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regime change
Why Regime Change in Cuba Is Imminent and We Should Be Worried
Cuba looks set to see a repeat of the Venezuelan playbook, as President Donald Trump has said he will be "the one" to finally act on Cuba. The message from Washington is clear: Cuba is next.
May 28, 2026
The United States has indicted Cuba's former president Raúl Castro on murder charges, deployed a carrier strike group to the Caribbean, and issued explicit threats of military intervention. Is the US moving toward another regime change operation in the Western Hemisphere? The rhetoric coming out of Washington suggests very much so.
Cuba looks set to see a repeat of the Venezuelan playbook. President Donald Trump has said he will be "the one" to finally act on Cuba. The message from Washington is clear. Cuba is next.
Latin America is empire's favorite backyard, where the United States has consistently moved to remove governments that pursue independent foreign and economic policies not in line with American interests. From the ouster of Guatemala's Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to the CIA-backed overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973, the region bears a long scar map of US interference.
But Cuba is an interesting case. Since the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the island has managed to stave off the empire. Fidel Castro faced over 600 assassination attempts by the CIA. Despite that, the island survived, 90 miles from Florida, outlasting every American president who tried to bring it down.
Trump's ratings have fallen considerably due to the interventionism in Venezuela and Iran. Further adventurism is only going to dent them further.
So why the sudden push for military action now? The US under Trump is following a ruthless foreign policy where the rules-based order, in whatever form it existed, has been buried. Just like Venezuela and Iran, the US believes it has the right to subdue Cuba by continuing the momentum it has built, as Cuba has always been a symbol of resistance to American imperialism.
Anti-Cuba narratives have served American presidents well when it comes to securing political capital. For Trump, this is an opportunity to reassert US power and influence in the region, as he has stated himself: "Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years. It looks like I'll be the one that does it." And most importantly, the move speaks directly to his voter base in Florida, which has a large and politically powerful Cuban-American population.
More than Trump though is the role and influence of Marco Rubio. A Cuban-American born in Miami, Rubio has crafted his entire political identity around the promise of a free Cuba.
He opposed former President Barack Obama's 2014 decision to restore diplomatic relations with Havana more loudly than almost any other politician in Washington, swearing to do "everything possible" to obstruct and reverse that policy. He pushed successfully to reverse it under Trump's first term and has consistently lobbied for tighter sanctions, stricter travel restrictions, and maximum pressure on the island and in 2024 introduced legislation to ensure Cuba remained on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
On Cuba's Independence Day, Rubio delivered a video message to the Cuban people blaming their suffering entirely on a military conglomerate called GAESA without once mentioning the fuel blockade his own administration imposed. It was a telling omission.
That blockade is producing real humanitarian crisis. Blackouts last up to 22 hours a day. The health system carries a backlog of over 96,000 surgeries including 11,000 for children. United Nations human rights experts have described the situation as "energy starvation" and said it violates international human rights law. Prolonged sanctions and economic pressure are deepening this crisis while doing little to produce meaningful political change.
Mr. Rubio should be reminded that it is not for the US to deliver freedom to the Cuban people, just as it is not for the US to deliver freedom to the people of Venezuela or Iran. Changing regimes under the guise of freedom and democracy is the old playbook of empire. It has nothing to do with the interests of ordinary people and everything to do with American vested interests.
The Cuban socialist regime may have a thousand flaws, just like the regimes in Venezuela or Iran. But that does not give any state the right to intervene and impose regime change.
The US should also be wary of its ambitions and remember that Cuba is not Venezuela. While it may not possess the ability to retaliate like Iran or block strategic choke points, the Cuban nation has a fighting spirit that should not be underestimated. Cuba's defense doctrine envisions the entire civilian population mobilized for resistance; every Cuban citizen receives military training. The country's official motto says it all: "Patria o muerte, venceremos." Homeland or death, we will prevail.
At the same time, Trump's ratings have fallen considerably due to the interventionism in Venezuela and Iran. Further adventurism is only going to dent them further, particularly if an attack on Cuba triggers a refugee crisis on Florida's doorstep.
If Rubio is genuinely concerned about the Cuban people, lifting the fuel blockade would be a meaningful first step, one that would ease humanitarian suffering and open space for de-escalation. Another US-driven regime change in the hemisphere would not liberate Cubans. It would likely deepen instability across the Caribbean and Latin America at a moment when the region can least afford it.
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Alex Saab and the Fragility of the Venezuela Solidarity Movement
It’s difficult not to see the renewed imprisonment of Alex Saab as a disappointing capitulation to US coercion after so many of us fought for his freedom, but we cannot forget the task at hand.
May 24, 2026
The recent deportation of Alex Saab from Caracas to the US on May 18, 2026 has generated shock, confusion, anger, and intense debate across sectors of the international solidarity movement and many Venezuelans themselves.
Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman who became closely associated with the Venezuelan government during the years of heavy US sanctions, is seen by many Venezuelans as someone who helped the country bypass sanctions, obtain fuel and food, open financial channels, and resist economic collapse under blockade conditions.
The US accuses Saab of corruption and money laundering connected to Venezuelan state contracts, but for many people in Venezuela and across the international left, Saab came to represent something larger than an individual businessman: the broader struggle over sanctions, sovereignty, and Venezuela’s ability to survive under extraordinary economic and geopolitical pressure.
The Venezuelan revolution did not survive the last decade of US economic warfare without contradictions. It survived through improvisation, exhaustion, loyalty, fear, sanctions, migration, stubbornness, and an almost unbearable national fatigue that few outside the country truly understand.
Reducing every painful decision to betrayal while ignoring the enormous machinery of coercion surrounding Venezuela risks reproducing the very fragmentation that external aggression was designed to create in the first place.
The United States did not merely sanction Venezuela. It attempted to break it. It froze national assets, it openly pursued regime change, backed parallel governments, economically strangled the country, and ultimately launched a military operation to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores from Venezuelan soil.
To understand why Saab became such a powerful figure, one must first understand what Venezuela became under sanctions: a country forced into survival mode.
And now, after the deportation of Saab to the United States and the growing accusations against Delcy Rodríguez, I watch many people speak with the confidence of hindsight. As if everything had always been obvious. As if Venezuelans navigating one of the most aggressive campaigns of economic warfare, destabilization, and military coercion in modern Latin American history had the luxury of moral purity.
As a Venezuelan American, I am struggling too to understand and process this moment. I stood there too. I called for Alex Saab’s freedom when he was detained in Cape Verde during the height of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela. At the time, the reality that existed for many of us was that Saab was a Venezuelan diplomat helping the country navigate sanctions.
Recently, Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez publicly stated that Alex Saab has maintained relationships with US agencies since 2019. These revelations, combined with Saab’s deportation, have generated painful questions for many people who spent years defending him publicly.
What did we actually know?
What kinds of compromises were going on inside a country trying to survive under siege?
These are painful questions. And at this moment, there are still far more questions than answers.
Maybe painful compromises were made.
