The Arc Of Force: Cartels, Sovereignty, And The Question Of End States
By David DeMay
The argument did not begin with geopolitics.
It began with a boat.
A narco-vessel, intercepted and sunk, its crew dead, its cargo gone. To one side, the event appears brutally simple: a long-overdue kinetic response to an enemy that has killed more American civilians than any foreign power in modern history. To the other, it appears ominous: a small, deniable act within a much larger military posture whose scale far exceeds the stated mission. What looks like enforcement to one eye looks like a pretext to the other.
That divergence is not accidental. It is the hinge on which the entire debate turns.
From the tactical vantage point, the logic is stark. Fentanyl is not a vice; it is a weapon. Its distribution network functions as an armed system that kills over one hundred thousand Americans a year, corrodes cities, launders billions, and destabilizes entire regions. When vessels carrying industrial quantities of synthetic opioids move freely through the Caribbean, they are not smugglers in the romantic sense; they are, instead, nodes in a transnational killing machine. In this frame, when the U.S. sinks a boat, it’s not escalating the situation. Instead, it is finally enforcing criminal and international law. The dead are tragic, but the arithmetic is merciless: thousands saved downstream for every link severed upstream.
But that is not the only arithmetic in play.
To those who take the ominous view of events, the boat is incidental. What matters is the posture. Fifteen thousand troops. Carrier strike groups. The presence of the USS Gerald R. Ford in Caribbean waters. This is not the force package required to interdict speedboats or fishing trawlers. It looks, instead, like the architecture of containment, if not of blockade. The concern is not drugs alone, but trajectory. They believe narcotics enforcement is becoming the legal fig leaf for something older and more dangerous, namely, gunboat diplomacy dressed in humanitarian language.
This is where Venezuela enters the frame, and with it, oil.
The country holds one of the largest proven reserves on Earth. It is also a narco-state in all but name, its criminal networks braided into governance, its prisons incubators for organizations like Tren de Aragua, which is active from South America to U.S. cities. From the pro-enforcement perspective, this convergence makes Venezuela the strategic hub of the hemispheric threat. You do not secure the southern border by fencing Arizona; you do it by dismantling the logistical brain that coordinates violence, migration, and narcotics at scale.
From the skeptical perspective, this same convergence rings every imperial alarm bell. Oil plus military presence plus regime hostility equals a familiar script. Seized tankers, interdicted ships, and “law enforcement actions” blur into de facto claims over sovereign resources. Even if the stated enemy is narcoterrorism, the fear is that the outcome will be something else entirely: a coerced realignment of control over energy, trade, and political allegiance.
And beyond Venezuela loom the great powers. Russia and China both have stakes—financial, strategic, symbolic—in resisting American dominance in their Latin America equivalent. Treating cartels as combatants in a “non-international armed conflict” stretches international law in ways that could invite external involvement. What begins as hemispheric cleanup could, in the worst case, become a proxy theater in a larger contest.
This is where the conversation usually breaks. One side hears naïveté. The other hears bloodlust. But that rupture misses the real dilemma, which is not about motives but end states.
The enforcement argument is not blind to scale. It concedes that the military presence is massive—the largest since the mid-1990s. But it argues that the scale of force mirrors the scale of the threat. Cartels are no longer criminal gangs. They are shadow states with fleets, armies, accountants, and political leverage. A Coast Guard cutter is insufficient for a problem that functions like an insurgency financed by mass death.
The skeptical argument, meanwhile, is not blind to fentanyl’s devastation. It recognizes the internal war already underway in American cities. Its fear is temporal and structural: that once the United States normalizes kinetic force under the banner of law enforcement, it may not be able to stop. That the Caribbean becomes not safer, but permanently militarized. That every future intervention inherits the precedent.
Both views are responding to different kinds of risk.
One fears external escalation—miscalculation, entanglement, global destabilization.
The other fears internal collapse—demographic decay, civic rot, and a quiet death toll that dwarfs conventional war.
This is the choice the arc reveals. Not peace versus war, but which war we are willing to acknowledge.
If fentanyl is treated as a mere crime problem, the internal war continues indefinitely, invisible but relentless. If it is treated as a weapon of mass destruction delivered through covert supply chains, then the use of force becomes grimly intelligible, even if still dangerous.
The unresolved question, then, is not whether the United States should act, but whether it can articulate and commit to a true end state: a hemisphere where criminal sovereignty is broken without replacing it with imperial permanence; where enforcement restores conditions for lawful trade rather than substituting one form of coercion for another.
The fate of the first boat sunk begins the arc. Where it ends is destiny.
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