Horizon Accord | Donroe Doctrine | Cuba Venezuela | Machine Learning
The Donroe Doctrine
Cuba is the visible pressure point. The underlying architecture is hemispheric resource control.
The Execution Layer
On January 3, 2026 — less than a month after the NSS was published — US special forces conducted Operation Absolute Resolve: a military strike across northern Venezuela beginning at approximately 2 a.m. local time, suppressing air defenses and seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Caracas. Both were transported to New York City to face federal charges including narcoterrorism and cocaine importation. At a press conference from Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced the United States would "run Venezuela" until a "safe, proper, and judicious transition" of power could occur.
In the days immediately following Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States used its new control over Venezuelan oil flows as a direct pressure mechanism against Cuba — which had depended on Venezuela as its primary oil supplier. The Council on Foreign Relations documented that the administration explicitly announced it would use that oil flow control to "pressure Cuba and other allies." Operation Absolute Resolve was not a standalone event. It created the leverage used in the next phase.
Trump had telegraphed the Cuba sequence directly. At his January 3 press conference, after announcing US dominance in the Western Hemisphere "will never be questioned again," he said Cuba "is ready to fall." As of May 2026, Trump has publicly stated the US will take over Cuba "almost immediately." The Security Council Report noted in January that Cuba and Colombia were both referenced at the Venezuela emergency session as next targets under the Trump Corollary framework.
The sequence from doctrine publication to Venezuela seizure to Cuba pressure to Cuba annexation announcement ran approximately five months. Each step was foreshadowed by the previous one.
The Resource Layer
Venezuela holds the world's largest proven oil reserves — approximately 303 billion barrels, roughly one fifth of the global total. The potential is historic. The reality is different. At the time of the US operation, Venezuela was producing less than one million barrels per day, less than one percent of global supply — down from 3.5 million barrels per day before Hugo Chávez and a decade of mismanagement hollowed out the state oil company PDVSA. Infrastructure that hasn't been meaningfully updated in fifty years would require an estimated $58 to $110 billion in investment and a minimum of five to ten years of sustained rebuilding before production could approach its former ceiling.
The type of oil Venezuela sits on adds a further layer of complexity that is almost never mentioned in coverage of the intervention. Venezuelan crude is heavy and sour — thick, sulfur-laden, requiring specialized refining equipment and chemical inputs that are not available at scale. It is not interchangeable with the light, sweet crude the United States predominantly produces domestically. The Gulf Coast refineries that can process Venezuelan heavy crude were specifically built and expanded for that purpose decades ago — meaning the supply chain connection exists, but it requires particular infrastructure on both ends. Venezuelan crude is well-suited for producing diesel, asphalt, and industrial fuels. It does not translate directly into lower prices at the gasoline pump.
On the day of the Venezuela operation, Trump met with executives from Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil at the White House. Chevron — the only major US company still operating in Venezuela at the time — announced plans to immediately expand its existing investments. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips held back. Both companies had assets seized by the Venezuelan government in 2007 during Hugo Chávez's nationalization campaign and are still owed billions in unresolved arbitration claims. Their hesitation was not ideological. It was financial: they needed legal and structural reforms before committing capital to a country that had already expropriated them once. The CEO of ExxonMobil told Trump directly that Venezuela was "uninvestable" without those reforms in place.
The public justification for the Venezuela operation centered on narcoterrorism and Maduro's indictment. The documented financial beneficiaries of the operation are three US energy corporations, two of whom had expropriated assets to recover. The framing of the operation as law enforcement and the reality of its corporate beneficiaries are not the same thing, and the documentary record does not require choosing between them — both are simultaneously true.
Venezuela, then, is one node in a larger resource architecture. Oil — even heavy, difficult, decade-away oil — is one category of strategic asset. The NSS framework explicitly references "strategically vital assets" in the plural, and its scope extends beyond energy. Ninety miles from Florida sits a second node, with a different resource profile, a different strategic logic, and a supply chain gap measured in years rather than decades.
Cuba holds the world's third largest cobalt reserves. The Moa Bay mining complex in northeastern Cuba was originally developed during World War Two, largely paid for by the US government, specifically to supply the American industrial shortage of nickel and cobalt. The United States lost access to those reserves after the 1959 revolution and the subsequent embargo. Cuba currently ranks as the world's fifth largest cobalt producer. The US Geological Survey designates cobalt as one of 35 critical minerals on which the United States is heavily import-dependent. China currently controls approximately 79 percent of global refined cobalt production.
