Opinion: The big lie behind Donald Trump’s boat strikes

Open this photo in gallery:People sit at a Trinidad and Tobago port. The White House has reportedly expanded patrols to Caribbean countries, such as Trinidad and Tobago, as it undergoes military strikes off the Venezuelan coast against small boats to deter drug smuggling.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesTimothy Snyder is the inaugural chair in modern European history at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

When announcing an aggressive policy, U.S. President Donald Trump typically offers some grotesque justification – a nonsensical fiction that is supposed to stick in our minds as a rationale for violence. The more we swallow these lies now, the harder it will be to question future falsehoods. This is the magic of the Big Lie, as Hitler explained in Mein Kampf: Tell a whopper so outrageous that people simply cannot believe it is untrue.

Hitler’s biggest lie was to claim that an international Jewish conspiracy was the source of Germany’s woes. In 1939, he and his propagandists spread blatant falsehoods about Poland as well – that it did not really exist as a state, and that it was the aggressor that had triggered the Second World War.

Mr. Trump’s big lies are almost too numerous to count. Perhaps the most versatile is his policy focus is on curbing the illicit fentanyl trade. Early in his second term, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that Canada had attacked the United States by allowing fentanyl to flow freely across the border, a pretext for imposing tariffs on Canadian exports.

Opinion: Canada is not to blame for America’s fentanyl crisisBut in the past few months, the White House has constructed an even more sinister geopolitical fantasy: military strikes on small boats in international waters are necessary to deter drug smuggling. These attacks, which many experts view as patently illegal, have been clustered off the coast of Venezuela and have killed at least 65 people so far.

The extrajudicial killing of alleged narcotics smugglers is less about drug trafficking and more about power projection – and maybe even regime change. Although videos of the bombings have become social-media fodder, there is no evidence that the targets were drug traffickers. Moreover, the Trump administration has reportedly authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela and deployed its most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean Sea.

This display of power is intended to serve as political spectacle. The danger is that it could escalate into an unwinnable, open-ended conflict. The tragedy is that the opioid crisis has been an essential element of the American experience for the past quarter-century. The U.S. has the world’s highest rate of opioid deaths, owing largely to the profit-driven “health care” system that guides people toward pain medication but does not incentivize the intensive, long-term care required to treat addiction.

The crisis began because of a money-making scheme by Purdue Pharma, the U.S. pharmaceutical company that developed and aggressively marketed the popular opioid painkiller OxyContin.Opinion: How the ‘discovery’ of fentanyl changed North AmericaThe Americans living at the epicentres of the addiction crisis tend to vote Republican; without their support, Mr.

Trump would never have been elected. Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are attuned to the opioid epidemic, in the sense that they see the wellspring of misery as a political resource that can be directed against an enemy of choice – whether an ally like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, or an adversary like Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Mr. Vance recounts how his mother, a nurse with easy access to prescription drugs, was addicted to pharmaceuticals. But his political messaging on immigration and security has spun a different story, with Mr. Vance blaming other countries – “the poison coming across our border” – for her travails.

It follows that Americans must view their addictions as an attack from outside. It is important to understand the psychology Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are exploiting. Addicts tend to blame others for their condition. The rise of the far right in U.S. politics has elevated this mindset to a national platform.

The belief that someone else must be responsible for the country’s problems has come to inform foreign policy, with the Trump administration concocting ever more absurd stories – for example, that each strike on a Venezuelan boat saves 25,000 American lives. Open this photo in gallery:In his 2016 memoir, JD Vance says his mother, a nurse with easy access to prescription drugs, became addicted to pharmaceuticals.

As Vice President, however, Vance blames other countries for funneling drugs into the U.S.Gerald Herbert/The Associated PressLies work because they shift blame. Holding other countries responsible for the opioid crisis is an attractive form of moral outsourcing for Americans. But fiction on such a grand scale requires an entire alternative reality to be constructed around it.

Mr. Trump and his administration are training the press and the American public to associate the boat strikes with stopping the flow of fentanyl and other drugs – a prime example of the falsehoods that imperialists tell before launching doomed wars of choice. Wars begin with words, which implies that words must be taken seriously before conflict erupts.

Only by calling out the big liars and telling the small truths can we have any hope of restraining Mr. Trump’s increasingly aggressive presidency. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. www.project-syndicate.org