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Fentanyl is no WMD, but Trump’s Venezuela claims eerily echo Bush’s arguments for invading Iraq
By Al Mauroni | December 18, 2025
The US Navy’s Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group has been sent to the Caribbean near Venezuela. Credit: US Department of Defense.Share
On Monday, the Trump administration declared through an executive order that “illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals” are weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The announcement came amid a massive US military buildup in the Caribbean Sea involving, so far, attacks on Venezuelan fishing boats allegedly carrying drugs, the seizure of an oil tanker, and worrying close encounters between military and commercial aircraft. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described Venezuela as “an illegitimate regime that’s basically a narcotrafficking organization that’s empowered itself”—in essence, a rogue state that represents “a threat to the region and to the US.” Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, posted on social media that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” The only solution to this emerging crisis, in the Trump administration’s view, is for President Nicolas Maduro to step down and to stop the potential flow of fentanyl to the United States—or else.
President Donald Trump posted another threat on Tuesday, writing of an “armada” that was growing near Venezuela and warning the country that the “shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.” Trump’s post demanded that oil, gas, and land be returned to the United States.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is: The George W. Bush administration was making similar arguments during the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Back then, the administration spent significant capital hammering home the idea that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had an active chemical and biological weapons program and connections to Arab terrorist groups. A brief recounting: In August 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney stated that “weapons of mass destruction are being sought by determined enemies who would not hesitate to use them against us.” Then in October, President George W. Bush told a crowd that “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people.” In January 2003, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote in The New York Times, “Iraq’s behavior … to maintain and conceal its weapons” was proving that “it is a nation with something to hide.” Later in February, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein has used such weapons. And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about using them again—against his neighbors, and against his own people.”
Of course, we know how the story ended. David Kay, the lead of the Iraq Survey Group that sought to find Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, told Congress in January 2004 that “we were almost all wrong” and that there was no active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq. By 2006, it was relatively clear that the Bush administration was more interested in removing Hussein for its own political reasons than eliminating any proliferation threat. Yet, even after the dust settled, Cheney said the US invasion “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it again, we would do exactly the same thing.” All that mattered was that Hussein had previously produced chemical and biological weapons and that Hussein was a bad actor in the Middle East.
Today, 22 years after the Iraq War, one can see the same themes emerging in the Trump administration’s roll-up to overthrowing the Maduro regime in Venezuela. In November, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Department of Justice had released a classified briefing that designated fentanyl as a chemical weapon. It was clearly a message intended to frame drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, shipping “chemical weapons” that were intended to kill US citizens.
For a moment, let’s ignore the facts that Venezuelan cartels appear to be moving cocaine and not fentanyl out of the country, and that the drug product seems to be going to Europe, not the United States. The idea that fentanyl could be weaponized has been around for several years, initially dating back to when Russian security forces used a fentanyl derivative to incapacitate Chechen insurgents in a Moscow theater in 2002. While it remains unclear as to whether any nation-state or terrorist group has developed chemical weapons using fentanyl, there have been advocates within the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security that terrorists could, someday, use fentanyl in an attack against US military forces or civilians. But that’s not what the boats in the Caribbean are doing.
It is true that fentanyl analogues are extremely lethal in small quantities, and that US deaths caused by fentanyl overdoses increased from fewer than 10,000 in 2015 to about 75,000 in 2022 before retreating to 48,000 in 2024. While concerning, this is a far cry from Trump’s declaration in 2024 that “we’re losing 300,000 a year” from fentanyl overdoses.
A substance’s lethal dose and statistics about annual mortality do not define the characteristics of a weapon of mass destruction. For that, there are legal definitions such as 18 USC 2332a, which identifies “any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily harm through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors.” There are other definitions in international law. The United Nations Security Resolution 1540, for example, is a good example of the careful definition of weapons of mass destruction. It addressed only those systems capable of delivering nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons that are specifically designed for use as weapons. The resolution defined non-state actors as individuals or entities not acting under the lawful authority of any state in conducting actions regarding the use of such weapons. There is no logical way that fentanyl and its analogues fit under this definition, let alone the specific case of Venezuelan drug cartels moving illicit products to their customer base.
The obvious answer as to why illicit drugs are not called chemical weapons is that they aren’t being used as weapons. The point of the illicit drug market is not to kill the users; it’s to sell drugs to them. At the end of the day, fentanyl is a law enforcement and public health issue, not the basis for a military contingency.
And yet, the Trump administration and its allies have no hesitancy about stating their desired results in this case: the overthrow of Maduro. The recently released National Security Strategy stressed realigning US military presence to the Western Hemisphere and ending “exports of fentanyl precursors that fuel America’s opioid epidemic.” To that end, the president has suggested starting military strikes on targets within Venezuela in addition to the ongoing lethal boat attacks. Elliott Abrams, former US special representative for Venezuela under the first Trump term, considers the nation to be a “candidate for regime change and a return to democracy.” Sen. Lindsey Graham said, after receiving a classified briefing on the boat strikes, that “you cannot allow [Maduro] to be standing after this [US] display of force.” The decision appears to have been made—the campaign to justify the action through legal-sounding directives has just started.
Both the 2002 and 2025 drumbeats to war have included amplifying the threat of chemical weapons against US national security interests. Both have used policy decisions that ignore intelligence assessments to justify a regime change using military force. The biggest difference between 2002 and 2025 is that the Trump administration doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard to make a convincing argument. Their effort to rationalize the threat of “chemical weapons” is paper-thin. It’s an argument meant to convince a small portion of the public or perhaps to offer the veneer of legal coverage to an international community that military force is necessary to overthrow Maduro and eliminate a national security threat.
The Bush administration had a much more robust public effort to roll its message out. Officials successfully pushed Congress to authorize the use of military force, for example. They tried to win UN backing, and, when that failed, they still assembled an international “coalition of the willing.” Their efforts worked until later bipartisan reviews showed that the weapons of mass destruction threat was not there. The current effort to categorize fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction can’t even get off the starting blocks in terms of offering a convincing argument to Congress or the public. The president and his allies can call fentanyl what they want, but that doesn’t make it so.
One might suspect that the US national security community has lost its ability to have rational discussions on the contemporary and future threat of weapons of mass destruction. There has been no serious public debate about the president’s decision to declare fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction and no committee discussions in Congress as to the ramifications of this action. As a result of Trump’s executive order, there will be significant policy implications across the defense, law enforcement, and public health communities from which it will be difficult to recover. At the least, American citizens should be able to look at recent proclamations about the necessity of regime change and say, in the famous words of George W. Bush, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me … you can’t get fooled again.”
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Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