The strategic alignment becomes legible: the US built the Moa Bay complex, lost access to it, and is now taking active steps to clear the field of its current operators. The embargo has kept Cuban cobalt inaccessible specifically to American industry while China moved in through documented joint venture agreements.
The Competitor Layer
Russia entered 2026 in fiscal crisis. Western sanctions had driven Russian oil export revenues to $9.5 billion in February 2026 — the lowest level since the full-scale Ukraine invasion began in 2022. Russian GDP contracted 1.8 percent in the first two months of 2026. The economy was described by multiple analysts as approaching a breaking point that could have forced Putin to make concessions on Ukraine.
The US-Israeli war on Iran, which began in March 2026, rescued the Russian fiscal situation. Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz drove global oil prices sharply higher. Combined with the US temporarily easing sanctions on Russian oil during the conflict, Russia's oil export revenues nearly doubled in March 2026 — reaching $19 billion. The Kyiv School of Economics estimated Russia could receive between $45 billion and $151 billion in additional budget revenues in 2026 depending on the conflict's duration. Russia's federal budget still came in below baseline every single month of 2026, but the Iran war windfall prevented the collapse that had been developing in February.
The Iran war financially rescued Russia at the precise moment Western sanctions were succeeding. Whether that outcome was intended, anticipated, or simply accepted as a byproduct of other strategic objectives is not answerable from the current documentary record. What is answerable is that Russia benefited, and that benefit directly extended Russia's capacity to sustain the war in Ukraine.
Analysts at multiple institutions — including the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Council on Foreign Relations — have described a long-game strategic objective: bringing Venezuelan and Cuban energy and mineral resources fully online under US corporate control over the next decade, flooding global markets with US-controlled supply, and using that supply to deliberately crash oil prices. The mechanism depends less on immediate production than on future supply expectations, infrastructure investment, and control over long-term market capacity. At sustained low oil prices, Russia's war economy — structurally dependent on energy revenues above a certain threshold — becomes financially untenable. This outcome is analytically coherent and well-supported by the documented resource positioning. It has not been named as an explicit objective in any public document currently available to this publication. It is therefore classified as Hypothesis.
"Today, it is not only Venezuela's sovereignty that is at stake. The credibility of international law, the authority of this Organization and the validity of the principle that no State can set itself up as judge, party and executor of the world order are also at stake." — Venezuelan Ambassador to the UN Samuel Moncada, UN Security Council Emergency Session, January 5, 2026
The Field-Clearing Layer
On May 1, 2026 — eleven days before this essay's publication — the Trump administration issued Executive Order 14404, authorizing the blocking of assets of any foreign individual or entity operating in key sectors of the Cuban economy, including energy, financial services, mining, and defense. On or around May 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions specifically targeting Moa Nickel SA — the joint venture between Canadian miner Sherritt International and Cuba's state-owned General Nickel Company — which operates the Moa Bay cobalt and nickel complex. Hours before the announcement, Sherritt suspended all operations at Moa, began repatriating employees, and three of its directors, including its chairman, resigned with immediate effect.
The sanctions did not arrive without warning on the Cuban side. Reporting confirmed that secret negotiations — referred to in diplomatic circles as "Operation Cubastroika" — had been underway since February 2026, including a covert meeting between Rubio's team and a grandson of Raúl Castro, bypassing Cuba's sitting president Díaz-Canel. On April 20, the US issued Cuba a two-week ultimatum: release high-profile political prisoners or face escalated consequences. When the deadline expired without a satisfactory response, Trump signed EO 14404 on May 1. The Sherritt sanctions followed six days later. The field-clearing was not purely strategic positioning — it was also the documented consequence of a collapsed negotiation.
The Moa Bay complex — the cobalt and nickel mining operation on Cuba's northeastern coast — was built by the United States during World War Two, largely paid for by the US government to secure its own supply of strategic minerals. It was lost when Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution nationalized foreign assets across the island. For the past three decades, Toronto-based Sherritt International has been operating the site through a 50/50 joint venture with Cuba's state-owned General Nickel Company. Sherritt — among the last companies to operate at scale in Cuba despite decades of punishing US sanctions — has now been sanctioned out of the site. Not after a Cuba regime change. Before one.
The effect is to clear the field in advance of whatever comes next. EO 14404 provides the legal instrument to remove foreign competitors from strategically relevant sectors of the Cuban economy before US access is restored.
