By Donald Trump’s account, his campaign of lethal maritime strikes is an attempt to extinguish powerful drug cartels, not a prelude to attempted regime change in Venezuela. But even by that standard, the operation is already proving counterproductive, straining alliances essential to U.S. counter-drug strategy and starving officials of information central to battling criminal groups.

Veterans of U.S. law enforcement and counter-drug operations warn that the administration’s militarized effort—including 21 missile strikes, which have killed more than 80 people, on small boats that the administration claims were trafficking fentanyl and cocaine—will have little to no impact on the Mexican and Colombian cartels responsible for moving billions of dollars’ worth of drugs into the United States each year.

Trump also is casting in anti-narcotics terms his long-standing interest in seeing Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan strongman, driven from power. Five years ago, the U.S. indicted Maduro and several associates, alleging that they were the kingpins of a narcotics organization that permeated the Venezuelan military called “Cartel of the Suns,” a figure of speech among Venezuelans for generals corrupted by drug money and a reference to the sun insignia on their uniform.

The U.S. just classified the organization as a terrorist group. Trump said Saturday that Venezuela’s airspace should be considered closed, a possible prelude to further action. “President Trump is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

But Venezuela is primarily a transit country for cocaine bound for Europe. Cartels in Colombia and Mexico are responsible for almost all of the shipments of cocaine and fentanyl that arrive in the U.S.—the supply that the White House has repeatedly said it wants to stanch. Three months of deadly boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela and the eastern Pacific, which many legal experts contend violate international law, have strained U.S. relations with several countries that have worked jointly with Washington for decades against the groups that control most of the illicit-drugs trade in America and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Canada and Mexico distanced themselves from the U.S. maritime operation, stressing that they had “no involvement” and offering condemnation. France declared that the attacks “disregard international law.” The president of Colombia, whose nation is Washington’s closest security partner in the region (and the world’s chief producer of cocaine), said the boat strikes constitute a “crime against humanity.” So far, no country appears to have significantly curtailed cooperation in the alliance, known as the Joint Interagency Task Force South, based in Key West, Florida. But that may well change if the U.S. missile campaign intensifies.

Operation Southern Spear, as the U.S. military buildup is called, is putting a “short-, medium-, and long-term strain on our counter-narcotics relationships built up over the last 35 years,” said John Feeley, who served as an ambassador to Panama during the first Trump administration. Asked on Thursday when he might escalate to bombing targets on Venezuelan territory, Trump said, “Very soon.”

“We warn them: Stop sending poison to our country,” he added.

In addition to undermining international cooperation in the war on drugs, the boat strikes also present a more immediate downside to counter-narcotics efforts. Until now, the U.S. Coast Guard has led interdiction in the Caribbean, stopping drug vessels and seizing their cargo, which allows investigators to collect evidence and refer suspected traffickers for prosecution. Those foot soldiers of the international drug trade, in turn, may become witnesses in building cases against cartel higher-ups in U.S. courts. Military force is typically a last resort: The U.S. Coast Guard and its law-enforcement partners used lethal action in their maritime interdictions only three times over the past five years, in instances when a targeted vessel has attempted to “ram law enforcement officers with their boat,” a Coast Guard spokesperson said in an email.

The White House has offered little evidence that those targeted in its maritime strikes were drug smugglers. (The only two known survivors were repatriated to their home countries, where one was released after Ecuador’s investigators found no evidence that he had committed a crime.) But even assuming they were, U.S. officials have emphasized that the attacks are designed to kill, and the boats and cargoes are obliterated—and all possible evidence along with them.

“You’re drying up a pipeline of intelligence critical to understanding the criminal network,” Adam Cohen, a former head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, told us. When asked about this concern, Kelly, the White House spokesperson, wrote: “It’s pathetic that The Atlantic is running cover for evil narcoterrorists trying to kill Americans with illicit narcotics.”

Others doubt that killing those low in the pecking order will do much to stop drug trafficking, because the cartels have proved so adaptable in the past. Thomas Padden, another former head of the OCDETF, told us, “This is just whack-a-mole. It’s lethal whack-a-mole, but it’s whack-a-mole.”

Colombia, Venezuela’s neighbor, is a central player in U.S. efforts to stem the flow of cocaine from Latin America. The United States has invested well over $10 billion in battling drugs and rebel violence in Colombia since the late 1990s, embedding U.S. advisers into the country’s security institutions and granting it the bulk of military training and equipment going to Latin America. U.S.-Colombia cooperation has led to extensive drug seizures, extraditions, and convictions in U.S. courts over the past two decades.

But ties between the two countries have grown strained. President Gustavo Petro, a former leftist guerrilla leader, rolled back some of the most aggressive elements of the U.S.-backed counter-drug strategy, suspending forced eradication of coca, the raw material for cocaine. Cocaine production has soared. Petro is now the subject of U.S. sanctions. Trump has called Petro an “illegal drug leader,” and a senior administration official told us by email that U.S. investments in Colombia have been “nothing more than a long-term rip-off of America.”

Yet Colombia was responsible for 85 percent of all the “actionable intelligence” available to the Joint Interagency Task Force South from January 2024 to June 2025, according to a September letter to Trump from a Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In late October, the Colombian navy interdicted 2.8 tons of cocaine based on intelligence from the U.S. Southern Command.

“If you look at how cartels have risen and fallen, 100 percent of those cases were done as a result of cooperation” between the U.S. and Colombia, John Tobon, a former senior Homeland Security Investigations official, who oversaw counter-narcotics strategy and retired in January, told us.

When the U.S. started targeting small boats, Petro announced a suspension of intelligence sharing with U.S. agencies over the maritime strikes, which he said amount to murder. He and others in his government have since softened that stance. The Colombian embassy in Washington said in a statement that although “no Colombian intelligence has been or will be shared in relation to the recent boat strikes,” cooperation continues—and a senior Colombian official told us that the country continues to share other kinds of information, including with the Coast Guard.

Colombia’s cartels smuggle the majority of the country’s cocaine via the Pacific to Central America and Mexico, where it is moved overland into the United States. If Petro follows through on his threats to end cooperation, the result could be catastrophic for U.S. counter-narcotics. Diminished intelligence from Colombia would mean “we’re going in even more blind than we perhaps are already,” Todd Robinson, who served as the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement during the Biden administration, told us.