Former President Biden Once Called For Strikes Against Drug Cartels

Comments made decades ago by former President Joe Biden are resurfacing amid Democratic criticism of President Donald J. Trump’s aggressive campaign against international drug trafficking—highlighting a stark contrast between Biden’s past rhetoric and his party’s current objections.

While serving as a U.S. senator from Delaware, Biden openly called for an international military response against drug cartels during a fiery 1989 speech, according to Fox News.

“Let’s go after the drug lords where they live with an international strike force,” Biden said at the time. “There must be no safe haven for these narco terrorists and they must know it.”

Biden delivered the remarks while giving the Democratic Party’s official response to then-President George H.W. Bush’s Sept. 5, 1989, address outlining his administration’s strategy to combat the crack cocaine epidemic, according to C-SPAN footage.

In that speech, Bush announced plans to double federal assistance to state and local law enforcement, provide $65 million in emergency aid to countries such as Colombia to combat cocaine cartels, and boost federal drug enforcement spending by $1.5 billion.

Biden argued those measures were insufficient, urging a far more aggressive response and likening the fight against drugs to a major wartime mobilization.

“The president says he wants to wage a war on drugs, but if that’s true, what we need is another D Day, not another Vietnam, not another limited war fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy,” Biden said.

At the height of the cocaine and crack epidemics devastating American cities, Biden described drug trafficking as the foremost threat to U.S. national security.

“We speak with great concern about the drug problem in America today, but we fail to appreciate or address it for what it really is, the number one threat to our national security,” Biden said.

“It affects the readiness of our army, the productivity of our workers and the achievement of our students and the very health and safety of our families,” he added.

Biden went further, warning that the United States was already under siege from heavily armed drug organizations, drawing comparisons to Colombia’s battle against narco-terrorism.

“America is under attack, literally under attack by an enemy who is well financed, well supplied and well armed,” Biden said. “Here in America, the enemy is already ashore, and for the first time, we are fighting and losing the war on our own soil.”

Those remarks have taken on renewed relevance as Democrats now denounce President Trump’s administration for authorizing military strikes against suspected drug trafficking vessels tied to Venezuela.

Since September, the Trump administration has carried out at least 22 strikes on suspected narcotics boats operating in Caribbean and Central American waters, killing dozens of alleged traffickers.

Administration officials have defended the operations, arguing the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with transnational drug cartels that have evolved into sophisticated terror organizations threatening American lives and national security.

President Trump has said the strikes are designed to stop the flow of deadly narcotics into the United States and are part of a broader effort to pressure Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.

Democrats have objected most sharply to a Sept. 2 operation in which U.S. forces struck a suspected drug vessel and later conducted a second strike that killed two alleged traffickers.

“If the reports are true, Pete Hegseth likely committed a war crime when he gave an illegal order that led to the killing of incapacitated survivors of the U.S. strike in the Caribbean,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) said in a statement.

Republicans on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees have pushed back forcefully, saying the Trump administration acted within its legal authority and calling for additional classified briefings on the counter-narcotics operations.