U.S. Boat Strikes Are Straining the Counterdrug Alliance
The U.S. military relies on international partners to counter the narcotics trade, but allies won’t back lethal attacks
Nov. 15, 2025
France denounced the U.S. military strikes on alleged drug boats as a violation of international law. Canada and the Netherlands have stressed they aren’t involved. Colombia has vowed to cut off intelligence cooperation with Washington. Mexico summoned the U.S. ambassador to complain.
Two months into the Trump administration’s military campaign against low-level smugglers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the coalition of partners that has long underpinned U.S. antidrug operations in the region is fraying.
Instead of significantly reducing the flow of drugs to the U.S. and other countries, the shift to unilateral military operations that have killed at least 79 suspected smugglers could in the long run undercut the decades-old fight to keep cocaine, fentanyl and other substances out of North America, Europe and Asia, foreign and former officials say.
“It could potentially really hurt us in the end, because we need their help,” said Todd Robinson, who until January ran the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. “The fact that these countries are going public is a clear indication of their wariness for the tactics the United States is using. ”
As of last year, 80% of cocaine disruptions relied on international partners, according to U.S. defense officials. But since the U.S. boat strikes began in September, several key allies have emphasized that their own intelligence isn’t being used to strike the vessels, and publicly distanced themselves from the U.S. military operation that some of them call a violation of international law.
And those concerns come as the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its escort ships enter the region, bringing the largest influx of personnel, jet fighters and missiles it has seen in decades. This has prompted unusual public pushback from countries that have long been strong U.S. partners in counterdrug operations.
“We will not allow Panamanian territory to be used for actions against Venezuela or any other country,” President José Raúl Mulino said on Thursday.
President Trump, however, has hailed the operations as a success, saying that “boat traffic is substantially down” since the strikes started. “Interdiction doesn’t work,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in September, defending the unprecedented lethal strikes. “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”
On Wednesday, he shrugged off the concerns of allies. “I don’t think that the European Union gets to determine what international law is, and what they certainly don’t get to determine is how the United States defends its national security,” he said after meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven industrial nations in Canada.
For decades, U.S. antidrug operations have relied on over 20 allies for everything from detection to interdiction to cover a vast area of the Western Hemisphere used by traffickers and cartels to distribute illegal drugs. Most allies maintain liaison officers at U.S. Southern Command’s headquarters near Miami to coordinate interdiction operations in the region.
At least 14 countries have participated in Operation Martillo, a U.S.-led campaign launched in 2012 to disrupt maritime trafficking routes off Central America, including Canada, Colombia, France, the Netherlands, Panama, Spain, the U.K. and Chile.
These joint operations have seized hundreds of tons of cocaine and detained thousands of suspects in recent years, according to U.S. Southern Command officials. Five days before the first boat strike, U.S. officials touted that their coalition had disrupted a record amount of cocaine and “prevented approximately 334 billion lethal doses from reaching American communities.”
Nearly four out of five counterdrug missions intercepting cocaine bound for the U.S. involved foreign navies or coast guards, according to Southcom.
At the same time, the Trump administration has slashed or frozen counternarcotics aid across Latin America. This includes a foreign-aid freeze that grounded U.S.-funded Black Hawk helicopters in Colombia, temporarily halted U.S.-backed antifentanyl programs in Mexico, and a budget proposal to cut the State Department’s main counternarcotics account by more than 90%.
“There’s no Western nation in the world that is engaging in this sort of endgame against narcotics trafficking vessels,” said William Brownfield, who led the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and served as U.S. ambassador to Colombia. “And that is going to have an impact on things such as intelligence sharing.”
The boat strikes “violate international law,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on Tuesday on the sidelines of the G-7 foreign ministers’ summit in Canada, noting that more than a million French citizens are living in its overseas territories in the region. “They could therefore be affected by the instability caused by any escalation.”
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said international law was clear on the matter. “You can use force for two reasons: One is self-defense, the other one is the U.N. Security Council resolution,” she said this week.
Canada has also distanced itself from the strikes. While still running antidrug operations in the Caribbean, Canada’s defense ministry stressed that those are “separate and distinct” from the U.S. military operation against drug boats.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof had a similar message after visiting the country’s Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curaçao this week. “It’s important that we can say that we are in no way involved in the activities that America is currently conducting,” he said, adding that Dutch officials are “trying to determine the Americans’ actual intentions.”
Some leaders are now in a bind as they try to maintain cooperation with Washington while dealing with domestic outrage over America’s moves. Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell has dragged his feet on approving a U.S. request to temporarily install a radar at the country’s main airport, irking some Trump officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The request for Grenada to host a U.S. military asset amid the buildup has faced strong pushback on the island, where the memory of the 1983 U.S. invasion still looms large.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whose country until recently had been the closest U.S. antidrug partner in the region, said on Tuesday that he was ordering his nation’s security forces to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S. until the Trump administration stops its strikes. He has previously denounced the strikes as “extrajudicial executions.”
“If intelligence communication is only used for killing boatmen with missiles, not only is it irrational, but it’s also a crime against humanity,” Petro said, adding that information would only be shared with guarantees that it would be used to capture suspects instead of killing them.
The break could be significant. Between January 2024 and June 2025, 85% of all actionable intelligence used by the U.S.-led task force originated in Colombia, according to a letter from the House Foreign Affairs Committee to Trump in September.
Interior Minister Armando Benedetti said Colombia would continue its longstanding collaboration with U.S. law-enforcement agencies. But Antonio Martinez, a retired Colombian admiral who led antinarcotics efforts in the Caribbean and Pacific, said he feared the feud between the presidents could damage decades of trust building for counterdrug operations.
“It’s a major step backwards,” he said. “The only ones who win here are the criminal groups.”
Write to Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com, Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com and Shelby Holliday at shelby.holliday@wsj.com