The drone circled high above the Caribbean Sea as its target skipped across the waves below carrying another bounty of drugs bound for America.
A sudden flash and the boat was engulfed in flames, its cargo disintegrated and its 11 crew dead.
Donald Trump had just fired the opening shot of a new campaign against “terrorist” cartels in Latin America. The strike, he declared, was “only the beginning”.
By this week he had ordered his tenth strike on boats carrying drugs north, each one accompanied by a grainy video circulated far and wide.
This is Mr Trump’s war on narco-terrorism, packaged neatly for the nightly news bulletins and social media generation.
Yet behind the unclassified footage lies an intricate policy that fuses an 18th-century war-time law, spy craft, and trade deals that is fast re-establishing America’s sphere of influence.
The overall plan has been dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine” by insiders, and its aim, in part, is to rid America’s backyard of Chinese influence.
The Venezuela question
The strikes on drugs boats can be traced to one of the unusually large fleet of US warships, drones and troops that have converged off Venezuela’s coast in recent weeks.
Eight warships, including three destroyers, three amphibious assault ships, a cruiser and a smaller littoral combat ship now make up the largest US military presence in the region in decades.
They are joined by a squadron of F-35B Lightning II jets and a handful of Reaper drones, which are capable of flying long distances and carrying up to eight laser-guided missiles. B-2 bombers have also been spotted flying off the coast.
On Friday, Trump announced the USS Gerald Ford, the navy’s newest aircraft carrier, was also en route to the territory.
It is quite the counter-narcotics operation. The sheer scale of the fleet has convinced Venezuelans and many others that Trump is, in fact, preparing a ground assault.
“The deployment to the Caribbean is far beyond what you would need to conduct occasional strikes on vessels allegedly smuggling drugs,” Brian Finucane, a former state department lawyer who is now senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, explained.
“It is as a show of force, sabre rattling, gunboat policy intended to put pressure on Mr Maduro with the goal of forcing him to step down and convince him to step down and take a golden exit. If that fails emboldening those in his government, who might topple him.”
The aspiration for regime change is hardly hidden. The president has linked Mr Maduro’s regime with criminal cartels and approved the CIA to conduct covert missions in the hopes of toppling him.
“He doesn’t want to f— around with the United States,” the president warned recently, a line as much for Caracas as for his many other adversaries.
Yet there is another layer to consider.
Some sources close to the Trump administration point out that assembling an invasion fleet may be helpful for Mr Trump to solve a separate policy headache: immigration.
Declaring war could help with the revival of the Alien Enemies Act, last used to intern Japanese, German and Italian nationals during World War Two, to detain and deport Venezuelan nationals en masse.
Under the 17th-century law, a president can target citizens of a hostile nation in times of declared war or if an enemy government mounts an “invasion or predatory incursion”.
Early in his second term, the president dusted off the war-time law but was later blocked by the court of appeal.
The two architects of the Venezuela campaign are Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and, interestingly, Stephen Miller, the man known as “Trump’s Brain” on all things immigration.
Venezuela and the drug boats thus become a complex fusion of Trump’s great fixations; national security, immigration and the need to revive American dominance.
The Donroe Doctrine
Venezuela under Mr Maduro, who now has a $50m bounty on his head, has become something of an open shop for America’s adversaries.
China has poured millions into Venezuelan oil projects and loans while Russia has armed Mr Maduro with Sukhoi fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, and air defence systems.
Experts say Mr Trump’s push into the region is part of an attempt to revive the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century principle that views Latin America as America’s backyard and that declares the Western hemisphere as off limits to adversaries.
Project 2025, the Trump long-thought blueprint for his second term, calls it “re-hemisphering”.
It calls for the capture of supply chains in the region as a requirement of US economic security.
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Mr Trump has signed off on economic punishment targeting Venezuelan oil with a broader goal of reasserting US dominance.
Meanwhile, he told his generals last month: “We’re restoring a needed focus on defeating threats in the Western Hemisphere.”
“All the adversaries we’ve got have a significant presence in Venezuela. And that’s why back in 2019 and today, removing Maduro is such a priority,” John Bolton, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser, said.
“It’s long overdue and in the case of Venezuela, it’s not just China, they’re the late comers,” Mr Bolton told The Telegraph.
The Donald Doctrine has become a rallying cry across the GOP base.
“I’m at least thrilled that we’re finally using military force in our own hemisphere against people that would have done harm against the American homeland,” popular conservative Charlie Kirk told his podcast a week before he was shot dead.
Beyond Venezuela
Venezuela, which has the biggest oil reserves in the world, is just the latest example; part of a pattern by the administration to pick off countries with ties with China.
Guyana and Suriname, small South American states adjacent to Venezuela, have newly discovered oil reserves which have attracted a large amount of Chinese investment.
Just four months into the job, Mr Rubio was dispatched on a Caribbean tour to ramp up engagement in the Western Hemisphere by promoting energy independence, curbing illegal migration and drug trafficking.