Maybe Saab was never what many believed him to be.
Maybe serious betrayals occurred.
Maybe the deportation was justified.
Maybe realities existed behind closed doors that ordinary Venezuelans never had access to. Or maybe decisions were made inside an impossible reality where preventing wider war, deeper collapse, and even greater harm for ordinary Venezuelans became more urgent.
Because since the kidnapping of Maduro, Venezuela has not been operating in an atmosphere of freedom. It is operating under threat.
And it is easy to demand uncompromising heroism from a country under attack when you are not the one responsible for preventing millions of people from falling into even greater catastrophe.
People who defended Saab for years are now confronting the possibility that parts of the story may have been hidden from them. Others are immediately translating uncertainty into accusations of betrayal against Delcy Rodríguez and the entire Bolivarian process.
But I think there is something dangerous about how quickly so many people are rushing toward absolute conclusions while fragments of information, accusations, leaks, and political narratives are still colliding in real time.
Maybe there will come a moment for deeper criticism of Delcy Rodríguez and others within the Bolivarian process. Maybe new information will eventually clarify realities that today remain obscured by contradiction, secrecy, pressure, and war.
But I think there is a certain political myopia in discussing Venezuela's internal contradictions while removing the broader reality of US pressure and coercion from the story entirely.
Because regardless of what may eventually be revealed about Alex Saab, the larger reality remains unchanged: Venezuela was subjected to years of sanctions, destabilization, economic strangulation, coup attempts, international isolation, and eventually direct military intervention.
The aggressor has not disappeared from the story.
And reducing every painful decision to betrayal while ignoring the enormous machinery of coercion surrounding Venezuela risks reproducing the very fragmentation that external aggression was designed to create in the first place.
It’s difficult not to see the renewed imprisonment of Alex Saab as a disappointing capitulation to US coercion after so many of us fought for his freedom, but we cannot forget the task at hand. If we are serious about ending US aggression toward Venezuela, we cannot allow our solidarity with the Venezuelan people to be deterred. They have shown us how to sustain a revolution amid contradictions, and that is what we must do.
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Venezuela Buys Time to Rebuild While Under Siege
The current fraught détente with Washington is a window of opportunity to recover an economy operating at roughly 30% of its pre-sanctions level.
May 03, 2026
Although progressives are rightly concerned about US-coerced compromises and concessions, it is equally important to understand the resilience and continuing successes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Focusing only on the half-empty aspect of the proverbial glass obscures the strength of the resistance and conceals the vulnerabilities of the imperial juggernaut.
On a delegation to Venezuela, the constant refrain from both high-ranking government officials and grassroots Chavistas—supporters of the movement led by former President Hugo Chávez—was that they were urgently “buying time.”
A quarter-century of US hybrid war on Venezuela, especially the unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), has had a corrosive effect. The current fraught détente with Washington is a window of opportunity to recover an economy operating at roughly 30% of its pre-sanctions level.
President Maduro’s kidnapping
The kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores by US special forces on January 3 was “the one scenario we didn’t expect,” according to former Venezuelan Deputy Foreign minister Carlos Ron.
The kidnapping was a military success for the US. But politically Washington had no viable alternative to the Chavistas retaining power.
Abducting a lawful head of state—an egregious violation of international law—is not, however, unprecedented. In 2004, the US flew Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Central African Republic in what Washington claimed was a voluntary decision, but which Aristide called a kidnapping. In 1990, following a bloody invasion, the US extradited Panama’s Manuel Noriega.
Leading up to January 3, Washington had incrementally tightened its stranglehold over Venezuela. Initial sanctions imposed in 2015 evolved from targeted measures to broad sectoral restrictions, especially on oil and finance. “Secondary sanctions” followed, penalizing non-US actors engaged with Venezuela. By December an outright military “total and complete blockade” piratically seized oil tankers.
US President Donald Trump also designated the so-called Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, allegedly headed by Maduro. A $25-million bounty on Maduro under former US President Joe Biden was doubled in August. The following month, the US commenced extrajudicial murders of alleged drug runners in small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. By October, Trump suspended all communication with the Maduro government.
Resilience and Continuity
Despite post-kidnapping concessions, it is instructive to consider what hasn’t happened. The political leadership did not splinter, and the country did not descend into chaos. The US-directed fate of Libya in 2011 was not to be repeated in Venezuela.
Venezuela maintained constitutional continuity. Shortly after the strike, then Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president. Other top leaders—National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López—remained in place and unified. The civic-military unity held fast.
Under intense US pressure, high-ranking militants have been replaced. Padrino, who was swapped for Gustavo González López, another committed Chavista, remains influential in his new cabinet position heading the critical agricultural ministry. In this whack-a-mole scenario, the major exception to the government’s strategy of yielding in form to US pressure but maintaining a Chavista essence is the new Vice Foreign Minister for North America and Europe, Oliver Blanco, who is from the opposition.
Another triumph is that a highly divided population did not erupt into civil conflict. Instead, the attack produced a rally-around-the-flag effect, with some moderate opposition figures showing a new openness to the ruling party.
Nor was Noble Prize winner and far-rightist María Corina Machado imposed as president. She had signaled that if she took power there would be a retaliatory bloodbath against Chavistas. Meanwhile, the US effectively abandoned the bogus claim that Maduro headed the Cartel de los Soles.
Diplomatic Thaw and Economic Openings
On March 7, Washington formally recognized the Venezuelan government led by Rodríguez, marking a reversal of its policy since 2019. Trump even informally referred to her as “president-elect,” though the return of Maduro from US imprisonment as the rightful chief remains Venezuela’s national priority. On April 27, the US modified sanctions to allow the Venezuelan government to pay Maduro’s defense lawyers.
Financial easing is proceeding. In the late 1990s-early 2000s, the US bought more than half of Venezuela’s oil exports. Oil sales have again resumed under a highly restructured and controlled system, while the US has also taken steps to shield Venezuelan state assets from creditor seizure. The Rodríguez government is in the process of regaining control of Citgo Petroleum, the “crown jewel” of Venezuela's foreign assets, which the US had seized.
What has been achieved is not a lifting of sanctions, but a controlled reentry into international finance under US licensing and oversight.
Washington has authorized transactions with Venezuela’s central bank and major state banks, reversing the 2019 measures that had effectively cut them off from the global financial system. This policy change allows dollar-denominated transactions and access to US financial channels.
For the first time in years, Venezuela’s core financial institutions can operate in international banking channels. What makes this significant is that it allows oil revenues from US transactions to enter the domestic economy. That in turn helps stabilize liquidity, reducing the need for monetary expansion that had fueled inflation.
On April 16, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resumed engagement with Venezuela. Previously, the US-dominated IMF had cut Venezuela off from its $5-million “special drawing rights” (SDR). Rodríguez said she will only access its rightful SDR account to be used for social programs and not apply for loans.
