Ben Hyorns

The template here is in Venezuela and Iran already.

The US mounted operations to target leaders in those countries, military assets, air bases.

And so a similar operation potentially in Cuba would probably target the leadership.

So it's important to say that we have not seen sufficient evidence to say with high confidence that the US is moving towards a military attack against Cuba.

The US priority seems to be to use its ongoing fuel blockade and back-channel diplomacy to reach an agreement with the regime.

That said, the US is definitely making preparations and considering its options in the event that it abandons diplomacy and no longer considers a deal possible.

That means it is possible to rank these in terms of relative likelihood, and our understanding of the Trump administration's thinking suggests that any option that results in the removal of Cuba's current leaders, who Washington considers uncompromising, any option that avoids risking the lives of US troops,

and avoids a bout of instability on the island that would potentially trigger migration towards the U.S.

Exactly.

And the template here is in Venezuela and Iran already.

The U.S.

mounted operations to target leaders in those countries.

military assets, air bases.

And so a similar operation potentially in Cuba would probably target the leadership.

As it's clear in Venezuela, the Trump administration is working with Nicolas Maduro's vice president.

It hasn't completely changed the regime.

And so our understanding of that thinking that goes behind that is that the US would take a similar approach to Cuba, where it's focused on eliminating certain leaders and then encouraging the rest of the government to cooperate.

So there's three key developments that we've seen in recent weeks that suggest the U.S.

is potentially moving towards military action.

The first key one is that it's formed a legal basis for potential military operations in Cuba by criminally charging former President Raul Castro on the 20th of May.