Two Venezuelan F-16 fighter jets recently flew over a US Navy destroyer in the southern Caribbean, demonstrating power, according to the Department of Defense.

This event was the latest in a series of tense exchanges between President Donald Trump and President Nicolás Maduro, occurring just two days after Trump authorized an airstrike on a Venezuelan cartel vessel.

The US warship, called the Jason Dunham, did not engage with the Venezuelan aircraft, according to The New York Times.

In a Thursday night statement, the Pentagon clarified that the aircraft were from Maduro’s regime and had been deployed to ‘disrupt our counter narco-terror operations’.

‘This highly provocative move was designed to interfere with our counter-narco-error operations,’ the statement read. 

‘The cartel governing Venezuela is strongly cautioned against making further attempts to obstruct, impede, or meddle with the US military’s counternarcotics and counterterrorism efforts.’

It remains uncertain whether this act was in retaliation for the Trump administration’s strike on the cartel boat. Trump stated that Tuesday’s strike resulted in the death of 11 Tren de Aragua drug traffickers.

The Dunham, the vessel that was overflown, is part of a modest fleet of warships and surveillance aircraft assembled by the Pentagon for its counternarcotics mission.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said seizing drugs from cartels has done nothing to deter them in the past and endorsed Trump’s aggressive posture. 

‘What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,’ he said.

Maduro, who the US does not recognize as the official president of Venezuela, has said Trump is trying to drag him into a war.

Maduro characterized the escalation as ‘an extravagant, unjustifiable, immoral and absolutely criminal and bloody threat.’ 

‘In the face of this maximum military pressure, we have declared maximum preparedness for the defense of Venezuela,’ Maduro also said.

The Pentagon has deployed at least seven warships to the southern Caribbean.

Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro, saying he uses ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ to ‘bring deadly drugs and violence into our country’.

In the announcement, she said the Drug Enforcement Administration seized 30 tons of cocaine linked to Maduro and his associates and 7 tons of cocaine linked to the Venezuelan dictator personally.

She noted that cocaine is often laced with fentanyl, which has led to droves of American deaths.

‘Under President Trump’s leadership, Maduro will not escape justice and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes,’ Bondi said.

Maduro, 62, has been in the crosshairs of the American justice system since March 2020, when he was indicted in the Southern District of New York on a litany of charges related to drug trafficking.

They included narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.

Maduro has been the president of Venezuela since April 2013 and in that time, he has been accused of consolidating power in executive agencies while simultaneously wrestling it away from the elected National Assembly.

There was so much doubt over the veracity of the 2018 presidential elections, which he won, that the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, was declared the true leader of Venezuela by anti-Maduro legislators.

Guaidó was even invited as a special guest to Trump’s State of the Union address in February 2020.

Democrats and Republicans alike cheered for Guaidó after Trump called him ‘the true and legitimate president of Venezuela’.

In 2024, Maduro ran for a third term as president. He was declared the winner in July by the Maduro-aligned election authority, which did not release the voting tallies from each of the 30,000 polling booths in the nation.

The opposition party, who ran Edmundo González as their candidate, also claimed victory.