Trump's Making Cocaine Great Again

A Case Study in Strategic Self-Destruction.

The Trump administration’s new war on drugs has begun in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. It is not a war of patient interdiction or complex financial investigation. It is a war of missile strikes on small boats, announced with triumphant social media posts and dramatic video clips of vessels erupting in flames.

While Donald Trump frames these actions as a decisive campaign against “narco-terrorists,” his policies constitute the most effective pro-cocaine agenda in recent American history.

Through a unique combination of legally dubious military action, diplomatic self-sabotage, and perverse economic coercion, the administration is systematically dismantling the very pillars of a successful counter-narcotics strategy.

It is alienating key allies, crippling legal economies, and creating a vacuum that the cocaine trade is rushing to fill. The result is not a victory in the war on drugs, but a historic boom in cocaine production.

This is the story of how the Trump administration is, in effect, Making Cocaine Great Again.

Engineering a Cocaine Boom

The Trump administration’s policies are not merely failing to stop cocaine production; they are actively creating the economic conditions for it to flourish.

Decades of U.S. policy in Colombia proved that military actions fail without robust programs for rural and alternative development. Farmers stop growing coca only when they have a viable, legal alternative.

The Trump administration has taken this lesson and inverted it. By slashing U.S. foreign assistance and freezing USAID funds, the administration has gutted the very programs designed to provide that alternative.

Aid to Colombia has been cut from a requested $400 million to as little as $100 million, crippling efforts to build infrastructure and support legal crops in the remote regions where coca is grown.

Simultaneously, the administration has aimed its second economic weapon at the few legal crops that can compete with coca: coffee and cacao. These are precisely the products U.S. development programs have historically promoted.

Now, Trump is threatening to crush them with steep new tariffs on all Colombian imports. These tariffs would devastate the hundreds of thousands of small farmers whose livelihoods depend on these exports to the United States, their single largest market.

The administration has systematically closed the door on legal options, leaving the illicit coca economy as the only rational path to survival for many.

Sabotaging an Anti-Cocaine Partnership

For more than two decades, the U.S.-Colombia partnership has been the bedrock of American security policy in Latin America, with Colombia designated a “major non-NATO ally” and receiving over $10 billion in U.S. assistance since 2000.

In a matter of months, the Trump administration has dismantled this partnership, replacing cooperation with open hostility. The diplomatic collapse has been swift and total.

The feud began in January 2025 over U.S. deportation flights and spiraled downward. In September, the White House “decertified” Colombia as a reliable partner in the drug war for the first time in nearly 30 years.

After Colombian President Gustavo Petro criticized the Caribbean boat strikes, the State Department revoked his visa. By October, Trump had publicly branded Petro an “illegal drug leader” and vowed to suspend all U.S. aid, leading both nations to recall their ambassadors.

This grandstanding comes at a staggering strategic cost. Colombia provides an estimated 80 percent of the intelligence the United States uses for drug interdictions in the Caribbean.

To deliberately alienate the one military in the region with the capacity to fight drug traffickers is, as one analyst put it, “totally illogical.”

By attacking Colombia’s sovereignty, the administration is destroying decades of institutional trust, forcing Bogotá to distance itself and creating a dangerous geopolitical vacuum that U.S. rivals are eager to fill.

Join the resistance. Subscribe for more fearless commentary. Your support keeps this space open and ad-free.

An Undeclared War

Since September 2025, the Trump administration has unleashed a campaign of lethal force in the Western Hemisphere. Without a declaration of war or due process, U.S. forces have conducted at least nine strikes against civilian vessels, killing at least 37 people.

The administration’s justification rests on the contested assertion that the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, allowing it to kill suspected criminals as “unlawful combatants” anywhere in the world.

This legal theory has been rejected globally. Three United Nations special rapporteurs condemned the strikes as “extrajudicial executions,” stating plainly, “International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers.”

The entire enterprise is shrouded in secrecy, with no public evidence that the vessels destroyed were carrying drugs or that the people killed were cartel members. With the CIA providing the intelligence, the supposed evidence will “never see the inside of a courtroom.”

This is not a strategy; it is a performance waged for a domestic political audience, with real-world casualties.

The Harvest: A Record Cocaine Surge

The consequences of this multi-front assault on law, diplomacy, and economic stability are no longer theoretical.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report 2025 provides the damning evidence: as the Trump administration waged its performative war, the real cocaine economy was booming to unprecedented heights.

Global cocaine production hit a record 3,708 tons in 2023, a 34 percent increase from the previous year.

This surge is driven almost entirely by Colombia, which accounts for over 67 percent of the world’s coca cultivation and saw its own production skyrocket by 53 percent in a single year.

This reality exposes the futility of the administration’s militarized approach. The record cocaine production occurred at the very same time the Pentagon was deploying warships and launching its lethal strikes.

Blowing up a handful of boats is a bloody and meaningless distraction when the underlying economic incentives are pushing an entire country to produce more coca than ever before.

The Trump administration has not declared war on narco-terrorists; it has created their perfect operating environment.

Conclusion: Mission Accomplished?

The Trump administration’s renewed war on drugs is a case study in strategic self-destruction. It began with an illegal campaign of extrajudicial killings on the high seas, a policy that violates international law and undermines America’s moral standing.

It continued with the willful demolition of a vital, decades-long security partnership with Colombia, effectively blinding U.S. intelligence efforts in the region.

Finally, it implemented a set of economic policies that systematically dismantled the foundations of legal agriculture in rural Colombia, making coca farming the most logical and profitable choice for those struggling to survive.

The result, confirmed by the United Nations, is a cocaine boom of historic proportions. The administration’s aggressive, unilateral actions have not curbed the drug trade. They have fueled it.

The policies have failed spectacularly, profoundly, and predictably on their own stated terms. However, if one were to imagine a different, unstated goal, the picture changes.

If the objective was to undermine international law, destabilize a key democratic ally, empower transnational criminal organizations, and ensure a plentiful, ever-growing supply of cocaine for the U.S. market, then the administration’s policies have been an unqualified success.

In that regard, the mission to make cocaine great again has been accomplished.

Trump Appears To Confess To First-Degree Murder