![\"30](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-2302160586_932148.jpg?fit=6000%2C3920\")
Imperial ambitions are<\/span> ever-shifting under President Donald Trump. Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are oftentimes spoken about as one continuous train of complete victories and soon-to-be-complete-victories. With the midterms<\/a> fast approaching, and the date for an apparent telegraphed return to the Iran war on its heels, talk of easily overthrowing regimes has returned, if it ever truly left. <\/p>\n At a rally in Florida last Friday, Trump laid out<\/a> his grand vision, which he promised would come to pass once the Islamic Republic is neutralized as a threat to the world: \u201cWe\u2019re going to come back from Iran. Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We\u2019ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They\u2019ll raise up their hands, and then we\u2019re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the descendant of Cuban immigrants who left under President Fulgencio Batista (though Rubio later tried to claim<\/a> his parents fled Castro, who came to power three years later), has long put overthrowing the Communist government in Havana at the top of his agenda, with the hope of replicating the relative ease<\/a> of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in January. Rubio turned some heads last Friday when he publicly posted<\/a> on X that those seeking \u201cto create positive change in Cuba\u201d could \u201cseize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.\u201d<\/p>\n The post was widely met with bewilderment (Bloomberg\u2019s White House correspondent wrote<\/a>: \u201cChecked like four times that this was real\u201d), but U.S. officials and members of Congress also shared the post, elevating the public call for collaboration. Recruiting in public might come across as strange and out of character to a public that imagines the CIA recruiting secret agents and informants through clandestine channels or hidden websites, as the agency had done to try and recruit agents inside Iran under Bush and Obama. <\/p>\n But public appeals of this kind are not wholly new. Under the Biden administration, the CIA recruited collaborators inside Russia via a public Telegram<\/a> channel, as well as publishing videos on social media hoping to recruit<\/a> Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean assets.<\/p>\n This kind of overt recruitment stems from the difficulties Western intelligence agencies face against adversaries who have built sophisticated surveillance networks of their own. A CIA official told ABC News<\/a> in May 2025, \u201cin today\u2019s world of [universal technical surveillance], we can\u2019t recruit sources the same way that we did 20 years ago, probably the same way you did 10 years ago.\u201d This has not only affected intelligence operations targeting Beijing, but also Tehran and Havana, where both the U.S. and Israel\u2019s lack of on-the-ground connections and limited official presence has led the CIA and the Mossad to try to recruit willing informants online. <\/p>\n While these limitations may govern the particulars of this strategy, those in power in their respective countries may not see it as evidence of constraints, but instead as evidence of the power of their new strategy: boasting about their national power, rather than keeping it behind closed doors where it supposedly remains useless. After all, what is the use of a deterrent if nobody knows it was you?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The scale of these public appeals, despite having started under Biden, has exploded under the second Trump term, but these moves were arguably preceded by Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s efforts to bring the Mossad\u2019s operations much more into the public sphere. The Israeli prime minister\u2019s bragging about numerous cyberattacks targeting Iran\u2019s nuclear program in the late 2010s began to precipitate a shift in public discussion of the Mossad\u2019s work, with many Netanyahu allies, like then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked<\/a>, praising the fact that Iran could now \u201cknow it is exposed and that Israel can reach anywhere in the Islamic Republic.\u201d A former deputy director of the Mossad said after the unveiling of Iran\u2019s stolen nuclear archive that Netanyahu\u2019s move \u201cgoes against our nature,\u201d and that \u201cthe prime minister insisted on publicizing this.\u201d<\/p>\n Netanyahu\u2019s pick in 2021 for the director of the Mossad, David Barnea, has been credited<\/a> with institutionalizing that change, shifting the secretive intelligence agency\u2019s operations toward appealing to larger masses, and reportedly concerning Mossad veterans who were shocked by the publicizing of agents inside Iran. Casting Israel as a superpower capable of exerting its power anywhere has become a popular refrain under Netanyahu. In an interview with \u201c60 Minutes<\/a>,\u201d one Mossad officer said of the 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon<\/a>, which injured more than 2,000 people, that \u201cthey are walking proof of our superiority all around the Middle East,\u201d with another officer saying the operation\u2019s complexity and success demonstrated \u201cthe world is our stage.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. has also gotten in the habit of flexing its superpower status under Trump, declaring the nation\u2019s intent to conquer places like Greenland<\/a> and Canada, to steal the natural resources of Venezuela and Iran to fill American coffers, and to openly and unabashedly place the Western Hemisphere under a Washingtonian protectorate known as the \u201cDonroe Doctrine<\/a>.\u201d Rubio declared<\/a> in Greece in early October, speaking in terms of civilizational battle against the backdrop of the Acropolis, that \u201cwe choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.\u201d <\/p>\n Openly siccing the CIA on foreign adversaries and ICE on domestic ones has been part of that strategy of embracing imperial fervor at home and abroad. Erik Prince<\/a>, the founder of Blackwater and a private security contractor who remains influential in Trump world<\/a>, said<\/a> he was \u201cjealous\u201d of the pager attacks and publicly urged the CIA to take a lesson from the Mossad, saying \u201cwe should be getting those kinds of results.\u201d<\/p>\n While both countries have openly sought deep intelligence penetration in adversarial nations, there are limitations to the power of clandestine and overt operations, even by superpowers and wannabes. While the CIA asserted its power in May by openly having its director meet with Cuban officials in Havana<\/a> to demand \u201cfundamental changes\u201d in return for relief from economic strangulation<\/a>, the agency\u2019s history of attempts to overthrow<\/a> the Communist Cuban government are as storied as they are unsuccessful. Earlier hopes for Iran to be as quick and as clean as taking control of Venezuela\u2019s government were dashed early on in the conflict, with the war that was supposed<\/a> to only take a few weeks<\/a> now all but certain to extend past the midterm elections for another devastating round.<\/p>\n