After Venezuela, five targets appear in Trump’s crosshairs. Is it just talk?

AUSTIN, Texas – Who’s next? After a slick pre-dawn military operation that

landed a sitting president of Venezuela before a New York court

for trial on drug trafficking charges, the Trump administration appears increasingly vocal about using unilateral force to reorder its neighbourhood and beyond. 

The Danish territory of Greenland and the communist country of Cuba are figuring uppermost as the next likely targets of US President Donald Trump, say experts.

Iran, Mexico and Colombia are also mentioned.

In the early part of the 20th century, US leaders repeatedly turned to the Monroe Doctrine as they conquered land and resources. Considered a foundational US foreign policy document authored by the fifth US president James Monroe, it was aimed against European meddling in the Western Hemisphere.

Mr Trump’s twist on it, contained in

his National Security Strategy

published in December 2025, is that the US is justified in taking action against sovereign nations in the Western Hemisphere in order to protect its citizens and ensure their welfare.

That language might evoke Mr Trump, but it is still an unexpected position for a man who has built his politics around loudly opposing “forever wars” that involve US soldiers or money in foreign countries.  

So will he really move against other targets?

“Yes and no,” says Professor Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Burkle Center for International Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“If he senses a political opportunity, domestic support, congressional cover, international apathy or lack of consensus, he will act on his words, as we’ve seen.”

But the President will demur if he senses widespread opposition, allowing people to see his threats as merely bluster and rhetoric. 

Everything with this administration is “rhetoric” until it isn’t, said Prof Radd.

“It’s Trump’s way of playing both sides until he finds the safest political pathway. If there is domestic and international uproar over annexation of Greenland, then it will be dismissed as ‘rhetoric’, much like talk of running for a third term,” he added.

Dr Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center, discounted the talk as the afterglow of a successful operation in Venezuela. 

Sceptical of another intervention, she pointed to the possibility of the US being tied up with Venezuela

“The question is still out there (on) whether the splashy military operation will result in the strategic changes the US seems to want in Venezuela. And that could occupy a lot of the administration’s attention,” she said.

Greenland

Mr Trump

has talked about buying Greenland

as far back as 2019, and maintains that the US needs it “very badly” for national security reasons. 

His remarks about the island, which is administered by Denmark, put the US on a confrontational path with a transatlantic NATO ally.

He appeared circumspect when addressing reporters as Venezuela’s abducted leader Nicolas Maduro prepared to spend his first night in a New York jail.  

“Let’s talk about Greenland in 20 days,” Mr Trump said.

Was he saying that the US was planning an intervention in Greenland in the near future?

Perhaps not. The US may simply renew an attempt to buy it from Denmark, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Mr Rubio reportedly told lawmakers in a Jan 6 closed-door briefing

that the US goal is to buy the strategic, mineral-rich island

.  

The US had offered Denmark US$100 million in 1946 for Greenland, which is 25 per cent larger than the largest US state Alaska, but was rebuffed.

Instead, a defence agreement with Denmark permitted the continuation of the US base established there during World War II.

As Mr Rubio briefed congressmen, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the media that a military option to acquire Greenland was not off the table.

“The President and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilising the US military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal,” she said.

Lurking behind the moves is superpower rivalry.

“It’s so strategic right now,” Mr Trump said on Jan 4. “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”

“Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” he said, repeating his argument that the Nordic nation was not investing enough to stave off competition with Russia and China in the new shipping routes opening up as the arctic ice melts.

Amid uncertainty over US actions, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Mr Trump should be taken seriously and warned that a US attack on Greenland would spell the end of NATO.

The thinly populated island, with rich deposits of rare earth minerals critical to the modern artificial intelligence-powered economy, has been Danish territory for 300 years. 

As far back as 1916, the US recognised it as Danish territory in exchange for the possession of the Danish West Indies, which became the US Virgin Islands.

When Germany overran Denmark during World War II and wanted to take over Greenland, the US occupied it for four years and built a military base there.

“They’re not wrong that there is strategic importance to Greenland. But it is puzzling what taking over Greenland offers us that we don’t already have,” said Dr Grieco.

“We have US forces based in Greenland, and they’re willing to negotiate the size of the presence. Companies can come in to do mining in Greenland if they want to. It’s not clear why it would need to be under US administrative control,” she said. 

