“Cartels of terrorists across our hemisphere, enabled by adversaries, created and profited from chaos,” remarked Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference in early March. “What creates chaos? No leadership creates chaos.” The Christian nationalist crusader, whose Pentagon is in constant upheaval, was referring to the Biden administration—but his words are a much more apt description of his department, and of the Trump administration broadly. The president and his acolytes claim that they’re cracking down on terrorists, but even in the best cases, their efforts have proved costly and ineffective; in the worst, they’ve actually benefited terrorists, helping them swell their ranks and even enriching them.
The boat strikes that Hegseth has boasted about are a prime example of the former. “Under President Trump for the first time in history, the Department of War is on the offense against narco-terrorists,” he said at the conference. Putting aside the ethical implications of killing at least 185 people without trials, even when they’re clearly surrendering, and the damage such attacks do to our moral standing in the world, the strikes have also proven rather ineffective. While there’s evidence that certain drug routes from Venezuela have been shut down, the cartels have simply shifted to new routes and other methods of export, moving cocaine through cargo ships in multiple ports across Latin America. As Alex Papadovassilakis wrote for InSight Crime, “Concealment within legitimate cargo remains the main method for reaching consumer markets in the United States, Europe, and beyond, with traffickers routing loads through ports in countries like the Dominican Republic.” Papadovassilakis also noted that even people in “go-fast boats” who are actually transporting drugs are likely not direct members of the cartels but instead local fishermen and merchants doing one-off deals.
Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, essentially acknowledged the limited reach of the murderous strikes when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, saying that, going forward, “boat strikes will be one of the main tools, and probably not the most effective.” It seems the U.S. military’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who is now facing narco-terrorism charges in the U.S., has also been ineffective. Because Trump’s gambit didn’t topple the government—leaving key figures like Venezuela’s corrupt interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, in power, “the country’s broader criminal ecosystem remains largely intact,” Papadovassilakis reported. Yet our ineffectiveness has not been cheap, as the military raid and ongoing boat strikes have cost at least $4.7 billion, according to a joint analysis by the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Meanwhile, a recent New York Times exposé revealed that we’re inadvertently supporting major drug cartels in Colombia by purchasing gold from mines they control, despite declaring the end products that move through our mints to be “100% American.” It’s a practice that preceded the Trump administration, but of which it seemed blithely unaware, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telling the Times he’ll investigate it. There’s no indication that this will in any way affect the release of the 250th-anniversary commemorative gold coin featuring Trump’s phony tough-guy stare.
The fight against drug cartels has been further hampered by Trump’s pardon policies. At the request of Roger Stone, himself a recipient of a Trump pardon, the president pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who’d been sentenced to 45 years in U.S. prison for his role in a massive drug conspiracy. Hernández helped cartels smuggle 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. in exchange for millions in bribes, but Trump claims it was just a Biden setup. Trump may even be angling to install Hernández back in power, according to a bombshell report published by Canal Red and Hondurasgate.
Fulfilling a campaign promise he’d made to secure Libertarian votes, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, whose Silk Road site acted as a trading post for narcotics. Ulbricht had been sentenced to two life terms, plus forty years, and was suspected of involvement in five murders. Trump also pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted of failing to stop money laundering on the site, which was thought to be used by Russian gangsters and Hamas.
The administration’s efforts in Africa have perhaps been even more heinous and counterproductive, worsened by massive cuts to aid that have killed many and destabilized regions. Trump ordered a strike on Nigeria back in December, claiming it was necessary to combat a Christian genocide that right-wing conspiracy theorists wrongfully claim is occurring there. If a genocide were occurring, of course, a single strike would hardly suffice to halt it. As it is, the strike seems to have galvanized the terrorist group Boko Haram and its offshoot, the Islamic State West African Province, both of which are believed to be coordinating attacks against the Nigerian government. In response, the U.S. has ordered all nonessential staff out of our embassy in Abuja.
The Trump administration’s actions in Somalia, on the other hand, have been much more consistent and much deadlier. While presidents have ordered strikes against the unstable African state since the 1990s, under Trump they’ve drastically increased, leading to hundreds or perhaps thousands of deaths (it’s hard to tell exactly, since U.S. African Command conveniently stopped reporting the numbers a year ago). Undoubtedly, both ISIS and Al Shabab maintain a significant presence in Somalia, but West Africa has become the new hotbed of jihadist activity, and yet—with the single Nigeria strike as the one exception—the U.S. has done nothing to combat the rise of terrorist groups there.
Why, then, have we carried out so many operations in Somalia? Well, as former Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy Jr. told Vox’s Joshua Keating, “It seems like it’s on autopilot. It’s easier to keep doing something because there’s the institutional bureaucracy in place to keep supporting it.” In other words, it’s administrative laziness. Trump relaxed the rules for U.S. African Command to act independently and has since been uninvolved. We keep hitting Somalia because we have more resources there than in the Sahel region of West Africa, where terrorists are congregating.
Just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, in Yemen, the U.S. has been incompetently battling the Houthis. Despite Trump telling the terrorist group in March 2025 that their “time is up,” it quickly became evident that the hundreds of millions we were spending on airstrikes had accomplished virtually nothing. Two months later, Trump claimed the group had “capitulated” by agreeing to a ceasefire. But today, the Houthis are as powerful as ever. In fact, they’re using our withdrawal from the area as evidence of their strength. “By portraying themselves as the only force resisting foreign powers—the U.S. and Israel—the Houthis strengthened their internal support, increased recruitment, and reinforced their image as Yemen’s primary defenders,” reported the Stimson Center. They’ve also slowed traffic through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait by well over 50 percent, limiting petroleum exports in the region.
The Houthis’ ally, Iran, may have taken that as its cue when it closed the Strait of Hormuz, causing a massive oil shortage and impelling the U.S. administration to release $14 billion of Iranian oil from sanctions, thus providing plenty of funding for more state-sponsored terrorism. Humiliated before the world, Trump called for a ceasefire—one that has now been stretched indefinitely—even as he and Hegseth repeatedly claimed that their objectives have been met and that the U.S. has won. Iran’s theocratic regime, in contrast, has only become more hard-line.
While the U.S. continues to flounder abroad, terrorist attacks at home have gone largely unnoticed by the White House, and Trump’s completely unqualified “counterterrorism czar,” the campaign hack Sebastian Gorka, has no plan to combat them. The administration even reassigned terrorism specialists to immigration cases, only to call many of them back to their old roles after hostilities began with Iran. At the same time, Trump has distracted from genuine threats with fictitious accusations about the “radical left terrorists.” It fits a pattern: Fail, point fingers, and never, under any circumstances, take a good long look in the mirror.
