Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report. It’s been a busy week in the world of national security, and we’ve got a lot to discuss.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: the Trump administration’s increasing focus on Cuba, Ukraine’s rocky staffing shake-up, and the seemingly endless escalation ladder in the Iran war.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report. It’s been a busy week in the world of national security, and we’ve got a lot to discuss.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: the Trump administration’s increasing focus on Cuba, Ukraine’s rocky staffing shake-up, and the seemingly endless escalation ladder in the Iran war.

Is Cuba Trump’s Next Target?

The Trump administration is ramping up efforts to portray Cuba as a danger to the United States, raising speculation that the White House is attempting to lay the groundwork for military action against the island as its strategy of economic strangulation fails to bring about regime change in Havana.

On Thursday, the State Department announced new sanctions targeting the Cuban regime and its backers. In a statement on the sanctions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the “Communist Cuban regime continues to pose a deep multifaceted threat to U.S. national security and hemispheric stability.”

This comes just days after the State Department released a 100-page report portraying Cuba as “the center of a vast hemispheric network” seeking to subvert the United States (which our colleague Sam Skove wrote about). The report sought to link Cuba to left-wing causes and groups in the United States, including the Democratic Socialists of America.

Even as the report conceded that Cuba would be outmatched by the United States in a conventional conflict and acknowledged the island’s serious economic challenges, it warned that Havana “serves as the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders.”

Regime change. These moves are part of a broader effort that has picked up steam since the Trump administration began a devastating oil blockade on Cuba this year, leading to nationwide blackouts and worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.

The blockade is an apparent attempt to bring down the Cuban regime and builds on a decades-old U.S. embargo that has failed to achieve that goal. This is a particularly strong priority for Rubio, a Cuban American who has railed against the government in Havana throughout his political career. But it also falls in line with the Trump administration’s goal of asserting U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere, which has led the U.S. military to shift attention to Latin America in unprecedented ways.

As Rubio and other officials........

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