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Opinion
Cuba Works Health Miracles While Under US Blockade
Cuba’s approach to providing healthcare is indicative of the nature of the revolution: to serve Cubans and the oppressed across the world.
Jun 04, 2026
Last week, the Cuban Center for Molecular Immunology, or CIM, announced a major health breakthrough with VAXIRA, a vaccine treatment for lung cancer. This is a remarkable achievement, made only more impressive by the fact that this is Cuba’s second lung cancer vaccine.
The vaccine stops the progression of cancer by developing the patient’s immune system to fight off cancer cells. This has proven to significantly prolong people’s survival. Since 2013, the vaccine has been monitored, trialed, and tested on more than 1,300 patients. Over a 10-year period, patients survived a median of 76.6 months, with 20% of all patients who were given VAXIRA experiencing unexpected long-term survival. Last year, VAXIRA was awarded the Technological Innovation Prize in Cuba for its contribution to healthcare in Cuba. This is an incredible feat for humanity and the battle against cancer—and it is being done by a country facing the longest and most severe blockade in history.
In 2011, Cuba developed CIMAvax, which remains the world’s only approved lung cancer vaccine. This vaccine works to induce the immune system to stop the growth of cancer cells and slow the progression of tumors. This vaccine has already treated more than 5,000 people across the world and many more thousands in Cuba itself. Given the immense significance of the vaccine, the United States agreed to a special arrangement to trial the vaccine in the US. The Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York has been running clinical trials with CIM since 2018. They have run the first clinical trials of CIMAvax in the United States. The very same nation that is imposing a genocidal blockade on Cuba is also benefiting from the historic breakthroughs in healthcare.
These major developments in medicine to treat cancer are not Cuba’s only awe-inspiring health achievements.
The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Cuba produced five vaccines: Ablada, Soberana 01, Soberana 02, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa. Cuba had one of the lowest Covid-19 deaths in the Western Hemisphere—and by 2021, Cuba’s fatality rate was just 0.59% compared with the 2.2% worldwide average. The vaccines were produced without the need for specialist refrigeration, which meant they could be easily transported and also distributed across the world to places where accessing such infrastructure would be impossible. Quickly, Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico all picked up the vaccine to protect their population.
By 2023, Cuba had the third-highest rate of vaccinations per 100,000 people. Despite the fact that the US banned the country from importing the syringes necessary to immunize its own population. In this context, Cuba was the first country in the world to vaccinate toddlers and children, as part of their push to reopen schools safely.
Cuba, like the United States, offered its Covid-19 vaccines to the world. While Cuba donated vaccines to St. Vincent and the Grenadines and sold them as cheaply as they could, the US bullied countries into putting up their assets, like embassy buildings and military bases, in order to access vaccines. This was to “protect” against future legal challenges that vaccine recipients might file against the manufacturer of the vaccine. This profit motive was a major cause for the vaccine apartheid in the distribution of Covid-19 protection across the world. As of August 2024, in high-income countries, more than 222 doses had been distributed per 100 people. While in low-income countries, this was less than 46. In 2021, US pharmaceutical companies that produced Covid-19 vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson) collected an eye-watering revenue of $31 billion. The concept that companies and shareholders should make money from a pandemic should be utterly outrageous.
Biotechnology
Cuba leads the world in its vaccine breakthroughs. But, how is this all possible? It is not by accident that Cuba is able to develop world-leading health breakthroughs in medicine. Cuba has developed a world-class biotechnological sector that is state-owned and operates in the interests of the people, not profit. There are no profit motives to producing vaccines; research and development are for the collective benefit, and resources are shared to better the process of scientific development. This is quite the opposite situation in capitalist countries, where biotechnology is a major competition dominated by pharmaceutical companies motivated entirely by profits, which often means that when there are major developments in health, they are not accessible to people.
In 1981, Cuba opened the Biological Research Center, despite the blockade stopping the entry of equipment, materials, access to research journals, and medicines. In the first 9 years, the center produced three products. Between 1990 and 2000, it produced 18, and between 2001 and 2010, it produced more than 40. Today, that figure continues to grow. The center flourished into a world-class biotechnological sector that has made major health breakthroughs. Cuba produced the world’s first human vaccine to contain a synthetic antigen for Haemophilus influenzae type B.