Still, the core US sanctions framework remains in place, with most transactions subject to case-by-case authorization. Full unrestricted access to global capital markets has not been restored. What has been achieved is not a lifting of sanctions, but a controlled reentry into international finance under US licensing and oversight.
Prospects
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues its consecutive 20-quarter expansion. New and long-considered legislative reforms for hydrocarbons and minerals encourage needed foreign investment vital for economic recovery. Although the changes involved some bitter pills, the rationale is that it is better to compromise than to keep these resources in the ground where they generate no income.
Rodríguez lauded a new amnesty law, creating a “new historical moment… of national reunification.” The long-polarized Venezuelan people yearn for domestic tranquility, according to Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, editor of the Caracas-based Orinoco Tribune.
Venezuela has so far escaped the severity of the economic strangulation that Cuba is now suffering or the military pummeling on the scale of Iran. The US-Israeli war in the Middle East may even be creating a temporary opening for Venezuela, as Trump needs the prospect of freely available Venezuelan oil to help calm jittery oil markets.
Trump may have also calculated that engagement with the Chavistas offered greater strategic benefits than assassination or a large-scale invasion, while using the kidnapping to placate domestic hawks pushing for full regime change. Significantly for US imperial objectives, Venezuela’s connections with other counter-hegemonic countries were curtailed.
Washington’s strategy since January 3 has focused on Venezuela’s stabilization and economic recovery. Their deferred third phase, “political transition,” is another word for regime change. Rodríguez has made clear that “free and fair” elections can be held only if the blackmail of US sanctions is removed. Thousands marched in a national “Pilgrimage for a Venezuela Without Sanctions and Peace.”
The kidnapping was a military success for the US. But politically Washington had no viable alternative to the Chavistas retaining power, given their strength, according to former Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Areaza. The only other option for the invader was to face a Vietnam-style guerilla war. The Bolivarian Revolution has persisted and is still fighting. On balance, the glass is decisively more than half full.
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Trump's Iran War: Anatomy of a Debacle
President Donald Trump’s persistent boasts about tactical victories against Iran’ s military ignore the fundamental strategic fact that Trump has lost the Iran war.
Apr 21, 2026
When he declared war on Iran in violation of international law and the US Constitution, President Donald Trump announced several objectives. He claims to have won the war, but Iran is emerging as the long-term victor.
Let’s count the ways.
“Regime Change”
No one doubted the capacity of the US armed forces to decimate Iran’s far inferior military force. But to what end?
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump that launching the attack would prompt a popular uprising that would lead to the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy. Listening to Netanyahu’s assertion, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it “farcical.” Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio translated that word into language Trump would understand, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Trump’s bluster isn’t working with Iranian leaders. His threats to commit war crimes dominate news cycles, but they merely reveal to Iran Trump’s desperation to extricate himself from the mess he created.
Trump chose to believe Netanyahu. Announcing the US-Israeli assault, Trump told Iranians that this was their opportunity to reclaim their country. To win the war on Trump’s terms, the Iranian theocracy needed only to survive.
The attack killed the Supreme Leader of Iran and top members of the government. But immediately, the serpent grew another head—the Supreme Leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who had lost his wife and teenage son in the bombing. The new leader is known for deep, long-standing ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) security establishment. His appointment signaled a transition to a more heavily militarized, hard-line, and anti-Western regime.
Trump calls this “regime change.” By his definition, Admiral Karl Dönitz succeeding Adolf Hitler as head of the German state near the end of World War II constituted regime change too.
The Iran theocracy survived in an even more militant form.
Score: Iran 1, Trump 0
“Contain Iran”
Trump boasted that the war would restrain Iran’s ability to project power:
“We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders,” he said.
Trump then described the destruction of Iran’s navy, air force, missile facilities, and defense industrial base. Those were tactical successes, but the war itself has been a strategic failure.
Iran’s response included attacks on neighboring countries. Even more troubling, it discovered and deployed a powerful new weapon: blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Notwithstanding its decimated navy, Iran now has a choke hold on the global economy.
Netanyahu had assured Trump that the regime would be so weakened from the US-Israeli assault that it would be unable to block the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flowed. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the strait and the risks of Iran blocking it. But Trump dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before that could happen.
With the price of oil skyrocketing, Trump has created a new problem for the entire world and powerful leverage for Iran.
Score: Iran 2, Trump 0
“No Nuclear Weapons”
In his June 2025 attack on Iran, Trump claimed to have “obliterated” its nuclear facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went further, saying that not only were the facilities obliterated, but so too were Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Subsequently, Trump took repeated victory laps over the mission:
- “It knocked out their entire potential nuclear capacity.” (July 16)
- “It’s been obliterated.” (July 31)
- “We obliterated… the future nuclear capability of Iran.” (August 18)
- “But I also obliterated Iran’s nuclear hopes, by totally annihilating their enriched uranium.” (September 20)
- “Well, they don’t have a nuclear program. It was obliterated.” (October 13)
- “…completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.” (November 11)
- “It was called Iran and its nuclear capability, and we obliterated that very quickly and strongly and powerfully.” (November 19)
- “We obliterated their nuclear capability.” (December 11)
- “We knocked out the Iran nuclear threat, and it was obliterated.” (January 8)
- “…obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability.” (January 20)
- “…achieving total obliteration of the Iran nuclear potential capability—totally obliterated.” (February 13)
In defending the launch of the war on February 28, 2026, Trump acknowledged that Iran’s nuclear program had not been obliterated after all. Rather, the country was now “right at the doorstep” of having a nuclear bomb. Trump has no strategy for solving that problem either.
Trump’s tactics—bombing—won’t work. Knowledgeable experts believe that a key Iranian nuclear facility is Pickaxe Mountain, where some of its uranium may be stored. That facility is so far below the ground that even America’s 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs can’t reach its inner chamber.
Trump talks about “going in” and taking the nuclear material out. But a ground operation to retrieve the material or destroy the facility would entail tremendous risk to those attempting it while providing, at best, an uncertain outcome.
The threat of a nuclear Iran remains.
Score: Iran 3, Trump 0
False Declarations of Victory That Backfire
Trump’s bluster isn’t working with Iranian leaders. His threats to commit war crimes dominate news cycles, but they merely reveal to Iran Trump’s desperation to extricate himself from the mess he created. As a negotiating strategy, it’s counterproductive.
Trump’s persistent boasts about tactical victories against Iran’ s military ignore the fundamental strategic fact that Trump has lost the Iran war. If a deal emerges from discussions between Iran’s experienced negotiators and Trump’s collection of amateurs, America and the world will pay a big price for a long time.
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11,000 Children Among Tens of Thousands ‘Waiting for Surgery’ in Cuba Due to US Blockade
Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said he hoped the people of the United States would ask, "Why does our government treat the whole population of Cuba this way?"
Mar 23, 2026
More than 96,000 Cubans, including 11,000 children, are "waiting for surgery" due to a fuel shortage caused by the American blockade, the country's deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, said on Sunday.
