A bully blinks: on the U.S. and Cuba

Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term in office, his administration’s conduct of foreign policy has been that of a schoolyard bully. This is particularly true in 2026, when the U.S. launched attacks on two oil-rich countries, Venezuela and Iran. The first was on the blatantly false pretext of terming President Nicolás Maduro the head of a drug cartel and the second was at the instance of Israel. As with schoolyard bullies everywhere, the Trump administration recognises no rules and mistakes the absence of violent resistance for proof of its strength. The strangling of Cuba is a case in point. After seizing Venezuela’s energy assets, abducting its President and cutting off Venezuelan oil supply to Havana, the U.S. threatened countries such as Mexico that sought to step into the breach, and imposed a de facto naval blockade on Cuba, leading to a severe fuel crunch and acute distress for ordinary Cubans. This behaviour, justified by Mr. Trump as an attempt to take over Cuba and remove its decades-long communist government, is part of a strategy so nakedly imperial that it has been termed the “Donroe Doctrine”, a crude play on the original instrument of U.S. hemispheric dominance for over two centuries. Yet, the bully’s power is often brittle and holds only until someone calls the bluff. When Russia, Cuba’s ally since the Soviet era, dispatched a tanker, Anatoly Kolodkin, as humanitarian aid to fuel-starved Cuba, it also tested the will of the Trump administration to interdict a ship owned by another nuclear power. The tanker reached without incident.

The U.S., it turns out, did not push back and the bluff now stands exposed, even if by a country that has itself displayed similar behaviour in neighbouring Ukraine. Cuba’s fuel crisis has not ended and the threat of American attacks still hangs over the socialist government led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel. But Russia’s timely help reveals that the rest of the world need not simply endure the Trump era as this administration goes about breaking every accepted tenet of the international order. For all its flaws as a one-party state, Cuba has been an avowed member of the Non-Aligned Movement, has shown solidarity with the Global South by deploying well-trained doctors for medical programmes across poor countries, and has contributed materially to anti-colonial struggles for decades. It is time other countries repaid the Cubans by showing the will to break the American blockade and continue sovereign trade and commerce with Cuba, asserting their right to do so. After all, the international order holds only when its constituents accept that might does not always make right.