Foreign policy

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday that the U.S. military again targeted a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, killing three aboard the vessel.

“The Strike occurred while these confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the U.S.,” Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the strike. “These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests.”

The strike that Trump says was carried out Monday came two weeks after another military strike on what the Trump administration says was a drug-carrying speedboat from Venezuela that killed 11.

The Trump administration justified the earlier strike as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

But several senators, Democrats and some Republicans, have indicated dissatisfaction with the administration’s rationale and questioned the legality of the action. They view it as a potential overreach of executive authority in part by using the military for law enforcement purposes.

The Trump administration has claimed self-defense as a legal justification for the first strike, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing the drug cartels “pose an immediate threat” to the nation.

U.S. officials said the strike early this month targeted Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. And they indicated more military strikes on drug targets would be coming as the U.S. looks to “wage war” on cartels.

Trump did not specify whether Tren de Aragua was also the target of Monday’s strike.

The Venezuelan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported strike.

The Trump administration has railed specifically against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for the scourge of illegal drugs in U.S. communities.

Maduro during a press conference earlier on Monday lashed out at the U.S. government, accusing the Trump administration of using drug trafficking accusations as an excuse for a military operation whose intentions are “to intimidate and seek regime change” in the South American country.

Maduro also repudiated what he described as a weekend operation in which 18 Marines raided a Venezuelan fishing boat in the Caribbean.

“What were they looking for? Tuna? What were they looking for? A kilo of snapper? Who gave the order in Washington for a missile destroyer to send 18 armed Marines to raid a tuna fishing vessel?” he said. “They were looking for a military incident. If the tuna fishing boys had any kind of weapons and used weapons while in Venezuelan jurisdiction, it would have been the military incident that the warmongers, extremists who want a war in the Caribbean, are seeking.”

Speaking to Fox News earlier Monday, Rubio reiterated that the U.S. doesn’t see Maduro as the rightful leader of Venezuela but as head of a drug cartel.

“We’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere,” Rubio said.

Following the first military strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, America’s chief diplomat said Trump was “going to use the U.S. military and all the elements of American power to target cartels who are targeting America.”

AP and others have reported that the boat had turned around and was heading back to shore when it was struck. But Rubio on Monday said he didn’t know if that’s accurate.

“What needs to start happening is some of these boats need to get blown up,” Rubio said. “We can’t live in a world where all of a sudden they do a U-turn and so we can’t touch them anymore.”

Madhani and Garcia Cano write for the Associated Press. AP writer Matthew Lee in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — The United States and Argentina on Monday announced that they are working on a plan to allow Argentine tourists to again travel to the U.S. without a visa.

It probably will take two to three years before visa-free travel becomes a reality for Argentine passport holders, but the Trump administration’s move to kickstart the process marked a show of support for President Javier Milei, its staunchest ally in South America and a darling of conservatives around the world.

The gesture coincided with a visit by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, for closed-door meetings with Milei and his officials. Noem signed the statement of intent alongside Security Minister Patricia Bullrich in Milei’s office.

Noem, on horseback at the country’s sprawling Campo De Mayo army base and donning a cowboy hat and jeans, told reporters that the Trump administration would put Argentina on an “expedited path” to enrollment in the Visa Waiver Program.

Still, she cautioned that securing approval within the next year “would be very difficult,” according to a White House pool report.

The Department of Homeland Security praised Milei for reshaping Argentina’s foreign policy in line with that of the U.S.

“Under President Javier Milei’s leadership, Argentina is becoming an even stronger friend to the United States — more committed than ever to border security for both of our nations,” the statement said.

This first step toward waiving visa requirements for Argentines, it added, “highlights our strong partnership with Argentina and our mutual desire to promote lawful travel while deterring threats.”

The department cited Argentina as having the lowest visa overstay rate in the U.S. of any Latin American country.

Trump’s loyal ally in South America

The removal of rigorous U.S. visa requirements — particularly at a time when President Trump is tightening restrictions for foreign nationals — would offer a symbolic victory to Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who rose to power as a far-right outsider mimicking Trump’s war-on-woke rhetoric and skillful use of social media.

