OPINION — “I knew the possible danger. It was a very dangerous operation. It was amazing that we had a few injured, but all are in good shape right now, but I knew there was great danger. You got off a helicopter. The helicopters were being shot out. They got on the ground amazing talent and tremendous patriotism, bravery. The bravery was incredible…They got off the helicopter and the bullets were flying all over the place. As you know, one of the helicopters got hit pretty badly, but that we got everything back. Got everything back and nobody killed,” meaning Americans.

That was President Donald Trump speaking Sunday aboard Air Force One on the way back from Florida about what he observed watching the early Saturday morning U.S. raid in Caracas that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

While events in Venezuela are still unfolding and I will discuss some below, I use that quote because it illustrates that deaths of American service members is one thing I believe is high in Trump’s mind as he has in recent months undertaken a series of worldwide military actions.

Trump almost regularly points out that no Americans have been killed in the four months the U.S. has been blowing up alleged narco-trafficking boats. No Americans were lost in the bombing of Iran nuclear facilities.

And despite Trump’s threat that he could put U.S. boots-on-the-ground if needed to “run” Venezuela, there is no immediate indication he has plans to do that.

Instead, it appears Trump’s plan is to “run” Venezuela using what remains of the corrupt Maduro military/police hierarchy as long as they do what Trump wants. To me it recalls Trump as a builder working with questionable union leaders and construction firms to get jobs done.

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Just why has President Trump spent time and money, first to negotiate with Maduro to get him to leave, and finally to dramatically oust the Venezuelan President from office?

I divert for a moment.

On Friday, the original beginning of this column was, “Most fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking into the U.S. occurs through official ports of entry along the southwest border, according to DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency).”

That was a quote from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled, “Illicit Synthetic Drugs: Trafficking Methods, Money Laundering Practices, and Coordination Efforts,” that was sent to Congress and released publicly December 18, 2025.

The GAO’s report, including the finding cited above, focuses attention on fentanyl primarily coming into the U.S. through land ports of entry while the Trump administration made its anti-fentanyl focus on attacking narco-trafficking swift-boats initially from Venezuela, claiming they were headed for the U.S.

More recently, the attacks, and killing of those aboard, have been those in the eastern Pacific.

The New York Times published a story by Carol Rosenberg that discussed what happens when U.S. Coast Guard cutters intercept narco-trafficking boats, seize drugs and capture those aboard – but not kill 115 on 35 speedboats as the U.S. military did last year.

Putting together the December GAO report and the Times story raised some serious questions about the rationality of the Trump administration’s so-called anti-drug program.

Up to that time, interception of drug-carrying boats and interrogation of the crews gave valuable information on drug routes.

However, as The Times noted, “Attorney General Pam Bondi directed [U.S.] prosecutors in February to mostly stop bringing charges against low-level offenders in favor of bigger investigations.” According to The Times, “For the most part, people captured by the Coast Guard in the same smuggling routes the U.S. military is bombing are being repatriated -- either directly, before reaching the United States, or through deportation after briefly being questioned near U.S. ports.”

The Times noted that many earlier captured crew members were “poor, undereducated farmers or fishermen [who] would reach cooperation agreements that offered details of their engagement at the bottom rung of the drug smuggling business in exchange for possible leniency.”

The Times quoted Tampa-lawyer Stephen M. Crawford, who in the past had been assigned to represent defendants captured by the Coast Guard, who said the killing of crew members without prosecution amounted to very dangerous “political theater.”

I could say the same today for what I consider today’s ill-thought-out Trump actions in Venezuela.

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As many others have pointed out, returning democracy to the Venezuelan people was not uppermost in Trump’s mind.

On Saturday, in announcing the raid, Trump told reporters he had not been in contact with Venezuelan Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. He then went on to say, "I think it'd be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn't have the support or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman but she doesn't have the respect."

What I believe Trump meant was that the Maduro power structure – the Venezuelan Army, Bolivarian National Police and urban paramilitary networks known as colectivos -- remain active and it is they that don’t “respect” Machado.

They are also probably the reason there are no U.S. boots-on-the-ground.

Instead, Trump seems to believe that by keeping major U.S. military forces near Venezuela, he can threaten additional military attacks to keep the ex-Maduro crowd in line.

As Trump put it Sunday on Air Force One, “Venezuela thus far has been very nice, but it helps to have a force like we have. You know, we were ready for a second wave. We were all set to go, but we don't think we're going to need it.”

Apparently it is Venezuela’s oil which is primarily on Trump’s mind.

As with other matters, Trump seems to be living in the past as illustrated when he told reporters over the weekend, “We [the U.S.] had a lot of oil there [in Venezuela]. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

Nationalization was the culmination of a decades-long effort by Venezuelan administrations of both the right and the left to bring under government control an industry that an earlier leader had largely given away.

American oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil, which merged in 1999, and Gulf Oil, which became Chevron in 1984, were hit hardest. The Dutch giant Shell was also affected. The companies, which had accounted for more than 70 percent of crude oil production in Venezuela, lost roughly $5 billion in assets but were compensated just $1 billion each, according to news stories from that period.

On Sunday, Trump said, “The oil companies are ready to go. They're going to go in, they're going to rebuild the infrastructure. You know, we built it to start off with many years ago.

They took it away. You can't do that. They can't do that with me. They did it with other presidents.”

According to several sources, major oil companies are not eager to spend the years and money at the present time to revive the Venezuelan oil industry, but as with much about the Venezuelan situation, there’s little yet that is predictable.

One potentially dangerous outcome, looming already, is how Trump reads what he so far considers his military success.

On Sunday he made open threats to both Colombia and Cuba.

He called Colombian President Gustavo Petro “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he's not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you?”

And as for Cuba, Trump said, “Cuba always survived because of Venezuela. Now, they won't have that money coming in. They won't have the income coming in.”

He then went on to point out, “You know, a lot of Cubans were killed yesterday. You know that. A lot of Cubans were killed…There was a lot of death on the other side.”

But then Trump quickly added, as I have pointed out before, “No death on our side.”

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OPINION — “There's no doubt that America's adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. If this were a war, that would be one of the worst wars. I believe they killed over the last five or six years, per year, 200-to-300,000 people. You hear about a 100,000, which is a lot of people, but the number is much higher than that. That's been proven.”

That was President Trump in the Oval Office on December 15, explaining why he was signing an Executive Order (EO) designating “illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).”

Notice Trump’s use of the word “war,” and the vast exaggeration of numbers of fentanyl drug deaths in the U.S. -- actually 48,000 in 2024. Also, does anyone really think that the cartels are pushing fentanyl into this country “to kill Americans?” Or is the real reason they are doing it is to make money – as is the case with most drug dealers.

I am focusing on this rather odd EO because to me it is another sign that President Trump is bringing the U.S. military into yet another essentially domestic American problem, drug use. I also see it as the Trump administration regularizing employment of the U.S. military to be a normal response to control civil issues.

Remember, President Trump has employed some 9,000 active and National Guard service members on the U.S. southern border to block what he termed an invasion of illegal immigrants. He has also federalized National Guard troops in U.S. cities like Washington, D.C. claiming they were needed to combat crime, and required hundreds of Marines and originally 4,000 California National Guard personnel in Los Angeles to put down protests against immigration raids.

There was even a military atmosphere in the Oval Office on December 15, because the President used that same meeting to make the first awards of a Mexican Border Defense Medal to 13 Army and Marine service members who provided military support to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In the Oval Office meeting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained that the newly-issued medal exactly replicated the 1918 Mexican Border Defense Medal, but that one went to U.S. troops who patrolled the border during 1916-1917, when fear was of a German-inspired invasion by the paramilitary forces of Francisco "Pancho" Villa as part of the Mexican Revolution.

The Cipher Brief brings expert-level context to national and global security stories. It’s never been more important to understand what’s happening in the world. Upgrade your access to exclusive content by becoming a subscriber.

While President Trump said that “to kill Americans” was a purpose of trafficking fentanyl, the EO itself said there was a more complex goal. The EO said, “The production and sale of fentanyl by Foreign Terrorist Organizations and cartels fund these entities’ operations — which include assassinations, terrorist acts, and insurgencies around the world — and allow these entities to erode our domestic security and the well-being of our Nation.”

Here, this EO seeks to link up with one of President Trump’s first EOs, signed on January 20, that designated unspecified cartels as Foreign Terrorists Organizations to make them subject to laws Congress passed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The new December 15 EO goes on to say, “The two cartels that are predominantly responsible for the distribution of fentanyl in the United States engage in armed conflict over territory and to protect their operations, resulting in large-scale violence and death that go beyond the immediate threat of fentanyl itself.”

Inexplicably, the EO does not name those two cartels.

However, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in its 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment makes it clear who they are by saying, “The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartels, in particular, control clandestine [fentanyl] production sites in Mexico, smuggling routes into the United States, and distribution hubs in key U.S. cities.”

Then both the new EO and 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment carry the exact same following sentence: “Further, the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.”

It turns out that back in the 1990s, a number of countries investigated using fentanyl as part of an incapacitating agent, including the U.S. Defense Department. The U.S. dropped the idea because of a margin of safety issue – the difference between a dosage that would incapacitate and one that would kill a person.

However the Russians did create a fentanyl-based incapacitating agent and used it in October 2002, when 40 Chechen terrorists seized Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater and held some 800 people hostage. Russians finally released the fentanyl-based gas to incapacitate those in the theater and it killed some 130 of them.

