(LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump’s drone strikes on suspected drug traffickers, and their ships, have raised legal and moral concerns from philosopher Ed Feser and Professor Joseph Capizzi, a scholar at Catholic University of America.
The Trump administration has carried out dozens of strikes on boats in Venezuela that are suspected to be carrying drugs. Some reporting from the Washington Post suggested that officials ordered strikes on survivors of an attack, but that claim has been called into question.
The administration contends that these drugs will eventually end up in the United States, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to CBS News. Around 80 percent of boats stopped by the Coast Guard near Venezuela had narcotics on them, according to data provided to Republican Senator Rand Paul. However, these boats were interdicted using normal means, not shot down from drone strikes. Trump claims he has the authority to shoot at drug boats.
“We have legal authority. We’re allowed to do that,” Trump said in October, as reported by CBS News. “They killed 300,000 people last year. Drugs, these drugs coming in. They killed 300,000 Americans last year, and that gives you legal authority.”
However, Catholic scholars dispute this claim.
“Lethal strikes, that is, the use of force intended to kill others can only be justified towards those identified as ‘combatants,’ or in those cases absent other possible means of [incapacitating] someone posing and imminent threat to others,” Professor Joseph Capizzi told LifeSiteNews via email. The Catholic University of America scholar is the dean of the school of theology and regularly comments on Just War Theory.
He said the Trump administration cannot “justify these killings under the logic of Just War.”
While drug dealers and traffickers are “awful,” they “are not enemy combatants and we have other means available to us to combat the drug trade.”
Capizzi rejected the Trump administration’s argument that drug traffickers are equivalent to armed combatants.
“Legal and moral means should be employed” to stop drug trafficking, he told LifeSiteNews.
“But you don’t stop the drug trade by terminating the lowest level, most [desperate] and replaceable people in the process,” he added.
Capizzi said that the “causes of the demand” for drugs must be “addressed.”
“Any project to end drug trafficking must have the causes of the demand as its primary focus,” he said. “That way, the means employed to go after the supply won’t contribute to the callousness about human life we find in our culture.”
The theologian also suggested that respecting human life might “build a culture less vulnerable to drug addiction and consumption.”
Ed Feser criticizes ‘regime change war with Venezuela’
Esteemed Catholic philosopher Ed Feser has also been critical of Trump’s apparent plans to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“The Iraq war was thoroughly discussed and debated for a year before it began – and its defenders (which included me at the time) still got it wrong,” Feser wrote on X, in response to a video about Sen. Rand Paul criticizing what he sees as a build up to war in the country. “Yet some of those who criticized it are now supporting or silent about a sudden build up for a regime change war with Venezuela.”
Feser also wrote that “the burden of proof is always on those arguing for war, not on those opposed to it,” in a December 4 post on X, presumably in reference to Venezuela.
Sen. Paul has been critical of the Trump administration’s approach, warning that he is violating his pledge to put “America First.”
“Escalating military action in Venezuela without authorization cuts directly against President Trump’s America-First instinct to keep us out of unnecessary foreign entanglements,” the Kentucky Republican wrote on X. “Everyone recognizes the devastation socialism brings but, it is not the role of the United States to install governments abroad. And if Congress isn’t debating it, the military shouldn’t be doing it.”
“We should not allow unchecked power in this or any other administration,” he wrote further in an opinion piece for The Daily Caller. “It is our job in Congress to declare war or not, and we have for too long allowed administrations to wield a power they do not have.”
