Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that the Trump administration has not needed congressional approval for strikes on boats in the Caribbean that officials allege were smuggling drugs into the United States.
Speaking at a year-end press conference, Rubio said he would not speculate “about things that haven’t happened and may never happen.” He argued that, so far, the administration’s actions have not crossed “the threshold into war,” and therefore have not required Congress to be notified or to authorize military force.
Why this is drawing attention
In recent months, the administration has intensified both its rhetoric and its actions toward Venezuela. That escalation began with strikes on alleged drug traffickers operating in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, and later included the seizure of an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.
President Donald Trump has since ordered a blockade targeting Venezuela’s oil tankers, claiming the country uses oil revenue to support drug trafficking and other criminal activity. Trump also said he intends to keep increasing pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro until the government turns over “oil, land, and assets” that he says were taken from the United States.
What Rubio said
Rubio addressed a range of topics, but reporters repeatedly returned to questions about the boat strikes—particularly their legality and the mixed signals they could send as the administration presents itself as a global broker of peace following several agreements Trump has promoted over the past 11 months.
Rubio defended the administration’s approach, saying the strikes fall within its authority to protect national security and increase pressure on Maduro.
“We are presenting every single one of these as justified,” Rubio said. “We know who is on those boats, we’ve been tracking them from the very beginning. We know everything about them, OK?”
He added that the administration has declined to strike other vessels when they did not meet legal standards.
“There are boat strikes that we don’t take because they don’t meet the legal criteria,” Rubio said. “We have everything we need, and it’s one of the reasons you’ve seen this massive deployment in the region, is to be able to gather intelligence and paint a picture that we can justify to lawyers, based on the law. I’m very confident about that effort, it’s been very successful.”
Rubio also avoided directly answering questions about regime change in Venezuela, while calling the Maduro government “illegitimate” and accusing it of cooperating with Iran, Hezbollah, and “narco-trafficking and narco-terrorist organizations.”
What others are saying
On Truth Social, Trump wrote that Venezuela is “completely surrounded” by what he called the “largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” and said it would grow until Venezuela returns “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets” he alleges were stolen. He also claimed Venezuela has been designated a “FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” and said he was ordering “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS” going into and out of the country.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, wrote on X: “NO ONE in America wants a war with Venezuela or China except Trump [bc it might distract people from Epstein or high costs], reckless war hawks like Rubio and Hegseth, and the military industry [war is profit]. But we are closer than you think.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, told reporters: “If it were about drugs, we’d bomb Mexico or China or Colombia. This is about oil and regime change.”
