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Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a U.S. Navy radar locks onto a fast-moving vessel skimming through the Caribbean. The ship, believed to be carrying cocaine bound for the United States, is one of dozens targeted under Washington’s revived maritime counter-narcotics campaign — a series of deadly interdictions that have brought the U.S. military’s battlefront back to the Western Hemisphere.
But as the U.S. clamps down at sea, cartels are already adapting. “They’re going to try and stay alive by moving cargo on aircraft,” said Brent Sadler, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Navy officer. “But it’s more expensive, and you can’t move as much by volume, so it’s going to hurt their business model.”
Sadler said the shift shows how U.S. pressure on maritime smuggling routes is forcing traffickers to find new ways to move their product — and new vulnerabilities for Washington to exploit.
Yet just across the Gulf of Mexico, where nearly all of America’s fentanyl supply originates, the U.S. military presence fades to silence. There are no naval raids off Mexican ports, no drone strikes on cartel compounds, no talk of “narco-targets” inside Mexican territory. The fight stops there — by design.
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The suspect drug smuggling vessel is shown at left, moments before it was destroyed in a U.S. strike on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025. (X.com/SecWar)
A 2024 Drug Enforcement Administration report found that “nearly all the methamphetamines sold in the United States today are manufactured in Mexico, and it is purer and more potent than in years past.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported seizing 27,275 pounds of fentanyl along the U.S.–Mexico border in 2023.
Border Patrol agents reported the lowest number of apprehensions in fiscal year 2025 since 1970, at 283,000.
China remains a key source of the precursor chemicals for fentanyl and methamphetamine, but Mexico serves as the main production and trafficking base. Exports from Venezuela and neighboring Colombia are still dominated by cocaine.
“Once you go on land, now you’ve got sovereignty issues, collateral damage, all kinds of complications,” Sadler said. He argues the U.S. should focus on where its legal footing is strongest — at sea and in international airspace — cutting off the cartels’ finances and trade routes. “The cartels will collapse under their own weight if their money supply is cut off,” he said.
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During his first term, Trump allegedly favored the idea of bombing Mexico’s drug labs, according to a memoir by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Some Republicans have since discussed using military force for counternarcotics missions in Mexico.
But analysts say those calls collide with legal and political realities that make Mexico fundamentally different from countries where the U.S. has exercised military power.
“The Venezuelan military is relatively weak,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And the Congress passed legislation a couple of years ago declaring them narco-terrorists. None of that exists for Mexico … You would have that much less justification.”
Lester Munson, a former congressional foreign policy aide, said the broader U.S.–Mexico relationship also makes overt force politically implausible. “Mexico is very different than Venezuela,” he said. “We have, generally speaking, an excellent relationship with Mexico.”
Customs and Border Patrol agents seize drugs at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Loren Elliott/Reuters)
That relationship, Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne added, extends far beyond security. “Mexico has a wide range of relations with the United States, which includes it being our largest trading partner,” he said. “That makes it quite different from Venezuela and even very different from Colombia.”
Experts agree that any military strike or unilateral operation inside Mexico would risk unraveling that partnership — and with it, U.S. cooperation on migration and drug enforcement that Washington depends on to keep the border stable.
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Even without open military strikes, U.S. officials are not standing still. The drug war has shifted to quieter fronts — at sea, in the air, and in the intelligence channels that link Washington and Mexico City.
“You can put the cartels out of business by hitting them where they’re most vulnerable and where the legal precedents are strongest,” Sadler said. “That’s at sea and in international airspace.”
Those domains, he added, give the U.S. room to act without crossing the political red lines that come with operations on Mexican soil. “Once you go on land, now you’ve got local populations, you’ve got potential for collateral damage, you’ve got sovereignty issues,” he said. “It’s not necessary — the cartels will collapse under their own weight if their money supply is cut off.”
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The approach has reinforced a growing pattern of cooperation. Wayne said Mexico’s government has been “trying to be very cooperative on both migration and on drug trafficking.” He said Mexican authorities have allowed U.S. surveillance and intelligence-sharing to support operations, but that it would be politically untenable for Mexico to invite U.S. participation in direct strikes on cartels.
“We’ve seen instances in the past where there have been overflights allowed for U.S. surveillance, satellites and other things to go on,” Wayne said. “But the main operations have remained in the hands of the Mexicans.”
Analysts suggest Washington’s selective counter-narcotics campaign in the Caribbean is about more than drug interdiction — it’s also part of a broader effort to pressure Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. (Ap)
Analysts suggest Washington’s selective counter-narcotics campaign in the Caribbean is about more than drug interdiction — it’s also part of a broader effort to pressure Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
Trump authorized the CIA to take action against Maduro, and Washington’s posture toward the Venezuelan leader — whom the U.S. does not recognize as legitimate — has grown increasingly combative.
“The Venezuelan military is relatively weak,” Cancian said. “We can operate off their shores with few concerns.” That weakness has made Venezuela one of the few countries in the hemisphere where the U.S. can use counternarcotics missions to exert political pressure — a show of force just beyond the country’s territorial waters that also targets one of its key economic lifelines: cocaine exports.
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Sadler noted that traffickers have also exploited lax EU customs rules in French Guiana, a French overseas territory on South America’s northeast coast. Because shipments entering French Guiana technically move within the European Union’s open-border zone, they can reach Europe with minimal checks.
That loophole, he warned, has allowed human couriers and illicit cargo to move cocaine and other narcotics into Europe under EU protection — a vulnerability that, in his words, “needs to get plugged.”
