From Strategy to Enforcement: What the U.S. Is Doing in the Caribbean

This is Part II of a two-part series examining the Trump Administration’s reorientation of U.S. national security strategy. Part I examined the elevation of the Western Hemisphere as America’s near strategic environment. Part II examines how that strategy is now being enforced.

The current U.S. military presence in the Caribbean cannot be understood in isolation. What some observers perceive as a sudden escalation is, in fact, the operational expression of a strategic shift articulated years ago and formalized in the 2025 National Security Strategy. 

From Policy to Force Posture

Operation Southern Spear is the most visible manifestation of this change. Announced shortly after President Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Southern Spear is led by U.S. Southern Command and the Navy’s Fourth Fleet. While it builds on earlier counter-drug and maritime security efforts, including experimentation with manned and unmanned systems, it has undergone a significant expansion in scope, persistence, and enforcement authority over the past six months.

What the Force Is—and Is Not

The U.S. has now assembled a substantial joint force under Joint Task Force Southern Spear: a carrier strike group, an amphibious ready group with a Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked, supporting surface combatants, special operations elements, and forward-deployed airpower operating from Puerto Rico and regional bases.

This is not an invasion force. It is a control force—designed to deny freedom of movement, disrupt logistics, impose costs, and shape outcomes without occupying territory.

The force posture makes little sense if viewed solely as a tool to pressure Maduro. It makes far more sense as a layered contingency force. Special operations elements in Puerto Rico provide proximity and support for intelligence-driven or covert actions. The Marine Expeditionary Unit (2000 Marines) embarked aboard USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7) and two other amphibious ships offers a scalable rapid-response capability—to reinforce special forces, secure key nodes, or extract personnel if conditions deteriorate. The airwing aboard USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), F-35s in Puerto Rico, and the many missiles aboard cruisers and destroyers in the region can conduct targeted attacks on critical institutions and choke points and establish air superiority over the country to permit unfettered action. Logistics, intelligence, mid-air refueling, and air reconnaissance aircraft flying from the U.S. can support a wide range of requirements. 

In other words, planners appear to be preparing not only for regime exit but also for the dangerous period immediately after.

Why Venezuela Sits at the Center

Under Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has evolved from a failing petro-state into a permissive hub for transnational crime and narco-terrorism. Senior regime and military figures have been implicated in facilitating cocaine trafficking from Colombia through Venezuelan ports and airspace, often in coordination with FARC dissidents and other extremist networks. Unlike Mexico, where the U.S. can still exert leverage through trade, border enforcement, and bilateral pressure, Caracas offers no meaningful cooperation.

That makes Venezuela uniquely vulnerable to unilateral interdiction. From the administration’s perspective, choking off this permissive transit zone strikes at the upstream source of a drug supply chain that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Venezuela was also the single largest driver of destabilizing migration in the hemisphere until flows were curtailed by the Trump administration. More than seven million Venezuelans have fled since 2014, creating ripple effects across Colombia, Panama, Central America, and ultimately the U.S. southern border. The administration views this not merely as a humanitarian collapse but as exported instability. A legitimate government in Caracas offers the only plausible path to reversing that pressure over time.

Finally, Venezuela sits at the crossroads of energy and great-power competition. It holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, yet its production funds anti-U.S. activity through discounted sales to China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba via a global shadow fleet. Targeting Venezuelan oil exports simultaneously deprives the regime of revenue, disrupts sanctions-evasion networks worldwide, and weakens external powers’ footholds in the hemisphere—without direct confrontation.

Southern Spear: Slow and Steady Escalation

Initial actions under Southern Spear focused on drug-trafficking vessels, drawing predictable media attention. But the more consequential steps have targeted regime finance. Venezuela is a petro-state. Oil accounts for the overwhelming majority of its export revenue. The seizure of shadow-fleet tankers and the declaration of a blockade on sanctioned oil traffic strike directly at the regime’s economic lifeline.