In 1989, Cuba produced the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine during a severe outbreak of the disease in the country. This was the first ever vaccine produced to protect against Meningitis B and was exported to protect people in countries across Latin America. The US approved its first vaccine for Meningitis B in 2014.
Cuba once had among the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%.
The following year, Cuba produced a vaccine for Hepatitis B. They joined just five other countries as a manufacturer of Hep B vaccines: France, South Korea, the United States, Indonesia, and Britain. As the US blockade made it virtually impossible and far too expensive to import the vaccine, Cuba produced their own and eliminated Hepatitis B in under 15 years.
In 2006, Cuba developed Heberprot-P, the only medicine in the world to reduce the amputation rate of patients with diabetic foot ulcers by 75%. Within 10 years, it was used in 23 countries. It has treated more than 400,000 people with foot ulcers. In 2024, the United States even broke its own blockade and approved it for trials and use. The very thought that Americans who suffer from diabetes might be treated by Cuban medicine while being fed propaganda against Cuba and funding a war against the very Cuban researchers and scientists helping them reveals how inhumane this blockade is.
By 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. Cuba managed this because of its socialist model, which is the same reason why it is not celebrated in mainstream media and looked to as a center for health advances in the US. This world historical achievement came as a result of Cuba’s universal health system that integrated maternal and child health programs with HIV and STI treatment. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of AIDS in the world and the lowest in the Americas, thanks to the free provision of antiretroviral treatment it has been distributing since 2001. Its vaccination programs have eradicated diseases that continue to cause death and suffering around the world, including diphtheria in 1979, measles in 1993, whooping cough in 1994, and rubella in 1995. Cuba has also developed the highest control of blood pressure in the world.
The same principles that led Cuba to produce world-leading medical breakthroughs are similar to its success in eliminating diseases. Cuba’s vaccination model is motivated by protecting its people. The National Immunization Program, which began in 1962, has saved the lives of at least 560,000 children who would have otherwise contracted diseases if it weren’t for the program. This is motivated by four directives: equity of vaccine distribution; integration of vaccination in primary healthcare; the inclusion of active community participation; and providing vaccines free of charge. These guiding principles indicate how central the health of all society is, not corporate interests or greed.
Cuba’s approach to providing healthcare is indicative of the nature of the revolution: to serve Cubans and the oppressed across the world. Before the revolution in 1959, 300 children were paralyzed by polio each year. One of the first measures by the revolutionary government was immunization for Cuban society. In 1962, the polio campaign launched through mobilizing 100,000 members of newly founded revolutionary committees to conduct a population census and vaccinate all children. Within months, polio was eradicated in Cuba, making it one of the first countries in the world to do so. Polio is still a leading cause of paralysis and death across the world.
These health achievements have massively benefited people across the world through access to new treatments and cures, affordable and accessible vaccines and medicines, and models for healthcare. But another awe-inspiring element of Cuba’s healthcare is its international solidarity.
Cuba has restored the eyesight for more than 4 million people with its joint program with Venezuela, Operation Miracle. They have sent more than 600,000 health workers on medical missions to 160 countries in response to pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other crises where no other country would act. They have and continue to train doctors from the Global South for free so they go back to their home countries to practice medicine.
Cuba makes these miraculous achievements for humanity while facing a blockade that causes shortages of medicines in pharmacies across Cuba; blocks researchers from accessing health journals; and prevents the entry of equipment, spare parts, and laboratory materials that could make it easier and faster to conduct research. The US blockade should be seen as an attack on humanity itself. This is a genocidal act of war against a population that exports doctors across the world by an empire that exports bombs, fighter jets, and invading soldiers.
