By Jorge Elbaum on March 11, 2025 from Havana
US President Donald Trump signing one of his many executive orders. Photo: EFE.
The bellicosity of Donald Trump, on full display at the opening of the legislative sessions of the United States Congress, is evidence of a megalomania directly proportional to the fronts of conflict that he is projecting in parallel and simultaneously. His provocations, threats, denials and interventionist preparations are all aimed at recovering the geopolitical supremacy that was considered imperishable four decades ago. To “recover lost greatness” – that is the political translation of the Trumpist slogan MAGA – they work in a combined and juxtaposed way in five concurrent areas of conflagration, in addition to continuing the focus and sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela.
The first of these attacks was initiated by Barack Obama, during his initial term in office, when the construction of the enemy ceased to focus as much on “Islamic terrorism” as on narco terrorism. Both were replaced by the People’s Republic of China as the new strategic antagonist, with fentanyl being used to hold Beijing responsible for complicity in the international trafficking of this substance. Historical paradoxes force us to remember that in the mid-19th century the United Kingdom and France generated the two Opium Wars after the Chinese authorities decided to ban the consumption and commercialization of opium and to focus on the protection of its local production by preventing smuggling and importation. As usual, in the name of the sacrosanct free market – and the right to consume opium (heroin) in Western Europe – the imperial powers attacked China, imposed the opening up of Chinese trade by fire and sword and annexed the port of Hong Kong in the process. Yesterday the pretext was opium. Today it is fentanyl.
The American cultural configuration cannot live without enemies. Its cinematic history proves it: Indians, Vietnamese, Russians, Islamists, Latin Americans, and now Chinese. In their demon-haunted times – never one to lose a custom – they devoted themselves to terrorizing galactic invaders and Martians. The war against Beijing is presented as a two-pronged attack. On the one hand, in its economic, commercial and technological structure. But behind this visible conflagration there is another, silenced one: the need to prevent Xi Jinping from becoming, in the eyes of the world, the victorious leader of a Long March that has been able to eclipse the arrogant pride of the colonial West, accustomed to defining – for the last five centuries – the standards of what is civilization and what is barbarism.
However, beyond the actions aimed at fragmenting or dismantling the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — the global infrastructure project promoted by Beijing to improve trade logistics — what the United States cannot accept is that the leadership of the most competitive and productive country in the world is the result of a strategic orientation decided by a communist party. The belligerence against the Asian Giant, which has now lasted more than a decade and a half, is being waged in a hybrid format: tariffs, a siege on the Pearl – the maritime circuit in Southeast Asia – extortion of countries that cooperate with Beijing, unilateral sanctions, provocations over Taiwan, and media and propaganda hostilities.
The second facet of the war that Trump is waging is indirect, but it has the same victim as its ultimate target. He is seeking to decouple the Russian Federation from China, even if this means distancing himself from a minor Atlanticist partner, the European Union, which he considers to be his proven vassal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made this clear on March 25th, in a interview with the Breitbart portal, founded by Steve Bannon. In that interview, Rubio admitted that Trump’s positions on the conflict in Ukraine seek to decouple Moscow from Beijing, just as Henry Kissinger planned and executed in the 1970s. “I don’t know if we will ever manage to completely separate them from their relationship with the Chinese (…) but we have to try because now we are talking about two nuclear powers aligned against the United States…”
The third chapter of the connected wars refers to the expansionist pretensions of territorial occupation and logistical control of strategic points.
In this category are the cases of Panama and Greenland, a territory linked to Denmark for the last eight centuries. Marco Rubio took it upon himself to justify the expansionist urge by stating that: ”… the Chinese basically own the two major ports: the Hutchison ports on both sides of the canal (…) in the future the Chinese could impede canal traffic. That is the central concern.” In the case of Gaza, the provocations regarding the ethnic cleansing of that territory are about guaranteeing control of the western Mediterranean, access to the gas reserves off its coast and military protection for its partner, Bibi Netanyahu.
The fourth conflagration has clear racist overtones. The aim is to expel all poor migrants who are not Protestant, white and Anglo-Saxon (WASP), following the program of the Ku Klux Kan (KKK), without targeting those of African descent already settled in the United States. The victims of this racist war are those who have migrated in the last fifty years, especially Latin Americans. One of the leaders of this supremacist movement, David Duke, emotionally thanked the current president, saying that “Trump has empowered us”.
The fifth attack is against so-called wokism, which is nothing more than the expression of the defense of the rights of women, diversities and racialized ethnic groups. This hostility is not – as is commonly believed – cultural. It is an all-out attack on the logic of the market that renders women’s work invisible, forcibly feminizes care work, denounces patriarchy as an essential participant in economic exploitation and segregates in supremacist terms those it considers “inferior”.
Henry Kissinger well known euphemism, that the United States has no permanent friends, just permanent interests continues to pertain today.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English