Decisions on U.S. action near Cayman may be taken without Cayman, a UK territories expert said.

The question is no longer whether cocaine is moving through the sea around the Cayman Islands. It is who decides what happens to the boats carrying it, and whether anyone in George Town is in the room. Peter Clegg, Professor in Politics and International Relations and Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of the West of England in Bristol, who has studied the UK's Caribbean territories for more than 25 years, told TCJ in written answers on 7 November that a territory such as Cayman "has little ability to determine the behaviour of a major military power operating around it".

Three facts frame his answer. The U.S. military has killed at least 243 people in strikes on suspected drug boats since September 2025, by a tracker kept by the Washington Office on Latin America cited by Al Jazeera on 27 October 2026. The UK, which holds responsibility for Cayman's defence and external affairs, stopped sharing some Caribbean intelligence with the U.S. a year ago because, CNN reported on 11 November 2025, it did not want to be complicit in strikes its officials considered illegal. And the U.S. Coast Guard is still boarding boats and arresting crews: on 4 November it landed 3,622 pounds of cocaine and four detainees from two Caribbean interdictions at Port Everglades, Florida, in a release that does not say where the boats were stopped and does not mention Cayman.

Two imperatives, one territory

Professor Clegg said the UK had not ended counter-narcotics cooperation with the U.S. but had restricted information "where there is a foreseeable risk that it could be used for a lethal military strike instead of a conventional law-enforcement interdiction". That, he said, "creates a potentially awkward position for the Cayman Islands and other Caribbean OTs because their elected governments do not control defence, external affairs or, in most cases, internal security, yet they could well experience the direct consequences of any escalation or breakdown in cooperation".

Cayman, in his reading, sits between two pulls. "It needs close U.S. cooperation because it lies within Caribbean trafficking networks, but the UK, which retains constitutional responsibility for security and external affairs, also has to ensure that intelligence is not used in ways that London considers legally problematic," he said. Disagreements between a Governor and a Premier over security can arise, he said, "but as a rule cooperation is sought as much as possible", and he saw "enough room for triangular cooperation (UK-U.S.-Cayman) even under the present circumstances".

The capability paradox

Professor Clegg said Cayman "has important operational capacity through its police, Coast Guard, Customs and Border Control, and maritime surveillance systems". The more it invests in them, the sharper the question of who directs what they see. "The more capable and integrated the Caribbean territories become within regional security networks, the more important the question becomes of who ultimately controls how those capabilities are used," he said. "A radar system, patrol vessel, or locally generated intelligence can contribute simultaneously to territorial security and a much larger and potentially controversial U.S.-led operational picture."

Cayman's Coast Guard works with the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service Air Operations Unit. Shortly after midnight on 29 May 2026 the police helicopter crew alerted a Coast Guard unit to a vessel off the southern coast of Grand Cayman. Police said on 27 July that the packages on board held 505 pounds of ganja, 10 kilograms of cocaine, smaller amounts of ketamine and MDMA, a firearm and ammunition. Two men, aged 44 and 22, were charged with importation of cocaine, other drugs and firearm offences.

"This significant recovery demonstrates the impact of a major investment in law enforcement capabilities to disrupt the flow of illegal drugs, firearms and ammunition through our islands," Commissioner of Police Kurt Walton said in the 27 July release. "The RCIPS continues to work closely with our local and international law enforcement partners to maintain a zero-tolerance approach to drug and firearms trafficking."

Who those international partners are, and on what terms, is the question. Joint Interagency Task Force South, based at Key West, Florida, is the U.S. body that tracks suspected smuggling vessels and hands them to the U.S. Coast Guard or partner navies for boarding. It is the body to which, according to CNN, British intelligence was passed before the pause. Whether Cayman's Coast Guard exchanges information with it, and whether that has changed since the strikes began, are questions TCJ put to the Coast Guard on 6 November. The request was acknowledged and passed to the Coast Guard's heads the same day. No answer had yet been received by TCJ's deadline of 5:00pm on 10 November.

Drawn in, or cut out

Asked whether a territory could be drawn into U.S. operations, or cut out of them, without its own government having a say, Professor Clegg said: "Yes, there is a risk of both." Because defence and external affairs are exercised through the Governor, "Washington could seek cooperation primarily through London rather than through the elected territorial government", he said. The reverse also held: if the U.S. decided to act alone, "an OT government would have very limited practical capacity to prevent it", and in the most extreme case that could include "American action in or through an OT's territorial waters without the consent of the government".

That did not mean Washington would act that way, or that London would acquiesce, he said. "Rather, it highlights just how dependent the existing system is on U.S. restraint, respect for jurisdiction, and continued cooperation between allies." The question for a territory, he added, was "whether it might sometimes find that decisions affecting its immediate security environment have effectively already been taken in Washington and London before its elected government has had much opportunity to influence them".