The numbers cited by the minister on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday were first reported earlier this month by Cuban Minister of Public Health José Ángel Portal Miranda, who explained that President Donald Trump's policy of “energy asphyxiation," using tariffs to threaten countries out of importing fuel to Cuba, has devastated its National Health Service.
The policy has left Cuba unable to import oil from abroad for more than three months, reducing its fuel supply by about 90% and leading to periodic blackouts and strict energy rationing.
Using the severely limited electricity at its disposal, Cuba's health system has been forced to prioritize continuing cancer treatments and other lifesaving procedures, putting those awaiting non-urgent surgeries on the sidelines.
Last month, a specialist at a hospital in Holguín told Diario de Cuba that the surgeries canceled included "uncomplicated hernias, cataract surgeries, some non-urgent gynecological procedures, and scheduled orthopedic surgeries."
Other healthcare professionals said that nobody was being admitted to the hospital for tests and that it was running low on basic supplies like syringes, IV tubing, and antibiotics, which could not be delivered due to fuel shortages. Most of those that have been used had to be donated by family members or purchased for exorbitant prices on the black market.
Jorge Barrera, a reporter for CBC News, spoke with patients and employees at Havana’s National Institute of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery this weekend and found it to be at about half capacity, and that nonessential care has been virtually all suspended.
"Even though the health system is a point of pride for Cuba... something that they export to the rest of the world," Barrera explained, "because of this crisis, because of the impact it's had on the skyrocketing prices, it's just not enough for them to make ends meet. So people are quitting... to find other ways to make money to feed their families."
Experts with the United Nations have condemned the blockade of Cuba as "a serious violation of international law." Condemnations have grown louder over the past week as Trump said he believed he'd have "the honor of taking Cuba" after it collapsed.
De Cossio said he hoped the people of the United States would ask "Why does our government treat the whole population of Cuba this way?" and that they'd "understand that it's not correct to treat another nation the way the US is doing simply to try to achieve political goals."
The US blockade of Cuba is largely unpopular with the American public. A poll published last week by YouGov found that just 28% of adult US citizens said they approved of the US blocking oil shipments to the country, while 46% said they opposed it.
Asked by anchor Kristen Welker about suggestions from Trump that Cuba would collapse "on its own" without the need for the US to intervene militarily, De Cossio retorted, "What does 'on its own' mean when it’s being forced by the United States?"
Prior to Trump's further measures to isolate Cuba in January, the US had placed Cuba under an economic embargo for more than 60 years, which severely hampered the country's economic development and has cost Cuba trillions of dollars since it began, according to the UN.
"It’s a very bizarre statement, and it’s claimed by most US politicians repeatedly that Cuba will collapse on its own," De Cossio said. "Then why does the US government need to employ so many resources, so much political capital, so many human resources to try to destroy the economy of another country? Evidently, it implies that the country does not have the characteristics to collapse on its own."
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Why US Cuba Coverage Falls Far Short of the Truth
As the Trump regime tightens the screws of the embargo by further restricting oil access to the country, legacy media continue to toe the government’s line on the issue, with coverage that is either low on context or outright stenography.
Mar 22, 2026
The US government’s decades-long economic blockade against Cuba is in many ways not a complicated issue. The policy of restricting trade with the country’s communist government was put into full force under the Kennedy administration, with the explicit goal of causing enough economic hardship, hunger, and desperation to spur regime change.
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly and consistently voted to end the embargo since a resolution to that effect was first introduced in 1992. Member countries argue that the embargo violates international law. It has cost the country anywhere between $130-170 billion since its inception, and has restricted the Cuban people’s access to food and medicine. And it has not accomplished its primary goal of overthrowing the Cuban government.
These are key points that should be included in any article reporting on Cuba’s economic struggles. However, US journalists have consistently leaned into the US government’s framing of the issue: that the country’s communist government is largely or exclusively to blame for its financial woes (FAIR.org, 11/4/24).
As the Trump regime tightens the screws of the embargo by further restricting oil access to the country, a move that has been condemned by UN human rights experts as a further violation of international law (New York Times, 2/13/26), legacy media continue to toe the government’s line on the issue, with coverage that is either low on context or outright stenography.
‘Extraordinary Threat’
President Donald Trump has tried to justify his administration’s significant escalation in tactics on the basis that Cuba represents an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the security of the United States, primarily by supporting US geopolitical enemies. This accusation is not new: The country has previously been accused of hosting both Russian and Chinese spy bases. Despite neither claim being backed by evidence (Belly of the Beast, 2/6/26, 8/1/24), the Trump administration doubled down on them when rolling out its new and harsher set of policies.
But the administration also unveiled a new claim that upped the ante: Cuba has apparently been harboring Hamas and Hezbollah forces, not 90 miles off of our shores! “Cuba welcomes transnational terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” reads an executive order from January 29,
creating a safe environment for these malign groups so that these transnational terrorist groups can build economic, cultural, and security ties throughout the region, and attempt to destabilize the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.
The administration did not provide evidence to support this claim, and none has surfaced, despite local journalists’ investigative efforts (Belly of the Beast, 2/2/26).
That hasn’t stopped legacy media from repeating the claim uncritically, with nothing more than an “alleged” or “accused” attached, suggesting reporters can’t be bothered to fact-check it. This could be found in coverage in both The Guardian (1/29/26) and CNN (2/1/26) at the beginning of the recent round of escalations.
A full month later—plenty of time for a serious reporter to get to the bottom of the allegations, or at least ask the administration what evidence it has—The Atlantic (3/1/26) relayed the claim yet again, with just as little evidence supporting it as when it was first made. Throwing in the word “alleged” does little to change the fact that the US government has been given primary control of the narrative in this media coverage.
Despite the abundance of evidence regarding the intentions of US foreign policy toward Cuba, legacy media often fail to give proper context when reporting on the topic.
The Cuban government has categorically denied harboring or supporting terrorist organizations (Granma, 2/2/26). But defying basic journalistic practice, neither The Guardian nor The Atlantic gave any space to the Cuban government to respond to the claims made against it.
The Atlantic did quote a source that pushed back on using Cuba’s designation as a “state sponsor of terrorism” as a rationale for overthrowing its government. But that designation long preceded Trump’s recent comments, and the article did not offer any challenge to the recent accusations. The CNN article included only that Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that Trump’s threats were made under “empty pretexts.”
‘It Is Indeed a Blockade’
Some recent New York Times reports, on the other hand, have shown a willingness to break from the official narrative. An article by reporter Frances Robles (1/30/26) on the decision to cut off fuel to the island noted that the administration hadn’t provided evidence to support its claims that Cuba is harboring Hamas or Hezbollah fighters.
The article’s sourcing is more robust as well. For instance, the Times gave Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum space to oppose Trump’s decision, affirming her support for the sovereignty of the Cuban people and respect for international law. This was followed by Cuba’s foreign minister saying that what his government calls the “economic genocide” being enacted by Trump’s decision is built on “a long list of lies.” A social media post attributed to the Venezuelan government rounded out the opposing sources balking at the idea that Cuba constitutes a threat to the US.