When he became the first world leader to visit Trump after the U.S. election, Milei pranced around Mar-a-Lago like an excited school boy.

At the Conservative Political Action Committee convention in Washington in February, he gifted billionaire Elon Musk a bureaucracy-slashing chainsaw to support his DOGE campaign to eliminate government waste.

When not riding the far-right, pro-Trump speaking circuit, Milei is focused on straightening out South America’s second-largest economy after years of turmoil under left-wing populist rule. Through tough budget cuts and mass layoffs, Milei has succeeded in driving down Argentina’s notorious double-digit inflation.

The last time Argentines didn’t require a visa to enter the U.S. was in the 1990s under another free-market devotee, the late former President Carlos Menem.

Menem’s neo-liberal reforms and pegging of the peso 1 to 1 to the U.S. dollar destroyed Argentina’s industry, exacerbating poverty in what a century ago was one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

In the crisis that followed, the U.S. reimposed visa restrictions in 2002 as young Argentines seeking to flee misery lined up at European embassies and began to migrate illegally to the U.S.

“Argentina has had the advantage of the program before, and they’re looking to get back on track and reenrolled,” Noem, who grew up on a farm in rural South Dakota, said while feeding sugar cubes to a dark brown horse named Abundance, according to the pool report.

When pressed about her talks with Milei, she was short on specifics, saying they discussed security partnerships and “the business we could be doing together.” She said she appreciated Milei’s “embrace” of Trump’s policies.

The Argentine presidency described Monday’s preliminary agreement as “a clear demonstration of the excellent relationship, based on trust” between Milei and Trump.

After riding Abundance through the grassy fields of the army base, Noem rejoined U.S. and Argentine officials for asado — the traditional meat-centric barbecue and a national passion.

She is the third member of Trump’s Cabinet to meet Milei in Buenos Aires this year, after U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Tough limits on travel to Trump’s America

More than 40 mostly European and wealthy Asian countries belong to the exclusive club that allows their citizens to travel to the U.S. without a visa for up to three months. However, border officers have the power to turn anyone away.

About 20 million tourists use the program each year. Currently, Chile is the only Latin American country in the program.

Overseas travel to the U.S. plunged in the early days of Trump’s return to the White House as tourists, especially from Latin America, feared being caught in the administration’s border crackdown. Some canceled travel plans to protest his foreign policy and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

But those numbers began to rebound in April, with more than 3 million international arrivals — 8% more than a year earlier — from countries other than Mexico or Canada, according to the International Trade Administration, an agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce.

In addition to clamping down on the southern border, Trump has put up additional obstacles for students, tourists and others looking to travel to the U.S.

His recently passed “big, beautiful” bill of domestic priorities calls for the enactment of a new “visa integrity fee” of $250 to be charged in addition to the cost of the visa itself.

Travel industry executives have expressed concern that the charge could drive away tourists who contribute more than $2 trillion annually and 9 million jobs to the U.S. economy, according to the International Trade Administration.

About a quarter of all travelers to the U.S. come from Latin America and the Caribbean, the agency says.

Arrivals from Argentina have jumped 25% this year — a bigger increase than from any other country.

Debre and Goodman write for the Associated Press. Goodman reported from Medellin, Colombia.

WASHINGTON — When President Trump returned to the White House in January, he promised to deliver big foreign policy wins in record time.

He said he would halt Russia’s war against Ukraine in 24 hours or less, end Israel’s war in Gaza nearly as quickly and force Iran to end to its nuclear program. He said he’d persuade Canada to become the 51st state, take Greenland from Denmark and negotiate 90 trade deals in 90 days.

“The president believes that his force of personality … can bend people to do things,” his special envoy-for-everything, Steve Witkoff, explained in May in a Breitbart interview.

Six months later, none of those ambitious goals have been reached.

Ukraine and Gaza are still at war. Israel and the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, but it’s not clear whether they ended the country’s atomic program once and for all. Canada and Denmark haven’t surrendered any territory. And instead of trade deals, Trump is mostly slapping tariffs on other countries, to the distress of U.S. stock markets.