Fentanyl is an FDA-approved synthetic opioid used medically as a pain reliever and anesthetic. It is close to 100 times stronger than morphine. Two milligrams of fentanyl -- equivalent to 10-to-15 grains of table salt – can be lethal. Unlike other illegal drugs such as cocaine, wholesale traffickers distribute fentanyl by the kilogram, equal to 2.2 pounds.

The DEA has found wide U.S. usage of illicit, manufactured, counterfeit fentanyl pills ranging from .02 to 5.1 milligrams, the latter more than twice the lethal dose depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage.

Fentanyl illegal drug use has been a major problem in the U.S. since 2021 when overdose deaths reached 71,000. But as shown above overdose fentanyl deaths are on the way down. President Trump even recognized fentanyl use had gone down saying in the Oval Office on December 15, “We've also achieved a 50% drop in the amount of fentanyl coming across the border and China is working with us very closely and bringing down the number and the amount of fentanyl that's being shipped…We've got it down to a much lower number.” But Trump added, “Not satisfactory, but it will be satisfactory soon.”

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The term “weapon of mass destruction” has specific legal definitions, typically tied to nuclear, radiological, chemical, or biological weapons that are designed to cause large-scale death or bodily harm.

Under the Trump WMD EO, implementation calls for Defense Secretary Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi to determine if the U.S. military is needed to enforce 10 U.S.C. 282, a post-9/11, 2002 counterterrorism law covering emergency situations involving weapons of mass destruction.

If they agree the military is needed, under 10 U.S.C. 282 Hegseth and Bondi are to “jointly prescribe regulations concerning the types of assistance that may be provided,” and “describe the actions that Department of Defense personnel may take in circumstances incident to the provision of assistance.”

There are provisions in 10 U.S.C. 282 prohibiting the military from authority to arrest individuals, directly participate in searches or seizures of evidence related law violations or collection of intelligence for law enforcement – but those provisions also can also be waived.

In addition, under the Trump EO, Hegseth is to consult with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to “update all directives regarding the Armed Forces’ response to chemical incidents in the homeland to include the threat of illicit fentanyl.”

I go into all these details because I believe something other than fentanyl is involved here. Others are questioning the December 15 EO, such as Andrew McCarthy in National Review on December 20.

McCarthy wrote, “President Trump may despise ‘forever wars,’ but he sure seems to like pretend wars. The point of the fentanyl ‘designation’ is to shore up his case for using military force against drug traffickers — although its relevance to high seas around Venezuela is hard to fathom since fentanyl is neither produced nor imported from there. At any rate, fentanyl, a dangerous drug but one with legitimate medical uses, is a narcotic, not a weapon of mass destruction akin to a chemical or biological bomb.”

Yesterday, Military.com pointed out, “The [December 15] Executive Order does not spell out a specific military mission, and Pentagon officials have not yet stated whether the armed forces will take on a direct role under the new designation.”

Nonetheless, the EO creates yet another new, domestic area for military operations within the homeland, and what emerges needs to be watched.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

OPINION — “There's no doubt that America's adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. If this were a war, that would be one of the worst wars. I believe they killed over the last five or six years, per year, 200-to-300,000 people. You hear about a 100,000, which is a lot of people, but the number is much higher than that. That's been proven.”

That was President Trump in the Oval Office on December 15, explaining why he was signing an Executive Order (EO) designating “illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).”

Notice Trump’s use of the word “war,” and the vast exaggeration of numbers of fentanyl drug deaths in the U.S. -- actually 48,000 in 2024. Also, does anyone really think that the cartels are pushing fentanyl into this country “to kill Americans?” Or is the real reason they are doing it is to make money – as is the case with most drug dealers.

I am focusing on this rather odd EO because to me it is another sign that President Trump is bringing the U.S. military into yet another essentially domestic American problem, drug use. I also see it as the Trump administration regularizing employment of the U.S. military to be a normal response to control civil issues.

Remember, President Trump has employed some 9,000 active and National Guard service members on the U.S. southern border to block what he termed an invasion of illegal immigrants. He has also federalized National Guard troops in U.S. cities like Washington, D.C. claiming they were needed to combat crime, and required hundreds of Marines and originally 4,000 California National Guard personnel in Los Angeles to put down protests against immigration raids.

There was even a military atmosphere in the Oval Office on December 15, because the President used that same meeting to make the first awards of a Mexican Border Defense Medal to 13 Army and Marine service members who provided military support to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In the Oval Office meeting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained that the newly-issued medal exactly replicated the 1918 Mexican Border Defense Medal, but that one went to U.S. troops who patrolled the border during 1916-1917, when fear was of a German-inspired invasion by the paramilitary forces of Francisco "Pancho" Villa as part of the Mexican Revolution.

The Cipher Brief brings expert-level context to national and global security stories. It’s never been more important to understand what’s happening in the world. Upgrade your access to exclusive content by becoming a subscriber.

