President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. carried out a strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug-carrying vessel that departed from Venezuela. “We just … shot out a drug-carrying boat, lot of drugs in that boat,” he said . “These came out of Venezuela.”

A senior U.S. defense official offered a more coherent statement, confirming to The Intercept that “the U.S. military conducted a precision strike against a drug vessel operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization.”

The Tuesday attack is the first acknowledged attack in Trump’s recent ramp-up of U.S. military force in Central and South America. The belligerent foreign relations harken back to early 20th-century military interventions, when the “big stick” approach to the Monroe Doctrine led the U.S. to invade or

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