U.S. Flies B-1 Bombers Near Venezuela as Trump Expands Anti-Drug Campaign

ERBIL (Kurdista24) – The United States has dramatically escalated its military pressure campaign in the Western Hemisphere, flying powerful, supersonic B-1 bombers near the coast of Venezuela on Thursday in a formidable show of force that signals a potential widening of President Donald Trump's "war on drugs."

The flights, confirmed by senior U.S. officials and flight tracking data to The Wall Street Journal and Fox News, represent the latest and most potent display in a massive military ramp-up in the region, a campaign that the administration insists is aimed at dismantling transnational drug cartels but which a growing chorus of critics—including, surprisingly, some of President Trump's most ardent "America First" supporters—fear is a dangerous slide into a "neocon 3.0" agenda of regime change aimed at toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The complex and often contradictory nature of the administration's policy was on full display Thursday.

Even as two B-1 Lancers, capable of carrying a massive 75,000-pound bomb load, took off from Dyess Air Force Base in Texas and flew toward the South American nation, President Trump, during a White House roundtable on crime, issued a flat denial of the operation.

"No, it's not accurate. It's false," Trump said when asked about the B-1 flights. He immediately pivoted, however, to reiterate his administration's deep grievances with Caracas.

"But we're not happy with Venezuela for a lot of reasons, drugs being one of them. But, also, they've been sending their prisoners into our country," he stated.

This public denial, directly contradicted by his own officials, underscores the opaque and highly personalized nature of a campaign that has seen the U.S. surge over 10,000 troops, eight warships, a submarine, and an array of advanced aircraft into the Caribbean and, more recently, the Pacific.

The stated objective is a fierce and unprecedented crackdown on what the administration calls "narcoterrorists."

At the roundtable, which was convened to tout the successes of newly established Homeland Security Task Forces, Trump celebrated what he called a "sweeping, unprecedented, and historically successful operation... to arrest, prosecute and permanently remove members of foreign drug cartels from American soil."

He framed the cartels in stark, martial terms, declaring them "the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere" and vowing to "not stop until the threat has been fully and completely eradicated."

The most controversial element of this campaign has been a series of lethal kinetic strikes against suspected narco-trafficking vessels at sea. Just hours before the roundtable, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed another strike on Wednesday, this one killing three suspects.

As reported by Fox News, this marked the ninth such vessel strike since the operations began in September, bringing the total death toll to a reported 37 individuals.

The administration has expanded the campaign's geographic scope, with Hegseth announcing earlier in the week that U.S. forces had also attacked two vessels in the eastern Pacific.

President Trump has made it clear that he views these at-sea operations as just the beginning, suggesting that strikes on land could be next.

"There are few boats traveling on the water, so now they’ll come in by land to a lesser extent, and they will be hit on land also," Trump said at the White House on Wednesday, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

At the Thursday roundtable, he elaborated, stating he believes the cartels will now try to infiltrate the U.S. primarily by land. "The land is going to be next," he warned. "We may go to the Senate, we may go to Congress and tell them about it. But I can't imagine they'd have any problem with it."

When asked directly why he was not seeking a formal declaration of war, the President was dismissive. "I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war," he said. "I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. … They're going to be, like, dead."

It is this aggressive rhetoric and the clear signals of a widening conflict that have many observers, both inside and outside the administration, questioning the true objective of the massive military deployment.

As detailed in a comprehensive report by The Washington Post, Trump has already signed a "finding," or authorization document, for CIA covert operations inside Venezuela, a country whose president he has charged with heading a narcotics cartel.

While the precise instructions to the spy agency are highly classified, two people familiar with the document described it to the Post as authorizing "aggressive agency action" that, while not explicitly ordering the overthrow of Maduro, includes steps that could lead to that outcome.

One person familiar with the internal deliberations put it bluntly: "At the end of the day if you have authority to take out cartel runners" at sea, "you can take out the cartel boss."

This drift towards a potential regime-change operation in Venezuela has created a surprising and significant fissure within President Trump's own base of support.

Several prominent conservative commentators and policy advisers, who rallied around Trump's pledge to end America's "forever wars," are now raising alarms about the expanding military actions.

As reported by The New York Times, these figures fear that the hawkish, interventionist views that Trump once campaigned against are re-emerging within his second administration.

"There’s supposed to be incentives for ending wars and conflicts around the world," Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and influential outside adviser to Trump, said in an interview with the Times. "Yet, here we have this conflict with Venezuela that is only going to escalate."

Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, posed the question even more pointedly on a recent episode of his podcast: "Is this just a breeding ground for neocon 3.0?"

Much of this conservative skepticism is directed at Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a figure long labeled a "neocon" for his historically aggressive and interventionist foreign policy views.

According to The New York Times, Rubio is now the architect of a strategy to use military pressure and other means to oust Maduro, casting it as an "America First" effort to stop the flow of drugs and migrants.

Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, expressed deep skepticism of this approach.

"The regime-change stuff is what I’m most skeptical of," he told the Times. "I think that is just so politically hypocritical. Trump ran against the deep state, and now we’re going to cooperate with the C.I.A. to overthrow a government? It doesn’t pass the laugh test."

This internal conservative critique is bolstered by growing bipartisan scrutiny in Congress over the legal basis for the strikes, as well as factual questions about the identity of the victims.

The Trump administration has insisted the nearly 40 people killed at sea were drug smugglers but has not presented public evidence to support this claim.

The case has been challenged by recent events, particularly a U.S. strike last week that resulted in two survivors from Colombia and Ecuador who were quickly repatriated to their home countries instead of being detained and prosecuted as major drug traffickers.

This has fueled suspicions among legal experts and foreign policy analysts that the administration is not, in fact, killing important cartel members.

The policy has also created significant diplomatic friction. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has accused the United States of murdering a Colombian fisherman in a September 15 attack and killing other Colombian civilians in a subsequent strike. Trump has responded by calling Petro a "lunatic" and an "illegal drug leader," threatening to cut all U.S. aid to Bogotá and impose crippling tariffs.

In Venezuela, the government has responded to the escalating U.S. pressure by mobilizing its own troops to coastal areas and, according to Maduro, enrolling millions of people in civilian militias.

While Trump has publicly mocked these preparations, reposting a video of a woman training awkwardly with a gun and sarcastically calling it a "very serious threat," some analysts warn against underestimating the potential consequences of a U.S. intervention.

Geoffrey Corn, a retired Army officer and director of Texas Tech University’s Center for Military Law and Policy, wrote on the War on the Rocks website that "what began as a limited action against a handful of alleged drug smugglers could quickly expand to an interstate war, regime change ... and all the second and third order consequences the United States has experienced that are often harder to address than defeating the enemy in battle."

As the drums of war beat louder in the Caribbean, the flight of the B-1 bombers serves as an unmistakable signal of "seriousness and intent," as one retired Air Force general told The Wall Street Journal.

The question that remains, however, is what exactly that intent is. Is it, as the administration publicly claims, a narrowly focused war on drug cartels? Or is it, as many now fear, the prelude to another American-led regime-change war, an outcome that would not only plunge the region into deeper turmoil but would also represent a profound betrayal of the very "America First" principles that brought President Trump back to power.