Panasonic had previously cut ties with Sherritt after discovering that Cuban cobalt was flowing into Tesla batteries through their supply chain — citing US Treasury guidance on Cuban-origin import restrictions. The supply chain disruption was already documented before the current sanctions escalation. The sanctions do not change the supply chain problem. They change who will be positioned to solve it.
Banks, insurers, shipping counterparties, and industrial buyers do not wait for regime change announcements before repricing geopolitical risk. Financial markets responded before the broader strategic rationale had been publicly articulated. Sherritt's share price dropped thirty percent on the day of the announcement.
The sanctions created an immediate diplomatic problem with Canada that extends beyond Cuba. EO 14404 invokes secondary sanctions — meaning it can block foreign financial institutions from doing business with sanctioned Cuban entities. For Sherritt, whose entire business model depends on access to international banking, the order made continued operations structurally impossible without any direct action by the US against a Canadian company on Canadian soil.
Sherritt's cobalt refining operations are not only in Cuba. The company operates strategically important nickel and cobalt refining capacity in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta — critical minerals essential to the global energy transition and North American industrial supply chains. Canadian advocacy organizations formally called on the Carney government to provide legal and diplomatic protection to Sherritt and to resist what they characterized as the extraterritorial application of US domestic law. The sanctions did not merely affect Cuban operations. They put Canadian domestic critical mineral infrastructure under US jurisdictional pressure.
The Legal Architecture
The Venezuela operation was conducted without congressional notification. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 — standing federal law — requires the president to consult with Congress before engaging in military action and to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying US forces into hostilities. The bipartisan Gang of Eight notification, a longstanding practice for sensitive operations, did not occur. Congressional Democrats, joined by several Republicans, characterized the operation as a violation of both the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. Senator Tim Kaine called it "clearly illegal."
The administration's legal defense rested on a single reframe: Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized the entire operation as a law enforcement action to arrest indicted fugitives, not an act of war, arguing that this distinction made congressional notification unnecessary. The Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice issued a controlling legal opinion supporting the administration's position — consistent with a pattern of OLC opinions finding that executive actions may violate international law while remaining lawful under US constitutional and statutory frameworks. The OLC's role is to advise the president on domestic legal authority; it does not adjudicate compliance with international law.
The legal consequence of the classification is substantial. If a military strike on a sovereign nation's capital — involving air defense suppression and the forcible removal of a sitting head of state — can be classified as a law enforcement action, the War Powers Resolution's 60-day withdrawal clock never starts. The president retains unilateral military authority without triggering the War Powers withdrawal clock.
The Senate voted 52-47 to advance a War Powers resolution that would have blocked further military action in Venezuela without congressional approval. Five Republicans joined every Senate Democrat in supporting the measure. The resolution was ultimately defeated when Vice President JD Vance broke a 50-50 tie. The constitutional mechanism designed to constrain unilateral presidential military action was defeated by a single casting vote.
The international legal response was clear in its diagnosis and limited in its effect. UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated he was "deeply concerned that rules of international law have not been respected" in response to the Venezuela operation, citing Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Venezuela formally invoked Article 2(4) in its letter requesting the Security Council emergency session. The presidents of the UN General Assembly and the OAS Secretary-General echoed Guterres's concern. Brazil, Spain, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay issued a joint condemnation. France's deputy ambassador stated the operation "runs counter to the principle of non-use of force."
The Security Council held an emergency session and produced no binding resolution. It could not: the United States holds a permanent veto. The Security Council Report documented this outcome as "a stark example of the Council's inability to respond to threats to international peace and security when one of its permanent members is directly involved." The international legal framework correctly identified the violation. It had no mechanism to enforce a consequence.
"Today, it's Venezuela, with the excuse of narcoterrorism and a stated intention to control its resources. Tomorrow, it can be anywhere else, with some other excuse." — Chilean President Gabriel Boric, January 3, 2026. Cuba was publicly named as a next target seventeen days later.
The Frame Displacement
The public media treatment of these events has been largely sequential: the Venezuela intervention as one story, the Iran war as another, the Cuba pressure as a third, the Sherritt sanctions as a fourth. Each is covered within its own frame — drug trafficking, Middle East conflict, Cold War legacy, trade policy. The documentary record — the NSS, the executive orders, the Project 2025 blueprint, the oil flow mechanics, the cobalt supply chain, the War Powers debate, the corporate beneficiaries — connects these events as expressions of a single strategic architecture rather than as separate crises.