The Times (2/20/26) challenged official terminology in another piece headlined “A New US Blockade Is Strangling Cuba.” The article, by Jack Nicas and Christiaan Triebert, explained that the term “blockade” is a contentious one:
The US government called its 1962 policy a “quarantine” to avoid using the word “blockade,” which legally could be interpreted as an act of war. The Trump administration has also avoided using the word “‘blockade.”
Regardless of the Trump administration’s refusal to call the recent change in policy a “blockade,” the article said, “it is functioning as one.”
The article also quoted Fulton Armstrong, “former lead Latin American analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency,” who agreed with the diagnosis. “Among us longtime Cuba watchers, we’ve always resisted people using the word blockade,” he says. “But it is indeed a blockade.”
(Of course, the Cuban government has considered the US’ economic punishment to be an illegal blockade and a “wartime measure” long before the recent escalation—Granma, 2/2/17.)
The article also had a rare reference to the possible illegality of US sanctions:
The United Nations has criticized the US policy as a violation of international law that has exacerbated the suffering of Cuba’s roughly 10 million residents.
‘Lead an Army of Exiles’
Despite the abundance of evidence regarding the intentions of US foreign policy toward Cuba, legacy media often fail to give proper context when reporting on the topic. In a Reuters report (2/25/26) about the Trump administration allowing oil sales to private companies in Cuba amid the ongoing crisis, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was given space to blame the Cuban government for the country’s woes without any pushback.
“What the Cuban people should know is this: that if they are hungry and they are suffering, it’s not because we’re not prepared to help them. We are,” he said. “It’s that the people standing in the way of us helping them is the regime, the Communist Party.”
Are there any average citizens of Cuba who value their nation’s sovereignty, who don’t want their government to relent, or who blame the United States for enacting policies designed to hurt their own economy? Herald readers may never know.
The article allowed this quote to hang bizarrely in the middle of a story about the US exercising disproportionate power over the country. The article put very little blame on the US at all, noting that its recent escalations have only been “worsening an energy crisis in the Communist-run country that is hitting power generation and fuel for vehicles, houses, and aviation.”
Nowhere was the long history of US attacks on the Cuban economy mentioned. Nor was there any suggestion that Rubio, a man who boasted as a child that he would one day “lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba” (Atlantic, 12/23/14), might be invested in policies that might achieve his childhood dream. Rubio’s recent admission (Belly of the Beast, 1/28/26) that the Trump administration would like to see regime change in Cuba, a condition that is itself codified into US law as a prerequisite for lifting the “embargo,” is glaringly absent as well.
‘Failure of the Socialist Economic Model’
Similarly, the Miami Herald (2/17/26)—long hostile to the Cuban government—depicted Rubio as simply urging the Cuban government “to make economic reforms as a way out of the impasse.” While documenting the poor conditions on the streets of Cuba, the Herald‘s Nora Gámez Torres reported:
The economic crisis, a deep economic contraction that has lasted years, has largely resulted from the failure of the socialist economic model, a hard-currency-hungry military stashing billions of dollars in its accounts, and years of Cuban leaders dragging their feet on urgently needed economic reforms. The Covid-19 pandemic and the tightening of US sanctions under the first Trump administration also played a part.
The “stashing billions” reference is to a bogus story the same reporter (Miami Herald, 8/6/25) published last year; Gámez Torres, who accused the Cuban military of having a huge secret reserve of cash based on a leaked spreadsheet, apparently failed to understand that a dollar sign is used to denote both US dollars and Cuban pesos (FAIR.org, 8/29/25). In her latest piece, the final line of the paragraph is the only reference to the decades-long history of economic warfare against the island.
“By design, these sanctions exist in order to suffocate the country economically, and they’re very effective in doing so,” Alexander Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told FAIR. He notes that the sanctions are aimed at cutting Cuba off from the wider economic world. For instance, Cuba’s current placement on the US State Sponsor of Terrorism list has been deterring foreign investment in the country.
“It’s not going to happen because nobody wants to invest. They’re scared to death of running afoul of the sanctions criteria, so there’s this effect of overcompliance where companies are just not going to do it,” he says. “The risk of being hit by secondary sanctions is just way too high.”
And yet, throughout the Herald article, the US is depicted as simply wanting to “make economic changes,” “increasing external pressure” in an attempt to “reform the island’s hardline Marxist economy.”
‘Willing to Drown an Entire People’
The idea that the Cuban government has been rigid and unwilling to enact reforms is a false one, according to Main. “For better or for worse, they’ve taken a lot of measures to open up the economy,” including a major reform in 2021 that gave the private sector access to most sectors of the economy. “There’s a very limited number of sectors that remain completely under state control.”
“The problem with these reforms,” he says,
is that you can’t really implement them when there’s an embargo or blockade going on, when you’re basically restricting all of foreign capital from getting in, when you’re restricting the means of Cubans to import essential inputs for their own national production, when you’re starving the economy of cash. These reforms aren’t going to go very far.
Yet Cuban leaders are depicted throughout the Herald article as stubborn and cruel for refusing to give in to US pressure, which the paper’s choice of sources would have you believe is contrary to the interests of the people. Indeed, resisting extended economic attack, and refusing to allow the United States its God-given right to decide the structure of any country it chooses, is depicted as Cuban leaders being “willing to drown an entire people in the name of ideology,” by an unnamed “source in connection with Cuban officials.”
Are there any average citizens of Cuba who value their nation’s sovereignty, who don’t want their government to relent, or who blame the United States for enacting policies designed to hurt their own economy? Herald readers may never know, as the source given the most space to push back on the economic attack is a former Democratic congressmember from Miami. A quick reference to Cuban diplomats encouraging comparisons between the Trump admin’s actions and Israel’s in Gaza is also thrown in four paragraphs from the end of the article, though only in the context of “what some Cuba observers see as a strategy to blame the humanitarian crisis entirely on the United States and create a public-opinion crisis that would put pressure on the administration.”
The Herald gives priority to sources that are consistently critical of the Cuban government, though it is not especially difficult to find Cubans capable of giving a different perspective, as a video from Cuba-focused outlet Belly of the Beast (1/31/26) shows. The Herald’s reporting makes clear that the paper is capable of lifting up Cuban voices, just so long as those voices are singing the right tune.
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Is Trump's Iran War the US Version of the Suez Crisis?
The crisis saw Britain's aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire headed for extinction. Trump may have similarly hastened US decline.
Mar 17, 2026
In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”
Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current US intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.
But by the time Anglo-French forces came storming ashore at the north end of the Suez Canal, Nasser had executed a geopolitical masterstroke by sinking dozens of rusting ships filled with rocks at the canal’s northern entrance. In doing so, he automatically cut off Europe’s lifeline to its oil fields in the Persian Gulf. By the time British forces retreated in defeat from Suez, Britain had been sanctioned at the United Nations, its currency was at the brink of collapse, its aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire was heading for extinction.