Cuba once had among the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%. It is estimated that this has cost 1,800 lives of infants. This is the material result of a blockade that intends to kill, punish, and destroy a country for asserting its own sovereignty. Yet, even still, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than that in the United States. The US enforces its blockade on Cuba so that it can try to claim Cuba is a “failed state,” which also means its universal, free healthcare system “fails”; all so it can maintain its abysmal healthcare system that operates purely for profit, despite the level of death, bankruptcy, and suffering it causes to poor Americans.
The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.
Like Fidel Castro said in 2003: “Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities; our country does not possess nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or biological weapons. Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated in the idea of saving lives. It would absolutely contradict this concept to put a scientist or a doctor to work to produce substances, bacteria, or viruses to kill other human beings.”
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The One Conscience Claim America Won’t Honor
Religious liberty claims win everywhere, except when it comes to financing war.
Jun 04, 2026
The war in Iran has forced many Americans to confront what their tax dollars make them party to. After the US has killed hundreds of Iranian children in school and bombed the country’s civilian infrastructure, more and more Americans are considering tax refusal. It’s a tradition older than the republic itself. Quakers resisted military taxes in the colonies, sometimes at the price of seized property. Thomas David Thoreau was jailed for refusing a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War. And hundreds of thousands resisted the telephone tax during the Vietnam War, when the National War Tax Resistance counted 192 centers in 45 states.
Call that “freedom.”
In an age of ascendant religious liberty, a fortunate class of Americans enjoys it in special measure. Employers, schools, religious institutions, and corporations have won exemption after exemption from ordinary legal duties they claim violate their religious faith. Creationist craft store chains no longer have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Public school football coaches may launch disruptive displays of prayer at midfield. For every belief, the court has seemed ready with a baroque exception.
Except one, of course: the pacifist’s objection to financing war. One of the oldest religious and conscience claims in American life has been a consistent loser in court. Even the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, which helped make religious freedom claims an all-conquering force in American law, worked no change for war-tax resisters. In the late 1990s, Quaker objectors tried RFRA and First Amendment claims in federal court. Some offered to pay their full income-tax bill if the money could be directed to nonmilitary uses; others withheld the military portion and redirected it to life-sustaining organizations. All lost.
Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.
Mushrooms have fared better. In 2001, a mushroom company challenged a federal program that required it to help pay for generic mushroom advertising. The company argued that it could not be made to fund a message it did not believe: that mushrooms were mushrooms, and that its own were no better than anyone else’s. The Supreme Court agreed, finding the program violated the First Amendment. Free speech principles have thus protected the consciences of corporations from being wounded by mushroom advertising. But when pacifists, under a similar theory, have objected to financing war? Court after court has told them to get over it.
In this way, American law has built a vast sanctuary for conservative religious conscience and libertarian free speech sensibilities. That sanctuary ends at the gates of the only thing more powerful: the national-security state. Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.
Courts might be able to throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do, but Congress has no such excuse. It has let the most tepid solution to conscientious objection to war taxation languish for decades. The Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act, most recently reintroduced in 2021, would deposit the income, estate, and gift tax payments of conscientious objectors and religious pacifists into a fund reserved for nonmilitary uses. Americans who object to war would no longer have to choose between violating the law and violating their conscience. Instead, the bill would offer them a third way: Pay in full, but not for war.
The Peace Tax Fund Act has been reintroduced for five decades, and a more embarrassingly modest intervention is hard to imagine. The bill reduces neither military spending nor objectors’ tax burden. It would offer accommodations less burdensome than those given to other religious-liberty claimants. And it’s been backed in different iterations over the years by giants like John Lewis, the “conscience of Congress”; Ron Dellums, the first Black chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Mark Hatfield, an evangelical Republican, World War II veteran, and one of the first Americans to witness Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.
All of this raises the question: so why hasn’t it passed? If Congress cannot enact even this most minimal of bills—one that leaves the military budget untouched and still requires objectors to pay their full federal tax burden—then the objection cannot really be about administrative inconvenience or military necessity. Indeed, the Peace Tax Fund is far more dangerous than that. By making war taxation visible as a moral choice, the act would make Americans do what the national-security state is desperate to prevent them from doing: think.
