is a part of a broader effort to place strain on Venezuelan chief Nicolás Maduro. (AP)
Analysts counsel Washington’s selective anti-narcotics marketing campaign within the Caribbean is extra than simply drug interdiction; additionally it is a part of a broader effort to place strain on Venezuelan chief Nicolás Maduro.
Trump approved the CIA to take motion towards Maduro, and Washington’s angle in direction of the Venezuelan chief – who is just not acknowledged as authentic by the US – has turn into more and more combative.
“The Venezuelan navy is comparatively weak,” Cancian mentioned. “We will function off their coast with little concern.” That weak point has made Venezuela one of many few nations within the hemisphere the place the U.S. can use counter-drug missions to exert political strain — a present of power simply outdoors the nation’s territorial waters that additionally targets certainly one of its fundamental financial lifelines: cocaine exports.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Sadler famous that traffickers have additionally exploited lax EU customs guidelines in French Guiana, a French abroad territory on the northeast coast of South America. As a result of shipments getting into French Guiana technically transfer inside the European Union’s open border zone, they will attain Europe with minimal checks.
This loophole, he warned, has allowed human couriers and unlawful cargo to maneuver cocaine and different narcotics into Europe underneath EU safety – a vulnerability that, in his phrases, “have to be closed”.