What the record shows

There is, Professor Clegg said, "no public evidence that Cayman intelligence has been used in a lethal U.S. strike, nor that Cayman-specific intelligence has been withheld from Washington", though the UK has not disclosed which information streams its restrictions cover, and has not said publicly whether the pause remains. A UK government spokesperson told The Hill, a Washington news outlet, in November 2025 that it was "our longstanding policy to not comment on intelligence matters". Downing Street did not deny the CNN report.

The Cayman record is short. In a statement published on 6 January 2026, after the U.S. military action in Venezuela, Governor Jane Owen said she had "discussed the situation with Premier Ebanks and subsequently updated the Cabinet", that "security remains a paramount priority within the United Kingdom's relationship with its Overseas Territories", and that "our agencies here in Cayman continue to pursue strategies with this united objective". Nothing published since sets out what Cayman's elected government has been told about the intelligence pause, or whether it was consulted.

TCJ put ten questions to the Governor's Office and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on 6 and 9 November, including whether the restriction remains in place, whether it covers intelligence from Cayman's own agencies, whether the Premier and Cabinet were consulted, and whether the UK has sought any assurance from the U.S. about operations in the territories' waters. The Governor's Office answered none of the questions directly. In a written statement on 12 November it said security "is of paramount importance to the UK's relationship with its Overseas Territories" and that the Governor "continues to work closely on all security related matters" with the police, Coast Guard and Customs and Border Control. It added: "We have a long-standing policy of not commenting on matters relating to intelligence or law enforcement operations. American actions and security policy are matters for the U.S. Government."

Cayman's own picture of the drug it is helping to intercept is also thin. The National Drug Council told TCJ on 10 November that it "does not have community-wide figures on cocaine use or availability", that its Student Drug Use Survey "cannot establish how common cocaine use is in the wider community, how readily cocaine is available, or whether either has changed", and that it does not collect data on street price or purity. It directed questions on seizures and supply to the police and Customs and Border Control.

The other model

The 4 November offload is what the UK said it wanted to protect: detection, boarding, seizure and arrest. The cutter Tahoma, a 270-foot medium endurance cutter based at Newport, Rhode Island, brought the cocaine, valued by the Coast Guard at more than US$27 million, into Port Everglades. The four detainees were handed to federal agents "pending further investigation", the release said. The release does not say whether either boat was bound for the U.S. The interdictions involved the cutters Diligence and William Trump, the U.S. Navy ship USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, a Royal Netherlands Navy maritime patrol aircraft, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft and Joint Interagency Task Force South.

"This interdiction was due to the coordinated efforts of Joint Interagency Task Force - South, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Coast Guard Southeast District, along with our international partners throughout the Caribbean Sea," Lieutenant John Colucci, commanding officer of the William Trump, said in the release.

The Coast Guard said in January 2026 that its crews had seized more than 511,000 pounds of narcotics worth more than US$3.8 billion in 2025, the largest annual total in its own history. That followed years in which the service fell short of its own targets: the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the audit arm of Congress, reported on 13 January 2026 that the Coast Guard had not met its annual cocaine interdiction goal in any year from 2015 to 2024, and that between August 2022 and September 2024 operating hours for drug interdiction fell by 62% as ships and aircraft were shifted to intercepting migrants.

The strikes

U.S. Southern Command said on 27 October 2026 that its latest strike, on a go-fast vessel in the Eastern Pacific, killed five people and that "confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel's active involvement in narco-trafficking". President Donald Trump has said the U.S. is in an "armed conflict" with cartels and that the strikes are needed to stop drugs entering the U.S. Legal scholars and rights groups call them extrajudicial killings. Families of two Trinidadian men killed in a strike on 14 October 2025 sued the U.S. government in January 2026, saying their relatives were fishermen. On 18 October 2025 the heads of the Caribbean Community reaffirmed "the principle of maintaining the Caribbean region as a Zone of Peace", with Trinidad and Tobago reserving its position.

Where this goes

Professor Clegg does not think the strikes have rewritten the London-territories relationship, "but they do put potentially more pressure on them". The campaign, he said, "gives greater political significance to questions of intelligence control, operational consent, consultation, and the reserved powers of Governors", and it was possible that territories "would want greater (or even full) agency over these areas of policy, in order to better navigate and mitigate a more challenging relationship with the U.S."

Between the U.S. position and its critics sits a territory with its own Coast Guard, no control over its defence or external affairs, and a Governor who has said it remains safe and secure. The Coast Guard has not said where the four detainees are from or what charges they face. The two men charged in Cayman over the May seizure were remanded in custody when they appeared in court in July. And the question Professor Clegg poses, whether Cayman will hear about the next decision before or after it is made, remains open on the record.