That would begin on the otherwise dry tax form, where it would be hard to miss a new option to object to war. A taxpayer might wonder why it exists. She might begin to question how the military and intelligence agencies spend their combined trillion-dollar budget. She might wonder why the country goes to war and plucks foreign leaders from their beds without public debate. The national-security state has fought hard to keep those questions at bay by keeping citizens in the dark. Questions, after all, can quickly lead to demands for answers. The Peace Tax Fund would encourage them by inviting Americans to take a hard look at the killing done in their names, and that kind of public scrutiny is an existential threat to the military and intelligence agencies accustomed to immunity from it.
This is the only explanation for an otherwise odd situation. Congress appears more willing to lose money to scattered acts of illegal tax resistance than to provide conscientious objectors with a legal pathway to objection. That makes sense once one sees that legal objection is more dangerous to the national-security state than evasion. The Peace Tax Fund Act would legitimize opposition to the military-industrial complex and its casual violence by transforming that opposition into a recognized claim of conscience. Once the state recognizes those claims as the stuff of deep moral conviction rather than the anarchical fringe, it undermines the military-industrial complex’s favorite tactic: ridiculing opponents as traitors and stigmatizing their claims as beyond the pale.
The consciences of objectors and pacifists do not command the tender political theater reserved for the craft store chain, the football coach, or the mushroom company. But that should tell opponents of the American war machine something hopeful: The people who operate it do not believe it can survive public scrutiny. The task, then, is to drag more of that machinery into the light, where everyday Americans might begin to ask whether the country uses its power for good in the world—or for them.
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It's Time to Set Global Labor Standards for the Gig Economy
Strong International Labour Organization standards should start from a basic principle: If a company controls the worker, it should bear the responsibilities that come with that control.
Jun 04, 2026
Most discussion of artificial intelligence and work is about the future: which jobs may disappear, which skills may lose value, which workers may be replaced. But for millions of gig workers, who work for online platforms such as Uber, this future is already here.
Algorithms set their pay, assign their tasks, monitor their performance, and determine whether they can keep working at all. The issue is not just that technology may someday replace workers. It is that companies are already using it to control them while shirking the responsibilities that normally come with that kind of control. This leaves many workers with unstable pay, dangerous conditions, and little recourse when something goes wrong. But this could be about to change.
From June 1 to 12 in Geneva, governments will enter a final round of negotiations at the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations agency dedicated to labor rights, over the first binding global standard for what is called platform work. This new treaty would regulate jobs managed through apps and websites, from taxis and delivery to home care, cleaning, and online piecework. Governments will decide whether companies that control this work should be required to treat workers as employees and comply with labor protections.
The stakes go well beyond the gig economy. Increasingly, workers report to an algorithmic boss in hospitals, care work, domestic labor, and beyond. The question is whether governments will set rules for how companies use these systems to manage work or let companies keep writing the terms themselves.
If a business model works only because it evades workers’ rights, that is an argument for regulation, not against it.
Gig work today offers a preview of what happens when they do. These companies promise flexibility and independence. For many workers, the reality is low and unstable pay; dangerous conditions; and no sick leave, unemployment insurance, or retirement benefits.
This isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system. Companies use software to manage workers closely, then contracts to deny responsibility for them. The result is familiar cost-shifting in a new technological form: Workers absorb the risks while companies maintain control.
And it is scaling fast. DoorDash, which now operates in 30 countries, reported global revenue growth of 38% from the same period the previous year in the fourth quarter of 2025, and Uber, operational in about 70 countries, ranked ninth on Fortune’s 2025 list of the 100 fastest-growing public companies, with earnings per share growing 445% over three years. These companies create value by shifting costs off the company’s books and onto everyone else.
In recent months, Human Rights Watch spoke with workers in 10 countries. They described the same kinds of abuse everywhere.
In Beirut, we spoke with Apraham Orfalian, 74, who has worked for Uber since 2015. In October 2024, a passenger held a knife to his throat, forced him out of his car, and stole his vehicle and his phone. Without the car, he lost his income. Without sick leave, workers’ compensation, or support from Uber, he had to rely on his siblings to get by. “We are workers for Uber,” he said. “We generate income for them. At least they should show responsibility.”
