Former President Joe Biden, while serving as a U.S. senator from Delaware, called for an international military response against drug traffickers in a fiery 1989 speech that has resurfaced amid current controversy over the Trump administration’s anti-drug strikes. “Let’s go after the drug lords where they live with an international strike force,” Biden said in a 1989 address, Fox News reported. “There must be no safe haven for these narco terrorists and they must know it.”
Biden made the remarks while delivering the Democratic Party’s official response to then-President George H.W. Bush’s Sept. 5, 1989, speech outlining his administration’s efforts to combat the crack cocaine epidemic, according to C SPAN footage.
Bush announced plans to double federal assistance to state and local law enforcement, provide $65 million in emergency aid to nations including Colombia to fight cocaine cartels, and increase federal drug enforcement spending by $1.5 billion.
In response, Biden argued the Bush administration was not going far enough and called for what he described as “another D Day” in the war on drugs.
“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 time, Biden also described drug trafficking as the top threat to U.S. national security during the height of the cocaine and crack epidemics that gripped American cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“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 warned that the United States was already under attack by drug cartels, comparing the situation to Colombia’s battle with narco terror groups.
“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.”
The comments have resurfaced as Democrats criticize President Donald Trump’s administration for a series of military strikes targeting suspected drug trafficking boats linked to Venezuela.
Since September, the administration has carried out at least 22 strikes on suspected drug vessels in Caribbean and Central American waters, killing dozens of alleged traffickers.
Administration officials have defended the actions, arguing the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with transnational drug cartels that have evolved into terror organizations.
Trump has said the strikes are aimed at stopping narcotics from flooding into the United States and has linked the effort to increased pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Democrats have objected to a Sept. 2 operation in which U.S. forces struck a suspected drug boat and later fired 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 of Nevada said in a statement.
Republican lawmakers on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees said the administration acted within its authority and called for additional briefings on the operations.
