When we name the enemy war, we must mean it

Reason reports that the 'narcoterrorist' label is, in their words, 'tempting, misleading, and unlikely to stop drugs,' citing Brazil's experience with criminal organizations as a cautionary illustration. I have no firsthand knowledge of what has unfolded in Brazil or in the decades since my own time. But the civic shape of this question — I recognize it immediately, because it is as old as the Republic itself.

To declare a foreign body an enemy worthy of warmaking is among the gravest acts a government can perform. I learned this not from books but from command. War is not a posture or a slogan; it is a machine that, once set in motion, consumes treasure, lives, law, and reputation in proportions no planner fully anticipates. When a republic borrows the vocabulary of war for a purpose that is fundamentally one of law enforcement and public health, it does not merely rename the problem — it rewires the instruments brought to bear upon it, and it quietly migrates authority away from courts, legislatures, and the citizenry, toward executive actors who need not pause for a warrant or a verdict.

Reason's lead suggests the label is tempting precisely because cartels do commit violence that resembles, in its scale and organization, acts of war. I do not dismiss that. Organized criminal networks that operate across borders, arm themselves like armies, and corrupt the officers of sovereign states are a genuine threat to civic order. The question is not whether the threat is real. The question is whether the cure — transforming drug enforcement into a species of war-making — preserves or further erodes the constitutional structure we are trying to defend.

From my own experience I would counsel this: a republic in genuine peril has every right, and every duty, to defend itself with vigor. But vigor and clarity are not the same thing. Vigor without clarity produces campaigns without endpoints, authorities without accountability, and enemies defined so broadly that the category eventually swallows citizens alongside foreign criminals. The power to make war, in our system, was placed in the legislature deliberately — not to hamstring the executive, but to ensure that so consequential a decision carries the weight and consent of the people's representatives. When that decision is made instead by attaching a new label to existing executive authority, the constitutional architecture is being rearranged without acknowledgment.

I am told, as the Reason piece infers from the Brazilian case, that the narcoterrorist designation has not demonstrably reduced the power of criminal organizations where it has been applied — and that it has, in some instances, provided cover for abuses by security forces. If that inference is accurate, it is precisely the pattern I would expect. Naming something war does not make the adversary more defeatable; it makes the government more unconstrained.

My counsel is this: let the Republic pursue criminal cartels with the full force of law — extradition, prosecution, coordinated intelligence, and, where genuinely authorized, military assistance at the borders. But let it do so under clear statutory authority, with defined objectives, reported to the legislature, and subject to judicial review. The label matters less than the discipline. Call them what you will; govern the response as a republic must.