Today's Signal
The Gerald R. Ford is still in the Caribbean. The question is what comes next.
Five months after the January 3 operation that captured Maduro, the US naval posture in the region is the new normal. Caribbean nations are calibrating policy to it.
It has been almost five months since the joint US military and law enforcement operation on January 3 that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The immediate consequences were dramatic and largely commercial: the FAA closed Venezuelan airspace and the San Juan Flight Information Region that covers Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and surrounding waters. Hundreds of Caribbean flights were cancelled across a single weekend. American Airlines added almost 5,000 additional seats once the airspace reopened.
That was January. We are now in late May, and the secondary consequences are still unfolding. The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier arrived in the Caribbean shortly after the operation and remains in the region. The Trump administration has continued to weigh military action against what remains of the Venezuelan state. US forces have, since September 2025, destroyed multiple vessels in international waters in operations the administration describes as anti-drug strikes, killing at least 80 people.
The Caribbean diplomatic question, the one regional foreign ministries have been carefully avoiding asking out loud: what is the long-term posture of US military presence in the Caribbean basin, and what does it mean for sovereignty in a region where the United States is now functionally the security architect? Trinidad’s persons-of-interest list, which we covered yesterday, is part of this picture. So is the Belize SoE. So is the calibration of Jamaican crime policy. The Caribbean states are not aligning their security policies around US priorities by accident. They are doing so because the US is now physically, militarily, persistently in the room.
Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, and the OECS states have not yet collectively named this shift. That silence is itself a policy. Watch CARICOM Heads of Government in July.
Source: CBS News, Congressional Research Service IN12636, January 2026