In Gulf countries, delivery workers described cycling in extreme heat because they felt they could not afford to refuse orders, even when conditions were unsafe. In India, a worker injured on the job was left to cover his own medical costs. In the UK, another went months without income or injury compensation after being attacked while working.
Some governments have started to act. Mexico adopted legislation extending social security and labor protections to some full-time platform workers. In India, worker protests pushed the government to restrict 10-minute delivery promises that put dangerous pressure on delivery workers. Courts in the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have recognized rights that companies tried hard to avoid. But these gains are uneven and fragile. Without global standards, companies can keep exploiting gaps.
Strong ILO standards should start from a basic principle: If a company controls the worker, it should bear the responsibilities that come with that control. That means a presumption of employment in which companies exercise employer-like power; pay for all working time, which often includes waiting for assignments; safety protections; social security; protection from arbitrary deactivation; and a meaningful right to understand and challenge algorithmic decisions that shape pay, ratings, and access to work.
Some governments are trying to weaken those protections before they are written. They want standards that simply defer to weak national laws and define workers narrowly, and promise transparency without giving workers real power to challenge the decisions that shape their livelihoods.
Companies that depend on gig workers will say stronger rules would destroy flexibility. But that flexibility doesn’t really exist for many workers. Even if a worker can choose when to log on, they deserve protection from poverty wages, arbitrary dismissal, and uncompensated injury. If a business model works only because it evades workers’ rights, that is an argument for regulation, not against it.
This is about more than how companies that use gig workers operate. It is about whether labor law can keep pace with the way companies now organize labor. If workers cannot understand or challenge the systems that govern their work, software will become an efficient way to exercise control without accountability.
Governments meeting in Geneva can still set limits and protect workers’ rights. They should use that power before exploitation becomes the blueprint.
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American Empire: An Autopsy
We need to go beyond the immediacy of the Iran crisis to explore both the deeper causes of US global decline and its likely long-term consequences for both the United States and the rest of the world.
Jun 04, 2026
While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of US global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly from threats of devastation to promises of peace, it’s becoming increasingly clear that US military might is no longer capable of subduing even a mid-sized power like Iran, much less holding the rest of the world in its thrall.
Amid all the drama of air raids, drone strikes, and naval blockades, there are deeper geopolitical forces at play that lend a lasting historical import to events in the Persian Gulf—dynamics best seen by comparing two newspaper editorials with revealing similarities despite the 80 years separating their publication.
Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience. With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.” Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent—naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states”—faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold. Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.
Writing in a May 2026 edition of The New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of US global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago. Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”
Probe deeper still for the causes of the ongoing all-American imperial decline and you’ll come to the most fundamental but generally least noted factor in the rise and fall of every world empire for the past 500 years: energy innovation.
At the start of his second term as president in 2025, Donald Trump, Caldwell continued, “had a chance of pulling off something similar” by withdrawing “to a less expansive sphere of influence” and “refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere.” Caldwell considered that strategy potentially “workable” since “imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends.” Instead of keeping to that plan, however, Trump “has overextended the empire dangerously” by his intervention in Iran, which has now become nothing less than a “watershed in the decline of the American empire.”
To test the probability of Caldwell’s prediction coming true, we need to go beyond the immediacy of the Iran crisis to explore both the deeper causes of US global decline and its likely long-term consequences for both the United States and the rest of the world.
Explaining US Imperial Decline
Since most Americans came late (if at all) to the realization that their country was indeed an imperial power, and a stunningly powerful one at that, they have generally remained oblivious to its aging and the inevitable erosion of global power that accompanies such aging. Ever since, in the late 18th century, English scholar Edward Gibbon published his monumental, multi-volume study, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, succeeding imperial rulers have tended to assume that their imperial realms would last, like ancient Rome’s, half a millennium or more. Adolf Hitler, with his dream of “the Thousand-Year Reich,” was hardly the only one to share such an illusion.
