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Trump Is Crossing a Line That Dates Back to the Revolution

A missile strike in the Caribbean and National Guard deployments are pushing the armed forces beyond their traditional mission.

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty.

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty.

The black-and-white video President Donald Trump released yesterday was, in some respects, familiar. The grainy clip, only 30 seconds long and taken from a U.S. aircraft, shows a small boat skipping across the waves, bracketed by crosshairs. The crosshairs move in closer. Seconds later, a missile explodes, engulfing the boat in fire and destroying everything and everyone on board. That missile, Trump said, killed 11 “narco-terrorists” on an illicit smuggling mission that threatened American lives.

In the near-quarter-century since the 9/11 attacks, four presidents have launched strikes against suspected terrorists in at least seven nations, including Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. But with this week’s air strike in international waters in the southern Caribbean, Trump expanded the counterterrorism campaign’s mission to a new part of the world, against a different kind of threat. And in doing so, he drew the military even deeper into crime fighting, work that has traditionally been outside its scope.

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Author: Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, Jonathan Lemire, and Shane Harris

Source: The Atlantic

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