It turned out that force of personality couldn’t solve every problem.

“He overestimated his power and underestimated the ability of others to push back,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “He often acts as if we’re the only people with leverage, strength or the ability to take action. We’re not.”

The president has notched important achievements. He won a commitment from other members of NATO to increase their defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product. The attack on Iran appears to have set Tehran’s nuclear project back for years, even if it didn’t end it. And Trump — or more precisely, his aides — helped broker ceasefires between India and Pakistan and between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But none of those measured up to the goals Trump initially set for himself — much less qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize he has publicly yearned for. “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this,” he grumbled when the Rwanda-Congo agreement was signed.

The most striking example of unfulfilled expectations has come in Ukraine, the grinding conflict Trump claimed he could end even before his inauguration.

For months, Trump sounded certain that his warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin would produce a deal that would stop the fighting, award Russia most of the territory its troops have seized and end U.S. economic sanctions on Moscow.

“I believe he wants peace,” Trump said of Putin in February. “I trust him on this subject.”

But to Trump’s surprise, Putin wasn’t satisfied with his proposal. The Russian leader continued bombing Ukrainian cities even after Trump publicly implored him to halt via social media (“Vladimir, STOP!”).

Critics charged that Putin was playing Trump for a fool. The president bristled: “Nobody’s playing me.”

But as early as April, he admitted to doubts about Putin’s good faith. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” he said.

“I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done, and I always hang up and say, ‘Well, that was a nice phone call,’ and then missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city,” Trump complained last week. “After that happens three or four times, you say the talk doesn’t mean anything.”

The president also came under pressure from Republican hawks in Congress who warned privately that if Ukraine collapsed, Trump would be blamed the way his predecessor, President Biden, was blamed for the fall of Afghanistan in 2022.

So last week, Trump changed course and announced that he will resume supplying U.S.-made missiles to Ukraine — but by selling them to European countries instead of giving them to Kyiv as Biden had.

Trump also gave Putin 50 days to accept a ceasefire and threatened to impose “secondary tariffs” on countries that buy oil from Russia if he does not comply.

He said he still hopes Putin will come around. “I’m not done with him, but I’m disappointed in him,” he said in a BBC interview.

It still isn’t clear how many missiles Ukraine will get and whether they will include long-range weapons that can strike targets deep inside Russia. A White House official said those details are still being worked out.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sounded unimpressed by the U.S. actions. “I have no doubt that we will cope,” he said.

Foreign policy experts warned that the secondary tariffs Trump proposed could prove impractical. Russia’s two biggest oil customers are China and India; Trump is trying to negotiate major trade agreements with both.

Meanwhile, Trump has dispatched Witkoff back to the Middle East to try to arrange a ceasefire in Gaza and reopen nuclear talks with Iran — the goals he began with six months ago.

Despite his mercurial style, Trump’s approach to all these foreign crises reflects basic premises that have remained constant for a decade, foreign policy experts said.

“There is a Trump Doctrine, and it has three basic principles,” Schake said. “Alliances are a burden. Trade exports American jobs. Immigrants steal American jobs.”

Robert Kagan, a former Republican aide now at the Brookings Institution, added one more guiding principle: “He favors autocrats over democrats.” Trump has a soft spot for foreign strongmen like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and has abandoned the long-standing U.S. policy of fostering democracy abroad, Kagan noted.

The problem, Schake said, is that those principles “impede Trump’s ability to get things done around the world, and he doesn’t seem to realize it.

“The international order we built after World War II made American power stronger and more effective,” she said. “Trump and his administration seem bent on presiding over the destruction of that international order.”

Moreover, Kagan argued, Trump’s frenetic imposition of punitive tariffs on other countries comes with serious costs.

“Tariffs are a form of economic warfare,” he said. “Trump is creating enemies for the United States all over the world. … I don’t think you can have a successful foreign policy if everyone in the world mistrusts you.”

Not surprisingly, Trump and his aides don’t agree.

“It cannot be overstated how successful the first six months of this administration have been,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week. “With President Trump as commander in chief, the world is a much safer place.”

That claim will take years to test.