Historians now refer to the phenomenon of a dying empire launching a desperate military intervention to recover its fading imperial glory as “micro-militarism.” And coming in the wake of imperial Washington’s receding influence over the broad Eurasian land mass, the recent US military assault on Iran is starting to look like an American version of just such micro-militarism.
Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of US global hegemony.
Even if history never truly repeats itself, right now it seems all too appropriate to wonder whether the current US intervention in Iran might indeed be America’s version of the Suez Crisis. And should Washington’s attempt at regime change in Tehran somehow “succeed,” don’t for a second think that the result will be a successfully stable new government that will be able to serve its people well.
70 Years of Regime Change
Let’s return to the historical record to uncover the likely consequences of regime change in Iran. Over the past 70 years, Washington has made repeated attempts at regime change across the span of five continents—initially via CIA covert action during the 44 years of the Cold War and, in the decades since the end of that global conflict, through conventional military operations. Although the methods have changed, the results—plunging the affected societies into decades of searing social conflict and incessant political instability—have been sadly similar. This pattern can be seen in a few of the CIA’s most famous covert interventions during the Cold War.
In 1953, Iran’s new parliament decided to nationalize the British imperial oil concession there to fund social services for its emerging democracy. In response, a joint CIA-MI6 coup ousted the reformist prime minister and installed the son of the long-deposed former Shah in power. Unfortunately for the Iranian people, he proved to be a strikingly inept leader who transformed his country’s oil wealth into mass poverty—thereby precipitating Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
By 1954, Guatemala was implementing an historic land reform program that was investing its mostly Mayan Indigenous population with the requisites for full citizenship. Unfortunately, a CIA-sponsored invasion installed a brutal military dictatorship, plunging the country into 30 years of civil war that left 200,000 people dead in a population of only 5 million.
External intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.
Similarly, in 1960, the Congo had emerged from a century of brutal Belgian colonial rule by electing a charismatic leader, Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA soon ousted him from power, replacing him with Joseph Mobutu, a military dictator whose 30 years of kleptocracy precipitated violence that led to the deaths of more than 5 million people in the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and continues to take a toll to this day.
In more recent decades, there have been similarly dismal outcomes from Washington’s attempts at regime change via conventional military operations. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, US forces toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, Washington spent $2.3 trillion—and no, that “trillion” is not a misprint!—in a failed nation-building effort that was swept away when the resurgent Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in August 2021, plunging the country into a mix of harsh patriarchy and mass privation.
In 2003, Washington invaded Iraq in search of nonexistent nuclear weapons and sank into the quagmire of a 15-year war that led to the slaughter of a million people and left behind an autocratic government that became little more than an Iranian client state. And in 2011, the US led a NATO air campaign that toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s radical regime in Libya, precipitating seven years of civil war and ultimately leaving that country divided between two antagonistic failed states.
When Washington’s attempts at regime change fail, as they did in Cuba in 1961 and in Venezuela last year, that failure often leaves autocratic regimes even more entrenched, with their control over the country’s secret police strengthened and an ever-tighter death grip on the country’s economy.
Why, you might wonder, do such US interventions invariably seem to produce such dismal results? For societies struggling to achieve a fragile social stability amid volatile political change, external intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.
The Iran War’s Geopolitical Consequences
By exploring the geopolitical implications of Washington’s latest intervention in Iran, it’s possible to imagine how President Donald Trump’s war of choice might well become Washington’s very own version of the Suez crisis.
Just as Egypt snatched a diplomatic victory from the jaws of military defeat in 1956 by shutting the Suez Canal, so Iran has now closed off the Middle East’s other critical choke point by firing its Shahed drones at five freighters in the Straits of Hormuz (through which 20% of global crude oil and natural gas regularly passes) and at petroleum refineries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s drone strikes have blocked more than 90% of tanker departures from the Persian Gulf and shut down the massive Qatari refineries that produce 20% of the world supply of liquafied natural gas, sending natural gas prices soaring by 50% in much of the world and by 91% in Asia—with the price of gasoline in the US heading for $4 a gallon and the cost of oil likely to reach a staggering $150 per barrel in the near future. Moreover, through the conversion of natural gas to fertilizer, the Persian Gulf is the source for nearly half the world’s agricultural nutrients, with prices soaring by 37% for urea fertilizer in markets like Egypt and threatening both spring planting in the Northern Hemisphere and food security in the Global South.
The extraordinary concentration of petroleum production, international shipping, and capital investment in the Persian Gulf makes the Straits of Hormuz not only a choke point for the flow of oil and natural gas but also for the movement of capital for the entire global economy. To begin with the basics, the Persian Gulf holds about 50% of the world’s proven oil reserves, estimated at 859 billion barrels or, at current prices, about $86 trillion.
Time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.
To give you an idea of the scale of capital concentration in the region’s infrastructure, the national oil companies of the Gulf Cooperation Council invested $125 billion in their production facilities in 2025 alone, with plans to continue at that rate for the foreseeable future. To keep the global oil tanker fleet of 7,500 vessels that largely serves the Persian Gulf afloat, it costs nearly $100 million for a single large “Suezmax” tanker—of which there are about 900 normally on the high seas, worth a combined $90 billion (with frequent replacements required by the corrosion of steel in harsh maritime conditions). Moreover, Dubai has the world’s busiest international airport at the center of a global network with 450,000 flights annually—now shut down by Iranian drone strikes.
Despite all the White House media hype about the terrible swift sword of America’s recent airstrikes, the 3,000 US-Israeli bombing runs against Iran (which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe) in the war’s first week pale before the 1,400,000 bombing sorties over Europe during World War II. The striking contrast between those numbers makes the current US air attacks on Iran seem, from a strategic perspective, like shooting at an elephant with a BB gun.
Moreover, the US has limited stocks of about 4,000 interceptor missiles, which cost up to $12 million each and can’t be rapidly mass-produced. By contrast, Iran has an almost limitless supply of some 80,000 Shahed drones, 10,000 of which it can produce each month for only $20,000 each. In effect, time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.
Indeed, in a recent interview, pressed about the possibility that Iran’s vast flotilla of slow, low-flying Shahed drones might soon exhaust the US supply of sophisticated interceptor missiles, Pentagon leader General Dan Caine was surprisingly evasive, saying only, “I don’t want to be talking about quantities.”
Whose Boots on the Ground?
While economic and military pressures build for a shorter war, Washington is trying to avoid sending troops ashore by mobilizing Iran’s ethnic minorities, who make up about 40% of that country’s population. As the Pentagon is silently but painfully aware, US ground forces would face formidable resistance from a million-strong Basij militia, 150,000 Revolutionary Guards (who are well-trained for asymmetric guerrilla warfare), and Iran’s 350,000 regular army troops.
