Andrew Jackson’s Precedent for Trump’s Strikes on Drug Traffickers
3rd November 2025
In 1831, President Andrew Jackson dispatched the USS Lexington to the Falkland Islands to respond to attacks on American fishing vessels in the area. The Lexington rescued the American vessels and American citizens, and took some of the locals, loosely aligned with British and other local authorities, prisoner as punishment for seizing the American ships.
Jackson did not pursue a declaration of war which, in any case, would have involved a fairly nebulous authority in Buenos Aires, or more dangerously, with London, although after having already dispatched the USS Lexington, he suggested to Congress that “they may clothe the Executive with such authority and means as they may deem necessary for providing a force adequate to the complete protection of our fellow citizens fishing and trading in those seas.”
The Falklands Incident, as it was known, 194 years ago, was one of many interventions by American forces against, as Jackson put it, “bands” linked to governments, without being part of them that were attacking, looting, smuggling (including carrying slaves) or otherwise causing injury to our national interests. President Trump’s attacks on drug trafficker boats follows almost two centuries of military interventions against non-state forces beginning with President Thomas Jefferson’s war against the Barbary pirates who attacked American ships in the name of Islam.