Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report. Rishi is still on vacation, so Sam Skove has once again stepped in to co-pilot another edition.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: the U.S. military’s ongoing operations in Latin America, the State Department’s push to Make Europe Great Again, and why the energy crisis could persist even if there’s an Iran peace deal.
Wednesday marked five months since the U.S. military raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. A lot has happened across the globe since then, including the outbreak of the Iran war. But U.S. President Donald Trump has not moved on from the Western Hemisphere by any means.
He has maintained a sizable U.S. military presence in the region, and it’s not just there for show.
Here’s what’s happening in the Western Hemisphere, where the Trump administration has vowed to assert U.S. dominance as part of the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Drug boat strikes. The U.S. military is continuing to conduct lethal strikes on civilian boats allegedly transporting narcotics in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. The latest known strike occurred on June 3. The campaign, which began in September 2025, has killed more than 200 people, according to Airwars, a watchdog that tracks civilians killed in conflict zones.
Volker Turk, the United Nations’ human rights chief, has called on the United States to stop what he described as “the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats,” and legal experts have warned that the campaign is illegal under both U.S. and international law.
And in a congressional hearing this week, two U.S. senators—a Democrat and a Republican—cast serious doubt on Trump’s justification for the operation. They said that, according to classified military briefings they had received, the presence of drugs or arms aboard the boats was not among the military’s targeting criteria for the strikes. (Read more on this in John’s piece here.)
Cuba. The United States has imposed a full trade embargo on Cuba since 1962. But after more than half a century of the embargo failing to topple the country’s Communist regime, Trump has drastically ramped up pressure with an oil blockade. That has exacerbated a dire energy crisis on the island nation of 11 million people, leading to nationwide blackouts and placing major strains on the country’s already fragile economy.
The White House’s apparent goal is to create enough economic chaos that it leads to regime change. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—a Cuban American who is believed to be the architect of the administration’s Cuba policy—this week told lawmakers that Cuba was a “failed state” incapable of reform under the current leadership.
The administration has engaged in talks with the Cuban government, but a deal remains elusive. And in May, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging former Cuban President Raúl Castro in connection with the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes.
Since the Maduro raid, Trump has repeatedly signaled that Cuba could be “next” and made comments that have raised speculation that he might take military action to achieve his administration’s goals on the island. In March, Trump said he believed he would have the “honor of taking Cuba.”
U.S. drones and surveillance planes have recently been seen near Cuba, and some Republicans have called for Trump to take a more aggressive approach (as FP’s Rachel Oswald wrote in late May).
Joint operations. The United States began conducting joint military operations with Ecuador this year against drug trafficking groups and is reportedly pushing for more Latin American countries to follow suit.
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo in late May denied a New York Times report that his government had reached an agreement with the United States to conduct joint strikes against drug traffickers. However, he said there is “a request that falls within the framework of existing agreements in several countries.”
“What we are signing are types of collaboration that have been taking place in the past. We conduct maritime interdictions where the United States has been collaborating with training, capacity building and equipment,” Arévalo said. The Guatemalan government stated that there was “no agreement authorizing foreign military operations on national territory.”
Trump announced on Tuesday that Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, will serve as acting director of national intelligence, a cabinet-level role that oversees the intelligence community.
Pulte, a businessman, has no known national security experience, a fact that has raised concern among members of Congress, including some Republicans. However, Pulte has demonstrated loyalty to Trump, including by targeting several of the president’s political enemies, alleging that they had engaged in mortgage fraud.
Pulte can serve in his role for at least 210 days without Senate confirmation. He replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who said in May that she was stepping down.
Culture wars. The State Department will soon announce a wave of grants aimed partly at boosting conservative causes in Europe, according to a scoop from Sam this week. The move is likely to cause tension with some mainstream European politicians.
A State Department spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Sam that the new push takes its inspiration from the White House National Security Strategy. That document framed the European Union, immigration, and alleged democratic backsliding as a threat to Europe while making little reference to Russia.
“The effort is being overseen by a little-known office within the department known as the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) that was historically involved in promoting democracy in places such as Cuba, Iran, and Russia,” Sam writes. “Leading the charge is the bureau’s No. 2 official, a 27-year-old who previously worked at a conservative group with ties to Vance and who first came to prominence for writing a State Department essay criticizing Europe.”
Energy crisis. Oil and gas prices will likely continue to increase over the next few months even if the Trump administration and Iran agree on a peace deal soon, FP’s Keith Johnson reports. That’s due in part to the continued physical risk associated with the war, but also to the technical challenges of restarting oil production.
“During the war, around 13 million barrels a day of oil production came offline, as export outlets were mostly closed. Even in a best-case scenario, restoring those oil fields to prewar production levels will take time, but the scale and duration of the outage has raised questions about possible longer-term damage to reservoirs, a particular issue for Iraq and Kuwait,” Johnson writes. “Coupled with the more direct war-related damage to oil and gas facilities, which some estimates put as high as $50 billion, the road to full recovery of production will take months at least.”
Smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike in Nabatieh, Lebanon, on June 2. Adri Salido/Getty Images
Sunday, June 7: Peru is set to elect a new president in runoff elections.
Armenia is holding parliamentary elections.
Kosovo is scheduled to hold snap parliamentary elections.
“It’s complex. This has been going on since O.J. had Isotoners.”
—Rubio, seemingly quoting Kayne West’s “Stronger” while testifying before Congress on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict on Wednesday.
U.S. fine arts commissioner Rodney Mims Cook Jr. this week became the first U.S. official to visit Russia’s marquee economic conference, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, in almost 10 years.
In a presentation on Thursday, Cook recounted his personal ties to Russia—including with Yury Ushakov, a top advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin—thanks to his work on architectural history. “I’ve met so many people in this country that matter to me greatly,” he said, to a table that also appeared to include American actor and prominent Putin supporter Steven Seagal.
Forum organizers said Trump chose Cook, who is overseeing the president’s White House ballroom project, “to be his representative” at the forum. However, Rubio told senators on Wednesday that he wasn’t aware that the United States had sent a delegation