“This really is about Donald Trump’s imperialistic impulses. You see that in the National Security Strategy, which says that allies and partners that spend more on defence will potentially gain better access to US markets. That starts to sound like a tributary system.”

Prof Radd did not think military action was likely in Greenland. “It will encounter significant European pushback if the US acts upon Greenland. It’s difficult to see how Trump can act against a NATO state while simultaneously trying to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine,” he said.

The talk of utilising military options, he said, was only so much posturing conveying a coded language of deterrence.

“Mr Trump is signalling to adversaries – China, but also Russia and Iran – that he will not hesitate to use force to accomplish US national security objectives, notwithstanding his campaign pledges against doing so,” he said.

He is warning China not to act on Taiwan and expect the US to remain passive, and Russia not to pursue further revanchist claims beyond Ukraine. It is also a signal to Iran to stay in its lane, Prof Radd said.

Cuba, Colombia and Mexico

Both Prof Radd and Dr Grieco homed in on Cuba as being a likely next target.

“The next ‘candidates’ for regime change appear to be Cuba and Colombia,” said Prof Radd, who cautioned, however, against assuming action is imminent.

“There is much to unpack and do with regard to the next steps for Venezuela.”

Asked whether he was considering action against Cuba’s government, Mr Trump said it would suffer on its own account after the ouster of Maduro.

The island of about 10 million people, which has long been hostile to the US, has exerted a remarkable degree of influence over Venezuela, an oil-rich nation with three times as many people. 

“I think it’s just going to fall. I don’t think we need any action,” Mr Trump told reporters on Jan 4.

Mr Rubio, a second-generation Cuban-American and a critic of the Diaz-Canel regime, also issued a warning. “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least a little bit,” he said. 

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump loyalist, said the leaders of both Cuba and Iran should be “worried” following the attack on Venezuela. 

“There is a new sheriff in town. He has put life into the Monroe Doctrine,” Mr Graham said.

Dr Grieco said she could conceive of the Trump administration coming up with a parallel narrative for Cuba that could force change by displacing President Miguel Diaz-Canel. 

“Marco Rubio has expressed a longstanding desire to see regime change in Cuba,” she noted.

Hoover Institution scholar Joseph Ledford, whose research focuses on the exercise of US power in the Western Hemisphere, said military action was unlikely.

“I don’t think Cuba is next, insofar as a military operation to arrest Miguel Diaz-Canel,” he said.

“Rather, the US will put more pressure on Cuba to force a change in behaviour.”

Mr Trump has made pointed criticisms of Colombia, one of the world’s largest cocaine producers, and

accused President Gustavo Petro

of having personal involvement with the export of drugs to the US.

“Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long,” he said on Jan 4. 

Asked whether it meant a military operation against Colombia, Mr Trump replied: “It sounds good to me.”

Mexico, the predominant source of narcotics and fentanyl flowing into the US, is in the cross hairs too.

Mr Trump has floated the idea of using US forces to “take out the cartels” after casting doubt on President Claudia Sheinbaum’s ability to battle them.

“Mexico has to get their act together because (drugs are) pouring through Mexico, and we’re going to have to do something,” Mr Trump has said.

But Dr Grieco said it was unlikely that Mr Trump would be drawn into battling the powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

“This would probably involve ground forces against really well-armed cartels that have a lot of financing behind them. Essentially, not so different from fighting a counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan,” she said. “That’s not the precise, surgical, rapid operation that they clearly prefer.”

Iran

Prof Radd, an expert on US relations with the Middle East, saw the possibility of “some action” on Iran as more likely.

“Similar to what we saw in Venezuela, the US, in partnership with Israel, could act to remove Khamenei but leave the remaining apparatus of the Islamic republic in place,” he said, referring to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

“It would then be up to the Iranian people to bring about greater systematic change from there.” 

Mr Trump had

issued a threat of potential US intervention in Iran

on social media a day before the Venezuela operation. 

The US will stage a rescue, he said, if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom”. 

“We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

His threat came after Iran saw a week of violent protests sparked by currency devaluation and surging inflation.

It prompted a counter-threat by Iranian Parliament chief Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. “All American centres and forces across the entire region will be legitimate targets for us in response to any potential adventurism,”

he said on X

.