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So far, the United States has blown up 14 boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, killing at least 57 people. In the two months since the strikes began, the administration has consistently offered the same explanation: The U.S. has a fentanyl-overdose problem, and those boats are a source of the drug. The federal government has stuck to that line despite the Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Homeland Security saying most of the fentanyl brought into this country comes from Mexico, not through the Caribbean. Anyone with further questions is out of luck. There have been no presidential policy speeches, no big Pentagon press conferences. In fact, a few weeks into the boat-strike campaign, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instituted restrictions on journalists so severe that most media outlets gave up their press passes rather than submit.

Experts on Central and South America are playing a lively foreign-policy guessing game about the administration’s real aims. Does President Donald Trump see regime change in Venezuela as unfinished business from his first term? (The U.S. indicted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in 2020 on drug charges and called his election last year “illegitimate.”) Is this about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s siding with the Venezuelan opposition? Or does it have more to do with Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s desire to stem the flow of migrants from the country? Is America about to go to war with Venezuela, now that Trump is hinting he might hit targets on land and the world’s largest aircraft carrier is headed to the region? Or is it simply a show of strength meant to intimidate Maduro into giving up power?

Wherever the conflict in the Caribbean goes next, the Trump administration has already crossed a line. For decades, drug trafficking has been a law-enforcement issue, not a military one, with clear rules about who could be stopped, who could be searched, and who could be killed. Now the government is justifying these boat strikes by calling the targets “narco-terrorists,” but presenting no supporting evidence to the public. Meanwhile, in some American cities, the administration has begun deploying the National Guard—and perhaps “more than the National Guard,” as the president recently suggested.

So what comes next? This week on Radio Atlantic, the Atlantic staff writer Nancy Youssef, who covers national security. She joins the show to discuss Venezuela and how the administration is using the military in unusual ways without really explaining itself.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Tom Llamas (from NBC News): We come on the air tonight with breaking news: The U.S. has launched a military strike against a boat in the Caribbean, killing 11 people on board.

Nancy Youssef: So starting on September 2, the United States started striking boats in international waters as they were leaving Venezuela.

Llamas: The president says the boat was part of a cartel operation carrying drugs from Venezuela and heading right towards the U.S.

Youssef: The way the United States justified it is that they said these are “narco-terrorists” that pose this threat to the United States, and the way to combat the fentanyl-overdose problem in the United States is to take out the source of it, which is these boats.

Hanna Rosin: This is Atlantic staff writer Nancy Youssef, who covers national security.

Youssef: The problem is, we don’t know who are on these boats, why these boats versus others are being targeted, what was on those boats.