But the modern age, with its rapid economic and technological change, has only accelerated imperial decline. Britain’s sprawling global empire lasted just 90 years (1857-1947) and France’s African empire, covering a quarter of that continent, was about the same, while the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe barely lasted 40 years (1945-1989). So, for the US global imperium to have survived for 80 years (1945-2026) should be considered the most anyone could realistically expect for a modern empire.
Since the US-led global order—exemplified by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—had indeed presided over 80 years of sustained global economic growth, there is a distinctly American twist to the British concept of the “self-liquidating concern.” As the rest of the world enjoyed a rapid economic recovery from the ravages of World War II, America’s share of the global economy declined from an overwhelmingly dominant 50% in 1945 to less than half that figure today. Using an index called PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) that measures the real value of economic growth, the IMF calculates that, in 2026, China is producing 20% of global economic output, the US just 15%, and the European Union (EU) 14%.
But the relative economic decline of the United States should by no means be the crucial measure of its failure. Quite the opposite, in fact. It should be considered a tribute to Washington’s success in leading the world economy to unprecedented prosperity. In those 80 years since the end of World War II, the US economy has grown fast, but many other nations have grown faster still. An economic giant that could structure the global economy as it wished in 1945, the US must now negotiate the terms of trade with a host of peer rivals—whether economic powers like China; major players like India and Japan; or a growing number of regional blocs like the European Union, South America’s Mercosur, and Asia’s ASEAN.
Probe deeper for the forces now driving America’s decline and you’ll notice an underlying geopolitical dimension. As I explained in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, the US achieved its global hegemony after World War II by maintaining an unwavering geostrategic dominance over the Eurasian land mass. Through its military alliances at both axial ends of that vast continent—the multilateral North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the West and five bilateral defense pacts with countries ranging from Japan to Australia in the east—the US imposed an “Iron Curtain” of 5,000 miles of anti-communist containment across Eurasia. Using those axial ends as anchors, the US encircled the continent with three naval armadas, hundreds of military bases, and thousands of jet aircraft. With Moscow geopolitically isolated and Beijing still a developing power, Washington could simply sit back and wait for the Soviet Union’s increasingly stagnant socialist economy to collapse and its dozens of restive satellite states to break free—as they all did between 1989 and 1991.
In the 35 years since that great Cold War victory, Washington’s foreign policy elites have pursued policies that might all too accurately be branded “bipartisan mismanagement” of the US geopolitical position in Eurasia. As home to 70% of the world’s population and an even greater share of its productivity, that continent remains the epicenter of global power (as it has been for the past 500 years). No nation can contend for world leadership without competing for geopolitical influence there.
From 2001 to 2021, both Democratic and Republican administrations oversaw long-term military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of American lives, millions of civilian deaths, and trillions of dollars in treasure. While Washington was wasting an estimated $5.8 trillion on those pointless, profitless wars, China’s foreign currency reserves surged from just $200 billion in 2001 to a massive $4 trillion by 2014. Drawing on such unprecedented reserves, President Xi Jinping launched his trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative that quickly laid down a grid of railroads, roads, pipelines, and ports across Eurasia from the Baltic to the South China Sea. By the time American troops finished their humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021, China had become the dominant power in Central Asia and the US position in Eurasia was starting to crumble.
In his second term, President Trump’s foreign policy has further weakened the US global position. At the western axial end of the Eurasian continent, he compromised NATO, the largest and longest-lasting alliance in modern military history, by pressing Denmark, a founding member of the alliance, to cede its sovereign territory of Greenland, creating a serious crisis and compelling the Europeans to begin acting autonomously when it came to both trade and defense issues.
At the eastern end of Eurasia, Trump’s intervention in Iran and the blocking of key oil supplies to Asia, thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, weakened longstanding bilateral alliances with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. The thousands of missiles the US has fired at Iran have also reduced its ability to defend the island of Taiwan and forced Washington to begin withdrawing stocks of missiles from South Korea—exposing both the limits of its military power and Asia’s lowered priority.