With other ethnic groups (like the Azeris in the north) unwilling or (like the Baloch tribes in the southeast, far from the capital) unable to attack Tehran, Washington is desperate to play its Kurdish card, just as it has done for the past 50 years. With a population of 10 million astride the highland borders of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without their own state. As such, they have long been forced to play the imperial Great Game, making them a surprisingly sensitive bellwether for larger changes in imperial influence.
Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from US influence.
Although President Trump made personal calls to the top leaders in Iraq’s Kurdistan region during the first week of the latest war, offering them “extensive US aircover” for an attack on Iran, and the US even has a military airbase at Erbil, Kurdistan’s capital, the Kurds are so far proving uncharacteristically cautious.
Indeed, Washington has a long history of using and abusing Kurdish fighters, dating back to the days of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who turned their betrayal into a diplomatic art form. After he ordered the CIA to stop aiding the Iraqi Kurdish resistance to Saddam Hussein in 1975, Kissinger told an aide, “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and f… them if they can’t take a joke.”
As Iraqi forces fought their way into Kurdistan, killing helpless Kurds by the hundreds, their legendary leader Mustafa Barzani, grandfather of the current head of Iraqi Kurdistan, pleaded with Kissinger, saying, “Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people.” Kissinger did not even dignify that desperate plea with a reply and instead told Congress, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
Last January, in an amazingly ill-timed decision, the Trump White House betrayed the Kurds one time too many, breaking Washington’s decade-long alliance with the Syrian Kurds by forcing them to give up 80% of their occupied territory. In southeastern Turkey, the radical Kurdish PKK Party has made a deal with Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan and is actually disarming, while Iraq’s Kurdistan region is staying out of the war by respecting a 2023 diplomatic entente with Tehran for a peaceful Iran-Iraq border. President Trump has called at least one leader of the Iranian Kurds, who constitute about 10% of Iran’s population, to encourage an armed uprising. But most Iranian Kurds seem more interested in regional autonomy than regime change.
As Trump’s calls upon the Kurds to attack and the Iranian people to rise up are met with an eloquent silence, Washington is likely to end this war with Iran’s Islamic regime only furthe
r entrenched, showing the world that America is not just a disruptive power, but a fading one that other nations can do without. Over the past 100-plus years, the Iranian people have mobilized six times in attempts to establish a real democracy. At this point, though, it seems as if any seventh attempt will come long after the current US naval armada has left the Arabian Sea.
From the Granular to the Geopolitical
If we move beyond this granular view of Iran’s ethnic politics to a broader geo-strategic perspective on the Iran war, Washington’s waning influence in the hills of Kurdistan seems to reflect its fading geopolitical influence across the vast Eurasian land mass, which remains today the epicenter of geopolitical power, as it has been for the past 500 years.
For nearly 80 years, the United States has maintained its global hegemony by controlling the axial ends of Eurasia through its NATO alliance in Western Europe and four bilateral defense pacts along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia. But now, as Washington focuses more of its foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere, US influence is fading fast along the vast arc of Eurasia stretching from Poland, through the Middle East to Korea that scholars of geopolitics like Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman once dubbed the “rimland” or “the zone of conflict.” As Spykman put it succinctly once upon a time, “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”
Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded US international influence.
Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from US influence—including Europe (by rearming), Russia (by challenging the West in Ukraine), Turkey (by remaining neutral in the present war), Pakistan (by allying with China), India (by breaking with Washington’s Quad alliance), and Japan (by rearming to create an autonomous defense policy). That ongoing disengagement is manifest in the lack of support for the Iran intervention, even from once-close European and Asian allies—a striking contrast with the broad coalitions that joined US forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the occupation of Afghanistan in 2002. With Trump’s micro-militarism in Iran inadvertently but clearly exposing the limits of American power, Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of US global hegemony.
Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded US international influence with, among other things, his micro-military misadventure in the Middle East. As empires rise and fall, such geopolitics clearly remains a constant factor in shaping their fate–a lesson I try to teach in Cold War on Five Continents.
In difficult times like these, when events seem both confused and confusing, Mark Twain’s “broken fragments of antique legends” can remind us of historical analogies like the collapse of the power and influence of Great Britain or of the Soviet Union that can help us understand how the past often whispers to the present—as it indeed seems to be doing these days in the Straits of Hormuz.
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Amid Alarm That Trump Has No Plan for Iran, Critic Contends None 'Could Possibly Justify This'
"The war is wrong and illegal and needs to stop now—that's it, that's the line," said journalist Adam Johnson.
Mar 11, 2026
Several Senate Democrats on Tuesday came out of a classified briefing about the US-Israeli assault on Iran warning that President Donald Trump "can't defend this war in public" and top officials have even failed to explain behind closed doors "what the endgame is or what their plans are."
Media critic and political analyst Adam Johnson responded to such comments on social media early Wednesday, reminding leaders on Capitol Hill and beyond that "the war is wrong and illegal and needs to stop now—that's it, that's the line."
Experts around the world have argued that the US assault is unconstitutional, given congressional authority to declare war, and runs afoul of the United Nations Charter, which bars the use of force unless it is a "necessary and proportionate" act of self-defense or is authorized by the UN Security Council. Despite that, nearly all Republicans and a short list of Democrats in Congress have blocked war powers resolutions in both the GOP-controlled Senate and House of Representatives.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) voted for the resolution and was among the senators sounding the alarm after Tuesday's briefing. He wrote in a five-part thread on X that "the war goals DO NOT involve destroying Iran's nuclear weapons program," and Pentagon and White House officials "confirmed 'regime change' is also NOT on the list."
The primary goal of Trump's war on Iran seems to be "destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories," according to Murphy. "But the question that stumped them: What happens when you stop bombing and they restart production? They hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, endless war."
"And on the Strait of Hormuz, they had NO PLAN," he said of the key waterway Iran has shut down, cutting off the flow of fossil fuel exports and other products. "I can't go into more detail about how Iran gums up the strait, but suffice it say, right now, they don't know how to get it safely back open. Which is unforgivable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable."
Responding to Murphy in a pair of posts, Johnson argued that "we don't need 9,000 tweet threads consternating over an alleged lack of 'plan.' We also don't need another take criticizing the regime change war for not being sufficiently regime change-y."
"Criticizing Trump for a lack of a 'plan' implies the existence of a plan that could possibly justify this," he continued. "There isn't any, so what does a plan, or lack thereof, have to do with anything? The war is fundamentally unjust, illegal, and immoral regardless of nominal 'aims' or 'goals.'"
Since disrupting diplomatic talks on a new nuclear deal by bombing Iran a dozen days ago, Trump and his top officials, including Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have publicly sent mixed signals on aiming to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, regime change, how long they expect the war to last, and how much it will cost US taxpayers.
As The Washington Post reported, the Pentagon told Congress on Monday that it "burned through $5.6 billion worth of munitions during the first two days of its military assault on Iran."
That disclosure came after a Washington, DC think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, put the estimated cost of the war at $891.4 million per day, but also said the figure may drop if the US moves to "less expensive munitions."