The NSS explicitly names Cuba. It explicitly names the Monroe Doctrine corollary. It explicitly authorizes denial of strategic assets to non-hemispheric competitors. EO 14404 explicitly targets Cuba's mining sector. The Sherritt sanctions explicitly target the Moa Bay cobalt operation. The connection between these documents and these actions is not inference. It is citation.
The architecture has a name that has entered mainstream policy discourse. Eurasia Group, the Peterson Institute, Axios, and the Washington Post are all now using "Donroe Doctrine" as shorthand for the revived hemispheric sphere-of-influence doctrine, anti-China positioning in the Americas, strategic resource consolidation, and overt assertions of US primacy. The term began as internet sarcasm. It became analytical shorthand once the actions began matching the doctrine.
Institutional Permanence
The question this essay is not asking is whether this administration uses these powers. It does. The question this essay is asking is whether the powers themselves become permanent features of the system. Executive authorities, strategic doctrines, sanctions frameworks, emergency powers, and military precedents persist beyond administrations. The Trump Corollary is now written into a published National Security Strategy. EO 14404 is now on the books. The OLC opinion classifying a military strike on a sovereign capital as a law enforcement action is now established precedent within the executive branch. The War Powers Resolution defeat sets a procedural precedent for how to handle future challenges. None of these instruments require the current administration to remain in office. They require only that no future administration actively dismantles them.
Corporate actors inherit the normalized access pathways. Military planners inherit the expanded operational authority. Intelligence agencies inherit the legal architecture. Future administrations inherit it either as precedent to extend or as machinery they must actively dismantle. Reversal requires active legislative, diplomatic, and judicial action — not merely a change in personnel at the White House.
Systems normalize capabilities through repetition. Once normalized, they become available to whoever inherits the machinery. This is not a claim about intent. It is a claim about institutional mechanics.
Supporters of the doctrine argue that preventing rival powers from establishing strategic footholds near the continental United States is a longstanding and rational national security objective, consistent with historic American hemispheric policy across administrations of both parties. That argument has documentary support and cannot be dismissed. This essay is not evaluating whether states pursue strategic influence. It is documenting the legal, institutional, and resource mechanisms through which that influence is currently being operationalized — and the precedents those mechanisms leave behind when the administration that created them is gone.
The Restoration Threshold
Reversing a geopolitical doctrine is harder than announcing one. What follows is not a prediction or a prescription. It is a documentation of the specific mechanisms that would need to be engaged — by Congress, by future administrations, by the courts, and by the international community — to constrain or reverse the architecture described in this essay. These mechanisms exist. They have not yet been used in combination.
The War Powers Resolution remains standing law. Congress has the authority to pass a new Authorization for Use of Military Force that explicitly limits its geographic scope, or to pass legislation closing the "law enforcement action" classification gap the OLC opinion exploited. The Senate came within a single vice-presidential tiebreaker of doing so for Venezuela. The House, which failed a similar measure by a narrow margin before the Venezuela operation, represents the next legislative test if a Cuba military action materializes.
Executive Order 14404 can be rescinded by any future president on day one of their administration, as Trump rescinded Biden's Cuba delisting order on day one of his. Executive orders are the most reversible instruments in this architecture. The NSS can be superseded by a new NSS. The more durable instruments are the OLC precedents, the military operational precedents, and the corporate access structures established through infrastructure investment — because those develop constituencies and contractual obligations that outlast any single administration's policy preferences.
The international community has the tools to reconstruct a diplomatic framework around hemispheric sovereignty — treaty reaffirmation through the OAS Charter, renewed engagement with the UN Charter's Article 2(4) prohibition through General Assembly resolutions (which cannot be vetoed), bilateral agreements between the US and affected nations that create enforceable obligations. Whether a future US administration would engage those tools depends on domestic political conditions that cannot be forecast from the current documentary record.
Democratic accountability requires a citizenry that understands what was normalized. You cannot hold a future administration's feet to the fire on EO 14404 if you do not know EO 14404 exists. You cannot demand War Powers compliance if you do not know the War Powers Resolution was defeated by a tiebreaker. You cannot push for treaty reaffirmation if you do not know which treaties were bypassed and why. Documentation is not the conclusion of this analysis. It is the precondition for what comes next.