As The New York Times editorial board put it after Donald Trump’s recent Beijing summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (where the US president showed a “worrisome lack of interest” in Taiwan), “America’s inability to defeat Iran’s much smaller military has raised questions about whether it could help defend Taiwan from a mainland invasion.” If China ultimately takes that island, the US defensive perimeter in the Pacific would be pushed back from the “first island chain” (Japan-Taiwan-the Philippines) to the “second island chain” (Japan-Guam)—inflicting a major geopolitical blow on the US by crippling its capacity to aid its Asian allies.
More broadly, the Trump administration’s plans, as stated in its recent National Security Strategy, for “a readjustment of our global military presence” by shifting forces into the Western Hemisphere would be tantamount, if fully implemented, to a unilateral surrender in what foreign policy experts have come to call “the new Cold War” with Beijing and Moscow.
Imperial Energy
Probe deeper still for the causes of the ongoing all-American imperial decline and you’ll come to the most fundamental but generally least noted factor in the rise and fall of every world empire for the past 500 years: energy innovation.
In the 16th century, Spain and Portugal maximized the caloric output of the human body by developing the slave plantation, whose phenomenal profitability allowed a uniquely cruel form of commercial agriculture to spread from West Africa along the coast of Brazil to the Caribbean and then, of course, to the American South. A century later, the Dutch mastered wind power, using windmills to saw uniform planks to build efficient sailing ships that won them a commercial empire stretching from the Spice Islands of Indonesia to the island of Manhattan. In the 19th century, Britain’s industrial revolution developed coal-fired steam engines for factories, trains, and ships that facilitated its conquest of colonies covering a quarter of the globe. After 1945, America’s ascent to global hegemony would be synonymous with the rise of petroleum, quickly supplanting coal as the world’s primary form of energy and leading to repeated US interventions in the Middle East for the past 70 years.
Weighing all the changes likely to accompany Washington’s Trump-era retreat from global leadership, I suspect that, surprisingly enough, the world may have good reason to regret the passing of Washington’s world order in the years to come.
In recent years, however, Beijing has launched a revolution in green energy from the sun and wind whose accelerating pace, driven by its sheer economic efficiency, has the potential to transform much of the global economy, while simultaneously making China the world’s preeminent economic power. With surprising speed, solar-powered electrical generation has become 41% less expensive (and wind 53% cheaper) than the least expensive form of fossil fuel. In addition, engineering innovations in battery design for both driving and electrical storage are likely to make the cost of carbon-fueled power prohibitively expensive within a decade or less.
Under the Biden administration, Washington invested a trillion dollars to fund America’s baby steps toward a green-energy future. However, as soon as Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he began working to smother that infant initiative in its cradle beneath a sheaf of executive orders—canceling coastal wind farms, voiding the tax credit for electric vehicles (EVs), and opening vast stretches of US offshore waters for yet more oil and natural gas drilling.
Meanwhile, China increased its total power generation by 16% in 2025, with solar and wind energy accounting for half of its total capacity. And just as China already produces 80% of the global supply of solar panels, so its recent innovations in EV battery design have allowed it to rack up 70% of global electric vehicle production. While China’s auto industry surged in the last five years to capture 24% of global car production in 2025 (and is projected to reach 35% in just four more years), Detroit’s share has fallen to only 16%, driven in part by its costly retreat from EV production since Trump’s return to office.
Given rapid advances in battery range, charge time, and temperature range, it’s only a matter of years before the low-cost cars rolling out of China’s vast robotic factories supplant legacy brands and come to dominate the global auto market. With the Detroit vehicle industry, America’s largest manufacturing sector, now struggling to survive (along with other industries wedded to overpriced carbon-generated fuel), the future of much of US manufacturing looks increasingly dim.
The Consequences of America’s Decline
Yes, the world of a Pax Americana in the previous century (though imperial America never could fully avoid wars) is gone. And a world without active US international leadership will not necessarily be a better place. Without a single superpower or set of superpowers to backstop otherwise toothless resolutions from the United Nations, international relations in a post-American world order will likely be both more complex and possibly more conflict-ridden as well.