While President Trump said that “to kill Americans” was a purpose of trafficking fentanyl, the EO itself said there was a more complex goal. The EO said, “The production and sale of fentanyl by Foreign Terrorist Organizations and cartels fund these entities’ operations — which include assassinations, terrorist acts, and insurgencies around the world — and allow these entities to erode our domestic security and the well-being of our Nation.”

Here, this EO seeks to link up with one of President Trump’s first EOs, signed on January 20, that designated unspecified cartels as Foreign Terrorists Organizations to make them subject to laws Congress passed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The new December 15 EO goes on to say, “The two cartels that are predominantly responsible for the distribution of fentanyl in the United States engage in armed conflict over territory and to protect their operations, resulting in large-scale violence and death that go beyond the immediate threat of fentanyl itself.”

Inexplicably, the EO does not name those two cartels.

However, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in its 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment makes it clear who they are by saying, “The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartels, in particular, control clandestine [fentanyl] production sites in Mexico, smuggling routes into the United States, and distribution hubs in key U.S. cities.”

Then both the new EO and 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment carry the exact same following sentence: “Further, the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.”

It turns out that back in the 1990s, a number of countries investigated using fentanyl as part of an incapacitating agent, including the U.S. Defense Department. The U.S. dropped the idea because of a margin of safety issue – the difference between a dosage that would incapacitate and one that would kill a person.

However the Russians did create a fentanyl-based incapacitating agent and used it in October 2002, when 40 Chechen terrorists seized Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater and held some 800 people hostage. Russians finally released the fentanyl-based gas to incapacitate those in the theater and it killed some 130 of them.

Fentanyl is an FDA-approved synthetic opioid used medically as a pain reliever and anesthetic. It is close to 100 times stronger than morphine. Two milligrams of fentanyl -- equivalent to 10-to-15 grains of table salt – can be lethal. Unlike other illegal drugs such as cocaine, wholesale traffickers distribute fentanyl by the kilogram, equal to 2.2 pounds.

The DEA has found wide U.S. usage of illicit, manufactured, counterfeit fentanyl pills ranging from .02 to 5.1 milligrams, the latter more than twice the lethal dose depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage.

Fentanyl illegal drug use has been a major problem in the U.S. since 2021 when overdose deaths reached 71,000. But as shown above overdose fentanyl deaths are on the way down. President Trump even recognized fentanyl use had gone down saying in the Oval Office on December 15, “We've also achieved a 50% drop in the amount of fentanyl coming across the border and China is working with us very closely and bringing down the number and the amount of fentanyl that's being shipped…We've got it down to a much lower number.” But Trump added, “Not satisfactory, but it will be satisfactory soon.”

Subscriber+Members get exclusive access to expert-driven briefings on the top national security issues we face today. Gain access to save your virtual seat now.

The term “weapon of mass destruction” has specific legal definitions, typically tied to nuclear, radiological, chemical, or biological weapons that are designed to cause large-scale death or bodily harm.

Under the Trump WMD EO, implementation calls for Defense Secretary Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi to determine if the U.S. military is needed to enforce 10 U.S.C. 282, a post-9/11, 2002 counterterrorism law covering emergency situations involving weapons of mass destruction.

If they agree the military is needed, under 10 U.S.C. 282 Hegseth and Bondi are to “jointly prescribe regulations concerning the types of assistance that may be provided,” and “describe the actions that Department of Defense personnel may take in circumstances incident to the provision of assistance.”

There are provisions in 10 U.S.C. 282 prohibiting the military from authority to arrest individuals, directly participate in searches or seizures of evidence related law violations or collection of intelligence for law enforcement – but those provisions also can also be waived.

In addition, under the Trump EO, Hegseth is to consult with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to “update all directives regarding the Armed Forces’ response to chemical incidents in the homeland to include the threat of illicit fentanyl.”

I go into all these details because I believe something other than fentanyl is involved here. Others are questioning the December 15 EO, such as Andrew McCarthy in National Review on December 20.

McCarthy wrote, “President Trump may despise ‘forever wars,’ but he sure seems to like pretend wars. The point of the fentanyl ‘designation’ is to shore up his case for using military force against drug traffickers — although its relevance to high seas around Venezuela is hard to fathom since fentanyl is neither produced nor imported from there. At any rate, fentanyl, a dangerous drug but one with legitimate medical uses, is a narcotic, not a weapon of mass destruction akin to a chemical or biological bomb.”

Yesterday, Military.com pointed out, “The [December 15] Executive Order does not spell out a specific military mission, and Pentagon officials have not yet stated whether the armed forces will take on a direct role under the new designation.”

Nonetheless, the EO creates yet another new, domestic area for military operations within the homeland, and what emerges needs to be watched.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief, because national security is everyone’s business.