The world's biggest carrier goes to the Caribbean

Naval action in the Caribbean, with American or British, warship, has for years been associated with counter-drugs operations. The Royal Navy has often found itself grabbing several tons of cocaine from dodgy boats criss-crossing the seas in the region. But what the US Navy is currently up to in the Caribbean is on a totally different scale. In the latest development, the Pentagon has sent the world's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, to the Caribbean, off the shores of Venezeula. This move has very little to do with firing at speed boats piled with bags of cocaine. You hardly need a 100,000-tonne carrier with up 90 aircraft of different sorts on board to attack drugs-carrying boats, or in one case, innocent Colombian fishermen, or so it's claimed in Bogota. The carrier is the mightiest symbol of American military power. So, its presence off Venezuela has a very different purpose. It's all about putting unbearable pressure on Nicolas Maduro, the ghastly dictator of Venezuela and friend of Vladimir Putin, to voluntarily go into exile. He's an accused drugs baron - accused by Washington - and the arrival of the carrier is intended to show him that his days are numbered. But will Trump use the fighter aircraft on board to bomb Maduros's palace in Caracas to provide extra incentive for him to leave the country? He just might, even though he claims not to want US forces to get involved in any wars ever again. Now, with the bust-up between Trump and Putin, I suspect the US president will be even more tempted to do some bombing in Caracas because he knows it will seriously upset the Kremlin boss. It's all politics, with a bit of drug-traffic-bashing on the side.