Every accusation is a confession. This is clearly true of the Trump administration’s insistence that Venezuela operates as a “narco-state,” exporting terrorism to the US via fentanyl, now labeled as a “weapon of mass destruction.” The charge is not only false, given that virtually no fentanyl enters the country from Venezuela, but transparently political and pretextual.

This hypocrisy was made unmistakable with President Donald Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in 2024 in a US federal court on drug trafficking charges. Hernández presided over a regime long treated as a strategic ally within Washington’s regional security architecture, a reminder that the label of “narco-state” is applied not according to fact but according to the shifting imperatives of US imperial power.

This accusation collapses further when placed in broader historical context. For decades, the most powerful state actors facilitating and protecting narcotics trafficking have not been Washington’s adversaries but Washington itself. Throughout the Cold War and the so-called War on Drugs, the United States, above all through the CIA, repeatedly subordinated drug enforcement to geopolitical priorities, enabling narco-networks so long as they advanced perceived US interests.

These dynamics became especially pronounced in the 1980s, with disastrous consequences both at home and abroad. The decade marked an intensification of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. His administration insisted that communist “advances” could not only be contained but rolled back. Upon taking office, Reagan launched his promised global offensive, intervening wherever alleged Soviet influence appeared. Turning a blind eye to drug trafficking became a central feature of this crusade, as anti-communism consistently took precedence over anti-narcotics efforts.

Reagan’s rise followed a brief but meaningful thaw. In the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War, Americans’ faith in political institutions had been profoundly shaken. Years of economic stagnation, inflation, and the reverberations of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo convinced many that the postwar promise of endless upward mobility, the ideological core of the American dream, was collapsing.

It also became impossible to ignore that the US was not only failing to deliver on its economic promise but had also long abandoned the democratic values it claimed to champion. In 1975, the Church Committee laid bare what much of the Global South had known for decades: The United States had been operating as a global anti-democratic force, orchestrating coups and assassinations, sabotaging leftist movements (at home and abroad), and imposing political outcomes that served the interests of American capital rather than the aspirations of people around the world.

Imperial powers had long leveraged drugs to consolidate geopolitical control, from alcohol’s role in Indigenous dispossession to Britain’s forced export of opium into China.

Then, in 1977, came Jimmy Carter. Carter promised a new foreign policy rooted not in reflexive anti-communism but a commitment to human rights. In doing so, he broke, at least in his rhetoric, with decades of bipartisan Cold War orthodoxy. For the first time, a president openly challenged the axiomatic belief that every leftist movement was a Kremlin proxy that demanded immediate US intervention.

As Carter put it, “We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear,” acknowledging that “for too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.” Washington, he admitted, had “fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water,” a strategy that had ultimately backfired.

Carter would also come to critique not only the misguided zealotry of US foreign policy but, to an extent, capitalism itself. As he turned toward the root causes of the nation’s intersecting crises, he warned that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” and that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” Conservatives responded with derision, quickly dubbing it the “malaise speech,” a framing that captured many Americans’ refusal to confront the deeper structural problems Carter had identified.

Reagan ran on this response. He rejected everything Carter had come to represent. Carter, for his part, presided over a series of perceived foreign policy blunders, not all of them self-inflicted, including the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and his actual record was far less radical than his rhetoric suggested. But Reagan seized the moment, casting Carter as weak, naïve, and insufficiently committed to American power and the American way of life, and he won in a landslide.

When Reagan assumed office in 1981, he claimed a mandate to pursue his promised program of unfettered capitalism at home and militant anti-communism abroad, raising the military budget to what were then unprecedented levels. Yet even with this political momentum, he faced constraints. Among them was a public skepticism toward foreign intervention, labeled “Vietnam syndrome,” which posed a direct challenge to his effort to reassert American military primacy on the global stage.

Reagan, however, was not inclined to let public sentiment, democratic constraints, or questions of legality impede his objectives. This saw its most notorious expression in the Iran-Contra Affair, in which administration........

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