DONALD Trump’s most advanced and most powerful aircraft carrier – the USS Gerald R. Ford – has thundered into the Caribbean Sea on Sunday.
The American steel giant is now cutting through turquoise waters as fears of a showdown with Venezuela sharpen.
The Ford’s arrival caps the largest U.S. military buildup in the region in generations and lands just as Nicolás Maduro makes a surreal, last-ditch peace plea by belting out John Lennon’s Imagine.
Washington insists the deployment is about drugs, but few in the region believe that anymore.
The Pentagon confirmed the Ford transited the Anegada Passage near the British Virgin Islands.
The move rounds off a flotilla of nearly a dozen Navy ships and roughly 12,000 troops under Operation Southern Spear – the Trump administration’s sweeping campaign against what it calls “narco-terrorists” in the Western Hemisphere.
Complete with fighter squadrons and guided-missile destroyers, Rear Adm. Paul Lanzilotta said the Ford’s strike group will reinforce the growing armada to “protect our nation’s security and prosperity against narco-terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.”
Since early September, US forces have launched at least 20 attacks on suspected drug-running boats across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing more than 80 people.
Trump has said the US is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and warned operations would expand beyond the sea to “stop the drugs coming in by land.”
While the carrier group advanced, tyrant Maduro took to a stage in Caracas and broke into an off-key performance of Imagine in what looked like a desperate serenade to avert a confrontation.
“Do everything for peace. As John Lennon used to say right?” he told supporters before launching into the cringe-worthy rendition.
Afterward, he gushed: “What a beautiful song. Younger people should look up the lyrics; it’s an inspiration for all time.
“It’s an anthem for all eras and generations, a gift from John Lennon to humanity. Long live the eternal memory of that great poet and musician.”
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