A senior Trump administration official said it out loud last week — the word that no one in Washington is supposed to use. Accelerationism. The philosophy of hastening societal collapse. “We don’t want to kill off the regime just yet,” the official told Axios. “There’s a method to this.”

That candor is worth pausing on. The United States government has openly described its policy toward a sovereign nation — ninety miles from Florida — as the deliberate engineering of collapse. Not regime change by force, not diplomatic pressure with a handshake at the end. Methodical strangulation, timed for effect, calibrated to produce maximum internal fracture before the patient flatlines. This is the operating doctrine for Cuba in the summer of 2026, and it has been building since a January weekend that changed the strategic map of the Western Hemisphere.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration completed the removal of all remaining enriched uranium from Venezuela’s RV-1 legacy research reactor, eliminating a decades-old nuclear surplus risk in under six weeks from initial site assessment to material departure.

The RV-1 reactor supported physics and nuclear research until 1991. When operations ceased, its uranium—enriched above the 20 percent threshold that marks the critical boundary for weapons-usable material—remained in place as surplus. Thirty-five years later, 13.5 kilograms of that material has been secured and transported to the United States.