Importantly, the use of force did not come first. It followed nearly eight years of escalating non-kinetic pressure: financial sanctions, diplomatic isolation, legal designations, travel restrictions, and economic penalties. Those measures failed to alter the regime's behavior in Venezuela or meaningfully disrupt transnational trafficking networks. Only after those tools were exhausted did the United States resort to limited kinetic action at sea.

That sequencing matters. It is the difference between improvisation and strategy.

This pressure extends far beyond Venezuela. For decades, sanctioned states and criminal networks—from Iran and Russia to transnational traffickers—have relied on aging vessels, false flags, spoofed tracking systems, and ship-to-ship transfers to move illicit cargo. That system survives only when enforcement is theoretical. Once interdiction becomes real, the economics collapse. Insurance dries up. Ports close. Crews reassess risk. What was once a workaround becomes a liability.

This is why Southern Spear represents more than counter-drug enforcement or regime change in Venezuela. It also signals that sanctions evasion will no longer be treated as a tolerable cost of doing business.

Cuba, in particular, is feeling the pain of oil disruption. Its economy is already collapsing, and its oil supplier, Venezuela, has had to reduce exports, creating an economic and, soon, humanitarian crisis on the island. If the U.S. strategy in Venezuela is successful, it will create a crisis for Cuba’s leaders.

Possible Outcomes

The range of plausible outcomes is narrower than critics suggest but broader than supporters often acknowledge. As the nearby table shows, success is not assured, and several outcomes are possible. Notably absent is a large-scale U.S. invasion. The force posture does not support it, and the strategy does not require it. There is real risk here. Maduro survived Trump's maximum pressure during Trump's first term and his personality and actions suggest he may be willing to risk his life to remain in the country. He is counting on the lack of U.S. will and the disruptive nature of the U.S. political system, and the support of his allies to help him ride out Southern Spear.

The Aftermath Question

What follows Maduro matters as much as how he leaves.

The administration has publicly signaled support for a civilian-led transition consistent with Venezuela’s last legitimate electoral outcome in 2024. Installing Edmundo González as president, backed by a broad opposition coalition, would offer the strongest claim to legitimacy and the best chance to reverse migration flows and attract international support.

That said, no serious planner assumes a frictionless transition. Elements of the Venezuelan military will inevitably play a role. The real question is whether they will act as guarantors of a civilian transition—or as a self-interested junta.

The U.S. force posture suggests that planners are acutely aware of this risk. The ability to suppress armed spoilers, secure critical infrastructure, and prevent rapid fragmentation may determine whether Venezuela experiences a reset or a relapse.

What Comes Next—and Why It Matters

I have tried throughout this piece to explain what is unfolding, not to predict how it will end. That restraint is deliberate. Anyone claiming certainty about the outcome, whether confident of success or failure, overstates what can be known at this stage.

What can be said is that the United States has made a serious strategic wager. This is not a symbolic deployment or a messaging exercise. It is an attempt to apply sustained pressure—economic, maritime, intelligence, and limited military force on a criminalized regime with the intent of replacing it, while deliberately avoiding large-scale war or occupation. That approach carries real risk. It could succeed quickly, producing an orderly transition and regional stabilization. It could stall, hardening resistance and testing U.S. resolve. Or it could fracture unpredictably, creating second-order effects that no one fully controls.

That uncertainty is precisely why this moment calls for more than partisan reflexes. The American people should understand the strategy being pursued before taking sides for or against it. Congress should debate the strategy’s merits, risks, and alternatives—not posture over isolated tactical incidents after decisions have already been made. And the media should devote sustained resources to understanding and explaining what is likely to unfold in the coming weeks, not merely reacting to the most dramatic images or sound bites.

Events in the Caribbean are moving faster now. The positioning of special forces in Puerto Rico and President Trump’s acknowledgment of at least one probable covert attack by CIA  on land are evidence of that. The window for meaningful public understanding is narrowing. Whatever one’s view of the administration or its policies, this is a consequential moment in U.S. foreign and security policy. It deserves attention commensurate with the stakes—not later, after outcomes are fixed, but now, while they are still being shaped.

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