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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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