In the new multipolar world likely to emerge in the next decade (if not sooner), even major countries like the United States and China will undoubtedly find themselves exercising their asymmetric power ever closer to home. While some global areas will suffer from localized rivalries—Beijing versus Tokyo in East Asia, Ankara versus Cairo and Riyadh in the Middle East—regional associations like ASEAN, Mercosur, and the European Union are likely to play an increasingly important role in forging diplomatic consensus and mediating local conflicts.
Instead of the bipolar rivalry of the old Cold War era or American-led interventions in places like Afghanistan, Panama, or Kuwait during the more recent decades of its unipolar power, in the future regional rivals will likely wage bitter local wars in hot spots around the globe over boundaries, the control of minerals, water rights, or climate-change refugees. To take but one example, Ethiopia, an arid, landlocked, overcrowded nation of 140 million people in East Africa, faces potential conflicts with Egypt over the Nile’s headwaters, with Eritrea over port access, and with Somalia over the fate of the breakaway state of Somaliland.
Though their scope might be narrow, regional wars can potentially cause massive human carnage, as shown by the Second Congo War (1998-2003) that ravaged eastern Congo, as neighboring states like Rwanda and warlord armies like the murderous M-23 militia battled over mineral rights, killing an estimated 5.4 million people. That made it the world’s bloodiest (if least noticed) armed conflict since World War II. Even today, more than 20 years later, warlord armies are still battling for control of the eastern Congo, capturing cities and displacing more than a million refugees.
On the wider world stage, the international institutions that the US created at the peak of its power in the 1940s (the UN, the IMF, and the WTO) might survive. However, the liberal international principles that once inspired Washington’s world order—human rights, humanitarian aid, respect for refugees, women’s rights, and immutable national sovereignty—are likely to fade, even as aspirational ideals. (They already are, of course, in Donald Trump’s America.) And that will undoubtedly prove to be a genuine loss. After all, even under our current world order, a combination of Western foreign aid, Chinese economic growth, and World Bank loans led to a significant reduction in the percentage of the world’s population living under “extreme poverty” (less than $2.00 a day) from 44% in 1981 to just 9% in 2019.
Now, of course, while leading the West in shifting funds from foreign aid to military defense, the second Trump administration has already abolished the US Agency for International Development (USAID), cutting food and medication aid globally that could cause an extra 14 million deaths by 2030. Such humanitarian efforts and their supporting principles are already giving way to a far more transactional world order, exemplified by China’s current foreign policy, grounded in mutual self-interest and largely devoid of ethical concerns.
One of the major achievements of Washington’s old order, the avoidance of a world war among the superpowers for more than eight decades, could face increasing strain in the coming years. Instead of pooling scarce resources to cope with the challenge of climate change, the planet’s leading nations are continuing to raise their military budgets, producing a 13% increase in spending on nuclear weapons in 2023 alone. To keep pace with China and Russia in a great power rivalry that is clearly in danger of becoming a new Cold War, the US began revamping its nuclear triad in 2010 at a projected cost of $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. And mindful that nuclear-armed North Korea remains safe while Iran has been ravaged, even medium-sized states will undoubtedly be seeking the security of nuclear arms, potentially producing a dangerous proliferation of such world-ending weaponry.
Weighing all the changes likely to accompany Washington’s Trump-era retreat from global leadership, I suspect that, surprisingly enough, the world may have good reason to regret the passing of Washington’s world order in the years to come. Maybe it was growing up on US Army bases where patriotism was pervasive; maybe it was the way I hero-worshipped my dad when he came back from fighting communism in the Korean War; or perhaps it was saluting the US flag every day in Mrs. Stabler’s 6th-grade class. Whether my view comes from those personal wellsprings or from my professional training as an historian of empires, I’m pretty sure that, within the narrow limits imperialism allows, America’s imperial era did give the world at least some chance for progress.
Despite its many excesses and a frequent failure to honor its own principles, imperial America did offer this planet more chances for change than the great powers that preceded it and possibly the ones likely to succeed it as well. For all those reasons, I say, “Requiescat in pace (rest in peace), Pax Americana, you will be missed.”
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