Trump’s war crimes deserve legal retribution, but also show why we need an entirely new foreign policy.
United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump look on during a game between the Detroit Lions and the Washington Commanders at Northwest Stadium on November 9, 2025, in Landover, Maryland.
(Greg Fiume / Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters sometimes celebrate his administration’s policies in terms that are more damning than any rebuke by the president’s harshest critics. A perfect example came after The Washington Post reported that on September 2 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order “to kill everybody” aboard a boat off the coast of Trinidad allegedly smuggling drugs.
After the initial blast, two survivors were still alive and clinging to the wreck. According to the newspaper, “The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack—the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere—ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.”
A strong case can be made that everything about this attack was criminal. It was an act of war that required congressional authorization that Trump did not have. Further, even if the boat was smuggling drugs, that still doesn’t justify indiscriminate slaughter. But the killing of struggling survivors is the most clear-cut case of a war crime. It is murder, pure and simple.
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There were rare Republicans willing to acknowledge that Trump and Hegseth might have broken the law. Republican Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, for instance, told Face the Nation, “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.”
But Turner’s stance is admirable precisely because it is rare. A more typical and revealing response came from Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, who told CNN, “The president and the secretary of war have been very clear. They’re going to use lethality against our enemies—home and abroad.”
Beyond their cringeworthy sycophancy, Mullin’s succinct words are an vindication of the venerable radical theory of the “imperial boomerang.” According to this theory, the techniques of repression an empire imposes on the hinterland inevitably make their way back to the home front. In the Trump era, the imperial boomerang has started hitting back hard, with an administration committed to using unvarnished violence to shore up its power both domestically and internationally. With the National Guard being sent to major American cities and ICE acting as a virtually unrestrained national police force, the homeland has become a battle zone. Last Wednesday, two members of the national guard patrolling Washington, DC, were shot, one fatally. The alleged shooter is an Afghan refugee who fought in a CIA-backed unit in his home country.
The effect of the imperial boomerang is intensifying partly because the Trump administration has taken foreign policy in a more inward-looking direction. Hegseth has pushed for a new national security plan that downgrades great-power competition with China and Russia in order to have the military focus on the American homeland. In keeping with the long tradition of Republican anti-internationalism, that “homeland” includes the entire Western Hemisphere, seen in imperialist terms as being the natural backyard of the United States.
Trump’s criminal attacks on boats in the Western Hemisphere is part and parcel of a larger reassertion of imperialism justified by the Monroe Doctrine. The new imperialism can also be seen in visible interference in elections in Argentina and Honduras, using threatened cuts to aid and loans to coerce voters into electing right-wing governments.
On Friday, Trump announced that he was granting a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was convicted of drug trafficking on a massive scale. The New York Times presented this pardon as a curious display of “contradictions” and “dissonance.” The newspaper asked how Trump could be ramping up the war on drugs with military attacks on smugglers while also pardoning Hernandez.
In truth, there is really no contradiction. The underlying policy is the reassertion of American power in the hemisphere even at the expense of the rule of law. Pardoning Hernández is a way of gaining greater leverage over Honduras, just as blowing up ships is a way of intimidating neighboring countries.
Trump’s new imperialism, as executed by Hegseth, is also linked to the GOP’s domestic cultural agenda. Hegseth is a strong believer in patriarchy who argues that America has been losing wars due to an abandonment of manly values. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth asked, “Should we follow the Geneva Conventions?” Unsurprisingly, the answer appears to be “no”; in the same passage, Hegseth suggested that the US military could win wars if it told enemies, “If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to the hogs.” He also asked if winning wars was compatible with “universal rules about killing other people in open conflict.”
In the wake of the Post report on his orders to “kill everybody” and rising congressional criticism, Hegseth reasserted his open disregard for human life in the most juvenile way possible, posting the cover of a faux-children’s book called “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists” showing a cartoon turtle blowing up boats.
The sheer barbarity of Hegseth’s “kill everybody” orders has provoked a welcome backlash in Washington, with both Republicans and Democrats promising greater congressional oversight.
Although Hegseth remains unapologetic, Donald Trump shows signs of being wary of being tarnished by the September 2 attack. On Sunday, Trump was asked by a reporter, “If there were a second strike that killed wounded people, would that be legal?” Trump responded, “I don’t know that happened and Pete said he did not even know what people were talking about. I wouldn’t have wanted a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine.” It’s possible Trump is trying to prepare an argument whereby military commanders have to take the fall for the second strike.
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The danger of this debate is that it is too narrowly legalistic. It would be a sizable achievement if high government officials faced justice for these crimes. This in itself would be a departure from the record of impunity that has dogged American foreign policy, with major war criminals such as Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush allowed to escape punishment.
Still, legal sanctions address only a small number of acts. The larger problem is American imperialism. The war crimes are an outgrowth of that imperialism, which has done tremendous damage to both the United States and the world. Ultimately, there is no way to avoid future horrors without dismantling imperialism itself. As welcome as the backlash to Trump’s foreign policy is, the focus on a few crimes is only the start of a much more daunting project.
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