President Donald Trump is prepping for the midterms, overshadowed by his disastrous war with Iran, by gearing up for fresh military campaigns in Latin America.
The president, 80, secured his second term partly off the back of a campaign pledge to end messy foreign entanglements.
Since then, he has invaded Venezuela, threatened to invade Greenland, gone to war with the Iranian regime, and carried out bombing campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Nigeria.
The Trump administration is now planning to redeploy MQ-9 Reaper drones otherwise assigned to operations in Africa for a new run of counterterror and counternarcotics campaigns in South America, CNN reports.
It follows months of strikes on suspected narcotrafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea, which have claimed at least 230 lives in what critics denounce as violations of international law.
The deployment also comes as the White House has dramatically expanded the number of terrorism designations against organized crime groups in the region. More than 20 gangs and cartels are now on D.C.’s foreign-terror list, a classification traditionally associated with groups like ISIS and al Qaeda.
The White House and the Pentagon are likely to trumpet any success of new military operations in Latin America as a sign the president’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy is working.
Trump promised when he launched his war with Iran on February 28 that the conflict would last just a “few weeks.” It has now entered its seventh month, with Iran’s continued closure of vital oil shipping routes driving up both gas prices and inflation in the U.S.
The conflict is also putting an ever greater dent in Pentagon coffers as stockpiles of long-range weapons run dangerously low. Budget estimates released this week show direct spending on the war has hit $38 billion so far, with another $3 billion in projected costs for each additional month of fighting, according to Reuters.
Voters have consistently ranked the war and widespread cost-of-living concerns among their chief anxieties going into the November midterms. Trump has repeatedly failed to secure a lasting end to the conflict while dismissing unaffordability as a “hoax.”
Those issues, along with a raft of other scandals that have engulfed the second Trump administration, have helped Democrats gain a 7-point lead ahead of the race for control of the House and Senate.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Pentagon for comment on this story.
