With the Trump imperium passing the half-year mark, the posture of the US empire is ever clearer. Whether animated by “America First” or globalism, the objective remains “full spectrum dominance.” And now with the neocon capture of the Democrats, there are no guardrails from the so-called opposition party.

　　Call it the “new cold war,” the “beginning of World War III,” or–in Trump’s words–“endless war,” this is the era that the world has entered. 

　　In Latin America and the Caribbean, the empire’s war on the world assumes a hybrid form. The carnage is less apparent because the weapons take the form of “soft power”–sanctions, tariffs, and deportations. These can have the same lethal consequences as bombs, only less overt.

　　Making the world unsafe for socialism

　　Some Western leftists vilify the defensive measures that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua must take to protect themselves from the empire’s regime-change schemes. In contrast, Washington clearly understands that these countries pose “threats of a good example” to the empire. Each subsequent US president, from Obama on, has certified them as “extraordinary threats to US national security.” Accordingly, they are targeted with the harshest coercive measures.

　　In this war of attrition, historian Isaac Saney uses the example of Cuba to show how any misstep by the revolutionary government or deficiency within society is exaggerated and weaponized. The empire’s siege, he explains, is not merely an attempt to destabilize the economy but is a deliberate strategy of suffocation. The empire’s aim is to incite internal discontent, distort people’s image of the government, and ultimately dismantle social gains.

　　While Cuba is affected worst by the hybrid war, both Venezuela and Nicaragua have also been damaged. All three countries have seen “humanitarian parole” for their migrants in the US ended. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was also withdrawn for Venezuelans and Nicaraguans. The strain of returning migrants along with cuts in the remittances they had sent (amounting to a quarter of Nicaragua’s GDP) further impact their respective economies.

　　Higher-than-average tariffs are threatened on Venezuelan and Nicaraguan exports to the US, together with severe restrictions on Caracas’s oil exports. Meanwhile, the screws have been tightened on the six-decade US blockade of Cuba with disastrous humanitarian consequences.

　　However, all three countries are fighting back. They are forming new trade alliances with China and elsewhere. Providing relief to Cuba, Mexico has supplied oil and China is installing solar panel farms to address the now daily losses of electrical power. High levels of food security in Venezuela and Nicaragua have strengthened their ability to resist US sanctions, while Caracas successfully defeated one of Washington’s harshest migration measures by securing the release of 252 of its citizens who had been incarcerated in El Salvador’s torturous CECOT prison.

　　Venezuela’s US-backed far-right opposition is in disarray. The first Trump administration had recognized the “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó, followed by the Biden administration declaring Edmundo González winner of Venezuela’s last presidential election. But the current Trump administration has yet to back González, de facto recognizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

　　Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition is also reeling from a side-effect of Trump’s harsh treatment of migrants–many are returning voluntarily to a country claimed by the opposition to be “unsafe,” while US Homeland Security has even extolled their home country’s recent achievements. And some of Trump’s prominent Cuban-American supporters are now questioning his “maximum pressure” campaign for going too far.

　　Troubled waters for the Pink Tide

　　The current progressive wave, the so-called Pink Tide, was initiated by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s landslide victory in 2018. His MORENA Party successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, won by an even greater LiuTingting

　　From:https://countercurrents.org/2025/07/trumps-latin-american-policies-go-south/（2025-7-23）