Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton, a Democrat and former Green Beret running for US Senate, told CNN over the weekend that he believes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is guilty of war crimes for the administration’s operations against drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean, comparing the alleged double-tap strikes on survivors clinging to wreckage to actions for which Nazi submarine commanders were executed after World War II.
Jakub Grygiel, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to offer his assessment of that characterization and the broader strategic picture as Iran’s latest ceasefire violations push the conflict toward another escalation.
On Moulton’s war crimes claim, Grygiel said the legal picture is considerably less clear than the congressman presented it. He said narco-trafficking represents a genuine act of war against the American nation given the scale of American deaths attributable to drugs flowing across the border, and that the administration’s framing of cartel operations as a national security threat rather than a law enforcement matter is defensible on those grounds. He said people who choose to pilot boats for drug cartels accept the risks associated with that employment regardless of their economic circumstances, and that treating them as innocent fishermen requires ignoring the nature of what they agreed to do. He said the larger damage done by accusations of this type, comparing American officials to Nazi war criminals for conducting counternarcotics operations, is not primarily domestic but strategic, because America’s adversaries observe these divisions and incorporate them into their calculations about American resolve and staying power.
He said the same dynamic applies to accusations that Trump is somehow pro-Putin for pursuing a negotiated end to the Russia-Ukraine war, or that the Iran campaign violates international law. These arguments, whether accurate or not, signal to America’s enemies that the country is divided in ways that can be exploited. He said the old norm that domestic political divisions stop at the water’s edge was always imperfect but served a genuine strategic function, and its effective abandonment by the opposition party is a real cost to American national security even when the substantive criticisms being made have some merit.
On the strategic framework he developed in a recent piece for the Civitas Institute, Grygiel said one of the most important conceptual shifts visible in the Trump administration’s foreign policy is the recognition that stability and order are not always in American interests. The conventional critique of the Iran campaign is that it destabilized a region where the status quo, however imperfect, was manageable. Grygiel inverted that argument, saying the status quo of a nuclear-armed Iran, a country that has stated for forty years its intention to kill Americans and has in fact killed many of them, was itself the dangerous outcome, and that accepting manageable instability now to prevent catastrophic instability later is the correct strategic calculation. He distinguished between instabilities that matter to the United States and those that do not, noting that Mexico’s instability is America’s direct problem because of geography, while Central Asian instability is primarily a problem for Russia and China. The Strait of Hormuz sits in between: its instability is costly for America but far more damaging to China, Europe, and the Asian economies that depend on Gulf oil for a much larger share of their energy supply than the United States does.
He applied the same framework to Venezuela, where a limited and targeted American operation that removed Nicolas Maduro has produced what he called beneficial outcomes without the resource commitment or collateral damage of a conventional military intervention, with American oil companies now discussing investments in Venezuela that were not on the table four months ago. He said the administration’s willingness to take calculated risks that previous administrations, including Trump’s own first term, were not willing to take is a genuine strategic asset, while acknowledging that the Venezuela model is not automatically transferable to every situation.
On the immediate question of whether Trump should resume the Iran bombing campaign following Iranian attacks on American ships and a refinery in the UAE, Grygiel said his assessment is that a resumption of military operations is coming, though the timing is uncertain. He said the divergence of interests between the United States and the Iranian regime is simply too large to bridge through negotiation, and that the current pause, which he prefers to call a pause rather than a ceasefire given how loosely the ceasefire terms have been observed, is serving a legitimate purpose of restocking ammunition, refueling aircraft, and assessing whether any diplomatic opening exists. Iran’s decision to attack American ships and strike a UAE refinery is pointing clearly in the direction of resumed operations.
He offered a calibrating historical note for those growing impatient with the conflict’s lack of resolution after two months. The Russia-Ukraine war’s most recent intensive phase has lasted four years with no resolution. Two months is an extremely short period in which to expect a fundamental transformation of a forty-seven-year-old revolutionary regime. He said the patience required to see the combination of military devastation, economic blockade, and internal opposition support through to a meaningful outcome is real, but that the strategic logic driving the campaign remains sound and the tools available to the administration are far from exhausted.