In the Caribbean, the US is threatening to force regime change in Cuba, something it dared not do for nearly three quarters of a century because the island was under Russian protection. If Cuba does fall under American control, it will join Syria and Venezuela on the list of close Russian allies whose overthrow Moscow has done nothing to prevent over the last three years.
In a sign of President Donald Trump’s confidence that he can crush a sovereign nation, the US has indicted Cuba’s 94-year-old former president, Raul Castro, and is gathering military forces in the Caribbean. Trump boasts that US presidents had considered intervening in Cuba for decades, but it looks like he will be “the one that does it”.
As the US navy blockades Cuba – a country for which the Soviet Union once risked nuclear war with the US – Russian President Vladimir Putin was paying court to the Chinese leader, President Xi Jinping, in Beijing. China is Russia’s great and only ally, but the meeting confirmed that these days Russia is very much the junior partner in the alliance, needing China more than China needs it.
This is a huge change from five years ago when Russia aspired to regain its superpower status, which it lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This ambition vanished with Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, which rapidly became the greatest military failure in Russian history, demoting it as a leading power in the world for all its giant nuclear arsenal.
