Pentagon Launches ‘Operation Southern Spear’ With Carrier Group Off Venezuela

Washington has invoked the drug war before to justify force—most vividly in 1989’s Operation Just Cause, when 27,000 U.S. troops toppled Panama’s Manuel Noriega under a ‘narcotics’ banner. Southern Spear echoes that playbook but overlays two newer trends: (1) post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force logic now stretched from terrorists to cartels, and (2) the growing use of ship- or drone-based precision strikes that sidestep formal declarations of war. On a century horizon, the move reaffirms a 200-year Monroe Doctrine instinct—U.S. willingness to police its ‘near abroad’—yet it also tests the already-fraying norms of sovereignty and congressional war powers. If carrier-led shows of force against a mid-sized Latin American state become routine, they could normalize extra-territorial kinetic action against non-state actors and further blur the line between crime control and warfare, a precedent future great powers may cite in their own spheres of influence.