One Playbook, Every Chokepoint

Scott Bessent has said the same sentence about two countries on opposite sides of the world. Once about Cuba, once about Iran, the Treasury Secretary reached for identical words.

measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country — Scott Bessent

A cabinet secretary repeating himself verbatim in Havana and in the Persian Gulf is where a pattern stops being a pattern and becomes a template. ^[1] In Cuba, the administration quarantined oil deliveries at sea, induced a power and health crisis, then offered $100 million in aid on the condition it flow through the Catholic Church and NGOs rather than the government. ^[1][2] In Venezuela, it seized tankers in international waters, put 15,000 troops and the USS Gerald R. Ford into the Caribbean, and ended with Delta Force pulling Maduro out of Caracas — the one theater where the play ran all the way to regime removal. ^[3][4] In Iran, it blockaded Hormuz, then sent the Economic Fury campaign chasing Iranian tankers from the Indian Ocean to twenty miles off Sri Lanka. ^[5] Panama was next: the canal was "sort of on the table." ^[6] Greenland got an invasion plan, ordered by the president himself. ^[7] And in the Strait of Malacca, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs announced American forces would "actively pursue" vessels carrying Iranian oil. ^[8] In December 2025, the administration wrote all of it down. The National Security Strategy — the "Donroe Doctrine" — named the Western Hemisphere operations and the Iran campaign as a single framework, stating the administration had "applied a similar logic of deterrence" to Iran. ^[9] The coherence is partly retrospective. The Caribbean deployment began in September 2025, three months before the doctrine existed. ^[10] The Hormuz dimension was reactive: Iran closed the strait in March 2026 after the United States and Israel killed Khamenei, and Washington then claimed the closure as its own. ^[11][12] And the doctrine is selective. The same administration that claims Hormuz as its own leads a 14-nation coalition condemning China's South China Sea claims as having "no legal basis" and opposing "unilateral actions by force or coercion" — the precise behavior it practices in the Caribbean and the Gulf. ^[13] The template is real, self-documented, and it works mechanically. In Cuba, infant mortality rose from 4.0 to 9.9 per 1,000, child cancer survival fell from 85% to 65%, and power outages stretched past twenty hours. ^[14][15] The International Maritime Organization passed a resolution against the transit fees. ^[16] But Cuba has not fallen. Iran has not conceded. The doctrine produces catastrophe reliably — and in Cuba and Iran, the regime change it promised never came.