Casualties have swiftly stacked up, with over 1,300 Iranians slaughtered—including around 175, mostly children, killed in an apparent US bombing of a girls' school—according to Iran's government. The Lebanese prime minister's office said that Israel's related bombing of Lebanon has killed 570 people and wounded 1,444.
Iran has retaliated with drone and missile attacks on Gulf nations and US military bases in the region. The Pentagon confirmed that seven US service members are dead and around 140 have been injured. Additionally, The New York Times reported Tuesday that "at least 12 civilians have been killed in attacks across the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain."
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Jayapal Rips 'Cruel and Failing' US Policy After Trump Says 'Cuba Is Gonna Fall'
Trump's threats against Cuba are "just a plain attempt to open up Cuban markets to his billionaire buddies," warned the Washington Democrat.
Mar 06, 2026
As the Trump administration celebrates its broadly unpopular war on Iran—one in which an estimated 1,332 people have been killed in the country, including nearly 200 children at a girls' school—US Rep. Pramila Jayapal noted that President Donald Trump is still imposing a blockade on Cuba and denounced his stated plan to take over the island.
"The US maximum pressure campaign on Cuba is a cruel and failing policy that has caused incredible harm to the Cuban people," said Jayapal (D-Wash.).
Trump's oil blockade on Cuba in recent weeks and his threats to push out its communist government are "just a plain attempt to open up Cuban markets to his billionaire buddies," said Jayapal.
Trump announced last week that US companies would be permitted to sell small amounts of oil to Cuba if they circumvent the government and that Venezuelan fuel could be sold to private businesses in the communist country.
That decision came after weeks of a worsening fuel crisis on the island, triggered by Trump's push to take control of Venezuelan oil and his threat to hit any country that provided oil to Cuba with tariffs. In January, he issued an executive order accusing the country of supporting terrorism and posing a security threat to the US.
The blockade has left cities struggling to provide sanitation services and pushed Cuba's healthcare system to the brink of collapse, according to the country's health minister. Officials blamed the US this week for a blackout that plunged millions of people into darkness for 16 hours.
On Friday, as Trump's Iran war sent US oil prices soaring and the attack on girls' school was found by numerous investigations to have "likely" been carried out by the US, the president attempted to change the subject to his plans for Cuba, telling CNN, "Cuba is gonna fall too."
He told the outlet that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long advocated for regime change in Cuba, would turn his attention to pushing out the country's government after the war in Iran—which the president and his officials have estimated could take anywhere from four weeks to six months.
"Your next one is going to be, we want to do that special Cuba,” Trump told CNN. “[Rubio]’s waiting. But he says, ‘Let’s get this one finished first.’ We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen. If you watch countries over the years, you do them all too fast, bad things happen. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to this country.”
The president made similar comments to Politico on Thursday, saying the US is "talking to Cuba" and that his decision to cut off the island's crucial Venezuelan oil supply is pressuring the government.
"Well, it’s because of my intervention, intervention that is happening,” Trump said. “Obviously, otherwise they wouldn’t have this problem."
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also warned this week that "Cuba's next."
Jayapal said Friday that Trump's takeover of Venezuela, after which administration officials admitted the White House was after the country's oil supply and claimed the administration has the right to take over any country if doing so serves US interests, "is a clear example that Trump doesn't care about democracy or civil society."
Trump's threats against Cuba, she said, are "just a plain attempt to open up Cuban markets to his billionaire buddies."
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Warnings of Further Catastrophe After Trump Says Only Deal for Iran is 'Unconditional Surrender'
“The last time a country ‘unconditionally surrendered’ to the US was after we dropped atomic bombs on Japan,” noted one foreign policy scholar.
Mar 06, 2026
President Donald Trump’s demand for an ‘unconditional surrender” from Iran is raising fears that the massive military campaign he unleashed this past weekend will turn into an unmitigated disaster, potentially unseen since the Second World War.
“There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” the president wrote Friday morning on Truth Social. “After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, explained how unprecedented this demand was.
"The invasion and occupation of Iraq and replacing the Taliban with the Taliban after 20 years in Afghanistan were disastrous enough without seeking their formal surrender,” he said.
Each of those conflicts entailed the deployment of more than a million US soldiers and dragged on for years, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
“The last time a country ‘unconditionally surrendered’ to the US was after we dropped atomic bombs on Japan,” Williams added.
With each passing day, the Trump administration has seemed to extend its projections for the scope and duration of its regime-change campaign in Iran.
Last Saturday, the first day of “Operation Epic Fury,” which killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump projected that the war would be over in “four weeks or less.” The next day, he adjusted that to say it could go on for “four to five” weeks, or perhaps “much longer.”
By Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the war could drag on for as long as “eight weeks.” That same day, Politico reported that US Central Command (CENTCOM) had requested additional intelligence officers for its Tampa headquarters to support Iran operations for “at least 100 days but likely through September.”
According to data analyzed by the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), part of a US-based human rights monitor for Iran, at least 1,168 civilians have been killed in the US-Israeli war against Iran, where Hegseth boasted earlier this week that the US is raining down “death and destruction from the sky all day long.”
Investigations have revealed that the deadly bombing of a girls' school, which killed at least 175 people last weekend, mostly children, was "likely" carried out by the US, and several other schools have also been attacked.Following retaliation from the Iranian-aligned militia Hezbollah, Israel has launched a new onslaught into Lebanon. This week, the Israeli military ordered more than half a million people to flee their homes immediately and has pounded Beirut and other areas with airstrikes, killing more than 200 as of Friday, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Trump reportedly began the war expecting a swift and painless display of overwhelming force akin to his abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. But Iran has mounted a fearsome retaliation that has hit US bases and other infrastructure in several of the wealthy Persian Gulf states aligned with the US and Israel, killing at least six American troops.
"Trump demands Iran's unconditional surrender," said Sina Toosi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. "Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, global economic costs are rapidly mounting, Iranian missile and drone strikes continue, several US [missile defense] and radar facilities have been hit, interceptors are being drained, and Israeli air defenses are showing strain."
"Inside Iran, there are no signs of regime disintegration or unrest. The Islamic Republic’s base, and beyond it, continues to be mobilized in the streets across the country while officials assert they are prepared for a long war," he continued. "Gulf allies haven’t joined in attacking Iran and appear more angry that Trump launched this war against their wishes."
"The reality on the ground," Toosi said, "looks nothing like the fantasy seemingly in Trump's head and being sold by some in Washington."
Trita Parsi, the executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that Trump’s demand for an unconditional surrender suggests that rather than seeking an offramp, he is retreating further into delusion about the ease with which the US can force Iran to capitulate.
“He was lulled into believing that Iranian surrender is in the cards,” Parsi said. “It isn’t.”
Parsi said Trump rejected diplomatic solutions, including a deal mediated by Oman just before the attack began, under which Iran had agreed to stop stockpiling enriched uranium and degrade what it has to the point where it could not be used for a nuclear weapon.
“The false lure of surrender,” he said, “is why his war is turning into a disaster.”
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