The Trump Presidency Timeline

President Trump has a bold new Middle East strategy: he wants U.S. allies to, quote, "go to" the Strait of Hormuz and "just take it." Because when you’re talking about one of the most strategically vital and heavily militarized waterways on Earth, why bother with things like international law, diplomacy, or basic sanity when you can treat it like grabbing the last parking spot at Mar-a-Lago?

The New York Times helpfully brings in national security correspondent Eric Schmitt to explain that, actually, clearing and controlling the Strait of Hormuz by force is not "easy" unless your benchmark for success is "global oil shock and potential regional war." While Trump riffs like a guy yelling at CNN from his recliner, serious people have to game out what happens when a U.S.-led coalition tries to muscle Iran out of a narrow shipping lane bordered by missiles, mines, and small attack boats. Spoiler: it doesn't end with everyone shaking hands and going home for golf.

So we now have the Commander in Chief treating the world’s energy lifeline as a sort of geopolitical Black Friday doorbuster. Allies are supposed to show up, push Iran out of the way, and plant a flag, presumably while Trump takes credit on Truth Social and complains that NATO didn’t Venmo him for the operation. American foreign policy, reimagined as a real estate seizure with cruise missiles.

The US has triumphantly reopened its embassy in Venezuela, returning to Caracas not as a diplomatic partner, but as the guy who kicks in your door, kidnaps your president, and then asks to use your kitchen. Nearly three months after US troops abducted former president Nicolás Maduro and flew him to a federal prison in New York, the Trump administration is now celebrating a "new chapter" in relations with the government that magically appeared after the raid.

Acting president Delcy Rodríguez, formerly Maduro’s vice-president, is now Washington’s new best friend, because nothing says sovereign democracy like having your leadership transition managed by Delta Force and a federal indictment. The State Department is very proud of reopening the embassy that’s been shut since 2019, calling it a “key milestone” in the president’s three‑phase plan for Venezuela, which appears to be: 1) invade, 2) abduct, 3) call it diplomacy.

Veteran diplomat and intelligence official Laura F Dogu has been on the ground restoring the embassy building so the US can fully resume operations, including law enforcement work, now with the added convenience of having the last president locked up in New York. Washington insists this is all about combating drug trafficking and supporting civil society, while the rest of the world watches the US normalize the idea that you can just snatch foreign leaders, install their understudies, and then cut the ribbon on your newly renovated embassy like it’s a mall opening.

Trump’s Cuba policy continues its speedrun of humanitarian horror. After his administration, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio playing cosplay Cold Warrior, effectively strangled Cuba’s oil supply to force regime change, the island is now living in rolling blackouts: hospitals crippled, public transport slashed, people literally sitting in the dark on the Malecón. So naturally, the White House line has been: this is how we help Cubans.

Now a sanctioned Russian tanker — yes, sanctioned by the U.S., EU, and U.K. for that little Ukraine invasion thing — is parked off Cuba with 730,000 barrels of oil, and Trump shrugs from Air Force One that he has “no problem” with it reaching port. The same guy who engineered the blockade suddenly discovers a soft spot for basic survival: “They have to survive,” he says, as though he didn’t personally tighten the noose that produced the island-wide blackouts in the first place.

He insists this doesn’t help Putin — it’s just “one boatload of oil” — while simultaneously claiming Cuba is “finished” and that whether they get the oil “is not going to matter.” So the official doctrine is: Cuba is doomed, but also we care deeply about Cuban people, which is why we cut off their fuel, wrecked their infrastructure, then magnanimously allowed a sanctioned Russian ship to toss them nine or ten days of diesel. It’s not foreign policy; it’s a hostage situation with occasional mood-based mercy.

Trump wraps it all up by saying he’d “prefer letting it in… because the people need heat and cooling and all of the other things.” The people needed those things last month, when the blockade was grinding them down, and they’ll need them next month when the diesel runs out again. But sure, one reluctantly permitted tanker from a sanctioned Russian vessel totally balances out an entire U.S. strategy built on making 11 million civilians suffer until their government collapses. Freedom, Trump-Rubio style.

The Trump administration has discovered a fresh, modern way to wage war on Cuba: don’t bother with missiles when you can just suffocate a country’s fuel supply and let the maternity wards handle the casualties. After Trump threatened tariffs on any country delivering fuel to Cuba, oil imports collapsed, the grid started dying, and Havana’s hospitals are now performing the world’s darkest austerity cosplay. No tranexamic acid for cancer patients, staff who can’t afford to get to work, women giving birth at home because there’s no transport – all part of Washington’s deep concern for Cuban freedom, apparently.

Trump, who helpfully announced he could “have the honour of taking Cuba” and could “do anything I want with it”, has upgraded the six-decade embargo into an outright oil blockade that is wrecking tourism, shuttering hotels, and pushing infant mortality up in a country that once beat the US on basic health metrics. The White House press release calls this “promoting a stable, prosperous and free country for the Cuban people”; on the ground it looks more like enforced blackout chic, rotting garbage, failing water systems and a medical system being slowly garrotted.

This is all happening while US-backed carnage stretches from Iraq to Palestine to an illegal war on Iran that kicked off with the mass killing of schoolgirls. The self-proclaimed leader of the free world has streamlined its product line down to one core export: destruction. Trump thinks fear and brute force will restore American greatness; what he’s actually restoring is global clarity that US hegemony means your hospitals run out of medicine, your lights go out, and some guy in Washington congratulates himself on his “honour” of taking your country.