ON February 27, two days before the Israeli and US aircraft and missiles struck Iran, US President Donald Trump told reporters in the White House that he was interested in a ‘friendly takeover’ of Cuba. On January 3, the US had kidnapped the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and then on January 29, Trump signed Executive Order no. 14380 to prevent any country from supplying oil to Cuba. Within two months, from early January to early March, the US had seized one leader (Venezuela), killed another (Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), and threatened to overrun a third (Cuba). The list is not complete: there are other countries that are within Trump’s gunsights, ultimately at the bottom of his list the biggest prize – China.

The reasons for the attacks are ultimately specious: narco-terrorism against Venezuela, nuclear weapons against Iran, and for democracy against the Cuban Revolution. None of these claims are rooted in facts. Neither Maduro nor any of the senior leaders in the Venezuelan government have been involved in narco-trafficking, let alone narco-terrorism (whatever that is); neither does the Iranian government have any interest in nuclear weapons (in fact, it has made the opposite statement repeatedly); and neither does the US have any interest in the establishment of democracy in Cuba, which indeed had begun a process to deepen democracy when the Cuban Revolution ejected the mafia culture of the United States in 1959. The kinetic information war of the US against these three countries has been ferocious but false, although falsehoods are difficult to undermine when the US and its Global North allies largely control the channels of news and information in the world.

Trump’s assault on Venezuela came with speed and results, having seized Maduro and hastily forced the remainder of the government into an involuntary compromise to prevent an escalation. If the US had stopped after that hyper-imperialist attack, then Trump could have rested on his laurels and gone into the mid-term elections later this year with the Venezuela campaign as his badge of honour. But this was insufficient for Trump. He had larger plans, and that was the undoing of his own narrow political dreams. The attack on Iran, while it has devastated Iran’s infrastructure, has trapped the US. There is no easy exit from that war. Trump recognises that the assassination of the Supreme Leader did not intimidate the Iranians, who immediately used their arsenal to bring pain not only to Israel and to US military bases in the region, but to any ally of the US and Israel that continues to support these aggressive powers. The missile and drone strike by Iran on the Gulf Arab states and the closure of the Straits of Hormuz signalled the seriousness of Iran to defend itself. Iran knows that any short-term ceasefire will permit Israel and the US to resupply their militaries and to then continue the war against Iran on their terms, whereas to continue the assault now forces the rest of the world to bear the pain – through the instability of oil prices and oil supplies – and hopefully, for Iran, will force the world to put pressure on the US and Israel to make a permanent arrangement with the Islamic Republic. Since the US and Israel have already damaged so much of Iran’s infrastructure, the Islamic Republic’s leaders feel like they have nothing to lose by the continuation of the conflict, since they have much more to lose if the US and Israel redouble their attack at a future time. Iran wants a grand bargain. It cannot get this with a short-term ceasefire. The mendacity of the West is clear to Iran, and it will not fall for any such false notes.

Because Iran refuses a short-term ceasefire, Trump is trapped. He did not expect this. He thought the Iranians would be overwhelmed by US and Israeli military power and would therefore make a voluntary compromise. This was a serious miscalculation by the US and by Israel. The Iranians are a proud people with an old and unbroken link to an ancient civilisation that was not disturbed by full-scale colonialisation; and the Islamic Republic has a core ideology rooted in notions of sovereignty that are deeply held and hard to shake. They do not want to return to the Shah’s reign from 1953 to 1979, nor do they want to become vassals of the United States. Their claims are for Israel to end the Occupation of the Palestinians and for the US to abandon their military bases in West Asia: these are political demands that are the basis for a serious negotiation. But neither the US nor Israel are serious countries; they think that they will be able to subordinate all of their adversaries, just as they have done to Syria (which is now governed by a former al-Qaeda chief on behalf of Israel) and to the entire Gulf Arab region, except for Oman and Yemen (which are governed by monarchies set up either by the British or the US and are effectively petrol pumps for the world). Over the course of the past four years, China had urged on a process of reconciliation that began to make serious gains, through a trilateral process that included China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia and that began in Beijing in 2023 but then continued in November 2024 in Riyadh and in December 2025 in Tehran. These meetings showed the possibility of a different arrangement in West Asia, one that would not have relied upon US hyper-imperialism but on negotiation and goodwill. The US-Israel assault on Iran has disrupted this process, and has set it back by decades. There is no accident here. The US-Israel did not want to see any such grand bargain between Iran and Saudi Arabia, since such a grand bargain would have been entirely against the interests of the United States and Israel.

The attack on Iran, just as the attack on Venezuela and on Cuba, is not an isolated incident. It is part of a larger pattern: the systematic attempt to discipline states that refuse to align with the US geopolitical priorities. For decades, the US has relied primarily on sanctions, financial isolation, and covert destabilisation against governments it considers hostile. Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba have long been among the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. But sanctions themselves are a form of economic warfare. They have devastated civilian economies, restricting access to trade, finance, and vital imports while inflicting widespread social hardship. What is unfolding today is a shift from economic siege to direct military intervention. The strike on Iran and the intervention in Venezuela together signal that Washington is prepared to escalate beyond sanctions when those measures fail to produce regime change. The message is not only directed at Tehran or Caracas. It is addressed to the entire Global South: sovereignty is conditional upon obedience to the geopolitical order dominated by the US and its allies.

The operation in Venezuela illustrates this clearly. Caracas had forged close relations with countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, forming part of a loose bloc that challenged US dominance in the Western Hemisphere. For Washington, this alignment represented an unacceptable strategic challenge—particularly in a region historically treated as its sphere of influence.

The Confusion of India’s Government.

On March 9, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar addressed Parliament on the situation in West Asia. Jaishankar ignored the larger geopolitical questions of sovereignty and dignity for the world, ignored even the letter of the United Nations Charter. Instead, he emphasised energy security, trade flows, and the protection of Indians in the region and called for ‘dialogue and diplomacy’: all important issues, no doubt, but framed technocratically and not morally. The evidence of the moral failure was that Jaishankar did not explicitly mention the US-Israeli violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter, nor did he mention the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. But even these three issues – energy security, trade flows, and the protection of Indians in the Gulf – are rooted in a geopolitical matrix defined by US-Israeli authority in which India is not sovereign. India’s relations with West Asia go through a US-Israeli framework and are not produced by a non-aligned view of the world. It is a pity that Jaishankar did not use the opportunity to call upon the BRICS+ states, of which Iran is a member of good standing, to produce a different diplomatic architecture than what governs this conflict, which would necessitate a BRICS+ approach to the UN to sanction the US and Israel for a war of aggression.

If there are no consequences for the US (regarding its actions in Venezuela and Iran), then there is nothing to stop the US war path against Cuba – an immediate concern – or against China – a much more dangerous prospect. Cuba, from where I am writing this and about which I shall write next week, is resilient and the Cuban Revolution will refuse any voluntary surrender to the US. The Cuban Revolution is open to negotiations and dialogue, but not at the cost of its own sovereignty and dignity. But if there is no price to be paid by the US for its hyper-imperialist attacks, then why should it not invade Cuba or bomb Cuba or not increase its aggression against China, and then eventually every country in the Global South. Trump is the world destroyer. He is unconcerned with the impact on ordinary people’s lives. He seeks preponderant power for himself and for the United States.

Countries in the Global South need to stand up to stop the madness of an imperial United States. There are no two sides to this conflict. There is only the maddening hyper-imperialism of the US and its allies. And then, there is the rest of us, struggling to preserve the world as it is and then struggling to build a better world.