The Pentagon has warned Venezuela after two of its miliary aircraft buzzed a United States Navy ship in international waters, as an apparent show of force after a US naval build-up in the region.
The pair of warplanes, identified in various media as F-16 jets, flew over over the guided-missile destroyer Jason Dunham in the southern Caribbean Sea on Thursday, and while the US ship did not engage the aircraft, a subsequent Department of Defense statement called it “highly provocative” and “an attempt to interfere with our counter-narco-terror operations.”
“Today, two Maduro regime military aircraft flew near a US Navy vessel in international waters,” the Pentagon said in a post on X. “The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any further effort to obstruct, deter or interfere with counter-narcotics and counter-terror operations carried out by the US military,” the Pentagon said.
This was clearly President Maduro’s response to Tuesday’s US strike on an alleged drug trafficking speedboat in the same waters and general posture of saber-rattling. President Trump says the blown-up boat belonged to a criminal organization tied to Maduro, and the rare military action resulted in the deaths of eleven people.
However, some international monitors have noted that if those slain were civilians, this amounts to an extra-judicial killing, also given there was no apparent attempt to intercept the vessel or arrest those aboard. This is likely what’s behind the sudden frequent use of the term ‘narco-terrorists’ by the US administration.
The sudden terror pretext and label makes it easier to justify direct military action in front of the American people, who have become generally wary of the potential for new, unnecessary wars and foreign adventurism abroad – even if in Latin America.
Maduro has ordered a heightened defense posture due to the US sending some eight naval ships, with Venezuela’s Noticias Venevision news outlet quoting him as saying it is the “first time in history that the communal units of the militia will be activated, spanning the national map from north to south, from east to west, down to the last community.”
Are they gonna use this as a pretext to bomb Venezuela? https://t.co/xFWtcOIzBz
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) September 5, 2025
But the White House is answering further by deploying even more assets near Venezuela in the dangerous environment of rising tit-for-tat tensions.
President Trump has newly ordered ten F-35 fighter jets to be deployed to Puerto Rico, the American territory and Caribbean archipelago, in what’s becoming (or rather, being sold to the public) an all-out Pentagon war on drug cartels. Reports say the advanced aircraft will be in position by week’s end. They will join the at least eight warships and one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine to the eastern Caribbean, which are also there.
Just ahead of this new jet deployment, Trump warned after hitting the drug boat, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”
What’s really going on here? One trend being reflected, as we’ve long previewed, is that President Trump’s worldview is for greater coordination of national and hemispheric defense across the Americas, hence the push for stronger economic integration between the United States and Canada, coupled with a hardened defense perimeter stretching from the Arctic to the Panama Canal. Monroe Doctrine on steroids?
But this surge in major defense assets off Venezuela’s coast could also more likely be about renewing regime change efforts targeting Caracas, after some apparent failed externally-backed coup efforts which happened during Trump’s first term. After all, the ‘war on drugs’ is a losing proposition in the historic US policy playbook (and ironically the CIA was a hidden hand which helped fuel drugs on American streets), given it had been on for past many decades, and deploying warships and stealth jets is hardly the right tool set for something the DEA and Coast Guard have conventionally done.
They are lying about Venezuela because they want regime change and to strip the country’s natural resources. It’s really not that complicated. They lie. About everything. https://t.co/iU4jSLRhuR
— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) September 4, 2025
There’s also the question of to what degree one takes seriously the US administration’s claims concerning Maduro and his socialist country’s role in shipping dangerous substances into the United States. Why not a force concentration against the Mexican drug cartels instead – or at least in parallel? Of course, Mexico is not home to the world’s largest known reserves of oil, as Venezuela is, and consideration of what’s really going on can’t happen without that key fact front and center.
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