Rand Paul Slams Strikes Against Alleged Drug Vessels, Claims It's Unclear Whether They Are Heading To The U.S.

Paul went on to say authorities don't know if the vessels are indeed heading to the U.S., and lawmakers have not been given evidence for the strikes. "Nobody bothers to pick up the drugs out of the water and tell us if they were drugs," Paul added, noting that the vessels "probably don't have the ability to go more than 100 miles."

"They are 2,000 miles from the U.S and would probably have to refuel 10 or 15 times before they got to the U.S. if they were coming here in the first place," Paul concluded.

The Republican senator has repeatedly questioned the Trump administration's actions in the Caribbean, including forcing regime change in Venezuela.

"War is not a first resort. It's the last," Paul said in a social media publication last week with a link to an op-ed he published in Responsible Statecraft.

There, he criticized the "Washington establishment's long war against reality has led our country into one disastrous foreign intervention after another."

"From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, and now potentially Venezuela, the formula is always the same. They tell us that a country is a threat to America, or more broadly, a threat to American democratic principles. Thus, they say the mission to topple a foreign government is a noble quest to protect security at home while spreading freedom and prosperity to foreign lands," Paul said in a passage of the piece.

He went on to say that "no matter their recent failures, they promise that the next regime change will work, that the next country in the crosshairs will soon be a beacon of human freedom and aspiration."

Paul then added that even though the Trump administration claims that only drug smugglers are the target of operations, the broad military presence in the region is "perhaps akin to killing a housefly with a steamroller."

"Overthrowing Maduro risks creating more instability, not less. The breakdown of state authority may create a power vacuum that even the drug cartels themselves may fill. A generation of purges within the ranks of the Venezuelan military makes them a wild card in the event of an actual war, and we cannot assume they will fold and happily serve a new government preferred by the United States," Paul said.

"Think of the anarchy that followed our wars in the Middle East. Do we really want to risk creating similar conditions in our own backyard?" he concluded.