In Guyana, Mr Rubio signed a defence agreement that enhanced intelligence sharing and military-to-military cooperation.
Since ExxonMobil made its major oil discovery in Guyana in 2015, Venezuela has revived a century-old territorial dispute with Guyana and taken steps to annex the remote Essequibo region, which comprises about two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass.
Mr Rubio warned it would be a “very bad day” for Venezuela should that happen.
Meanwhile, China bristled at the strengthening ties. Beijing does $1.4bn in annual trade with Guyana and has invested in a string of major infrastructure projects that Chinese firms are undertaking.
By rallying a mini-coalition of neighbouring states, Mr Trump is isolating Mr Maduro and signalling to the rest of the hemisphere that aligning with the US can prove to be valuable and secure.
“It’s clearly a view of our enemies abroad that the Western Hemisphere is strategically important,” Andrés Martínez-Fernández, senior policy analyst for Latin America at the Allison Centre for National Security, said.
“The Trump administration recognises the importance of economic vitality and connectivity within our own hemisphere. For our national security, the rare earth minerals certainly are a core part of that.
“That is something President Trump is clearly trying to get Washington to wake up to that fact. And so I think that’s kind of undergirding the, what you could call a new Monroe Doctrine, or this is pivoting to our hemisphere.”
Just as Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, has managed to leverage his influence to expand his dominance, Mr Trump has sought to offer a lifeline to those in need of American intervention in return for loyalty.
In Buenos Aires, Mr Trump is planning to buy Argentine uranium in a deal with Javier Milei to counter China’s influence.
Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, has pushed to expand US access to the country’s valuable uranium supply in return for a $40bn lifeline for Argentina’s flailing economy.
China has poured tens of millions into projects into the South American nation, becoming its second largest trading partner and the top buyer of its agricultural exports.
Mr Milei, who has sought to align himself with Mr Trump, has turned to the president for help with his country’s currency crisis after some of the world’s highest inflation rates and a government debt crisis saw the value of the peso plunge.
The approach, the administration says, is yielding results. After visits from Mr Rubio and Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, Panama announced it would withdraw from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
But critics argue that conditioning US friendship on ideological alignment risks undermining credibility in the region.
“This is much more partisan in its shape, and it’s much more politically punitive,” Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, said.
The Global Pivot
Beyond the Americas, the White House’s strategic pivot includes strengthening ties with Africa’s 54 nations, which has become the new scene of competition between Washington and Beijing.
From the start of his second term, Mr Trump has pursued deal diplomacy, cutting international aid in favour of infrastructure and mining investments.
The focus has been on shoring up supply chains to rare earth minerals like cobalt and lithium which are vital to consumer electronics and the American tech industry.
China’s restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals in its tit-for-tat trade war with the United States has forced the administration to look elsewhere, namely Africa.
In June, Trump helped broker a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda. It was not only pitched as a ceasefire but as a gateway to American investment.
The deal aims to attract Western investment to a region rich in tantalum, gold, cobalt, copper, lithium and other minerals. According to Human Rights Watch, it is “a mineral deal first, an opportunity for peace second”.
Behind the scenes, US officials have flagged Africa as the next source of strategic increase in the ongoing technical rivalry with China.
A policy paper by Bookings, a non profit based in Washington DC, noted that Africa’s “critical minerals, human capital potential, untapped innovation, and fast growth make Africa essential to America’s economic future”.
“We will see how long it continues. I think people want to get the trade issue resolved, they want it settled,” Mr Bolton added.
“They don’t like the tariffs, but they fear the uncertainty more with good reason.”
Gunboats
In Latin America the airstrikes on drug boats keep coming.
On Wednesday, two targets were destroyed in the Pacific for the first time, with the US defence secretary calling the drug runners the “Al Qaeda of our hemisphere”.
There have been two survivors of attacks on drugboats.
They were picked up by the US military before being swiftly deported.
One left police custody in Ecuador this week after there was no evidence found of links to drug running.
Another lies in hospital in Bogota, critically injured.
Families of the killed have said their relatives were just fishermen. Reports in local media of their home countries have linked some of them at least to weapons trafficking.
Whether for show, or as part of a wider doctrine closing in on Latin America, the attacks remain controversial among legal scholars and some of the countries in America’s “backyard”.
Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, once at the centre of global drug trafficking, has called Mr Trump a “murderer”.
On Friday, he was sanctioned and added to “specially designated nationals list” over the country’s alleged drug trafficking.
Analysts point out there is a risk that elements of the policy could backfire as the US loses a key ally in the war on drugs.
“Under no circumstances can one justify that kind of threats and accusations that have no basis whatsoever,” Daniel Garcia-Pena, the Colombian ambassador, said after being recalled from the US following the latest drug boat attacks.
“There are elements that are unacceptable,” he said, visibly alarmed after being told what Mr Trump had said minutes before.
“At stake here is a historic relationship of more than 200 years that benefits both the United States and Colombia,” he said.
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