The videos of carnage on the open seas have, by now, become almost routine: A small, fast-moving boat skips along the waves. Seconds later, it erupts into a ball of flame after munitions flying too quickly to be seen on camera strike their target. By the end of the short clip, huge clouds of smoke fill the screen. After one such air strike last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the four people on board—who were alleged drug runners—the way the United States once depicted al-Qaeda operatives: They are, in Hegseth’s telling, “combatants,” foot soldiers in a foreign terrorist organization that is seeking to “poison our people” and who therefore must be eliminated by any means.

“These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!” Hegseth wrote.

There are a few holes in the defense secretary’s account. For one thing, the boats—there have been four of them—have not been carrying enough fuel to travel from the South American coast directly to the United States. For another, the administration has not said what kind of drugs it is seeking, through the strikes, to stop from entering. But relative to some of its neighbors, Venezuela is neither a major producer nor a significant transit hub for drugs. (Fentanyl, the drug that the president said is “killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and many very young, beautiful people,” doesn’t come through the Caribbean at all.) The United States has also not publicly revealed why it believes that those on board these boats are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang and the cartel that is the ostensible target. Even some of the president’s supporters on Capitol Hill have said that the legal case for military strikes seems dubious at best.

Read: Fentanyl doesn’t come through the Caribbean

Yet White House officials have shrugged off questions about the strikes, believing the attacks have a legitimate security rationale and, importantly, are politically popular. “No one is going to mourn a murderous, drug-dealing gang member,” one told us.

Both hawkish and isolationist figures in Donald Trump’s orbit have found reasons to support the strikes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for instance, is a hard-liner on Latin America who has advocated for the ouster of leftist strongmen, including in Cuba, Nicaragua, and, of course, Venezuela. Rubio—whose home state of Florida has a large Venezuelan population—has spoken against Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who stole the coun