It remains a mystery why an administration that styles itself “America First” has prevented third countries from selling food and oil to Havana, exacerbating an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Most Cubans now survive on fewer than two hours a day of electricity, with hospitals struggling to supply patients on life support. The reason, in short, is that Team Trump’s policy toward Cuba now is almost exclusively driven by ideology, rather than rational statecraft. 

The ideology, in turn, is defined by Miami’s enclave of Cuban and other Latin-American exiles. Fundamentally stuck in their native lands, they’re determined to wield American treasure and manpower to redress old grievances. This, instead of attending to the home front, which in South Florida is racked by petty corruption, cultural maladjustment, and the politics of shouting down opponents instead of debating them. 

You could, in fact, call it a form of Third Worldism. 

Yet that term is, ironically, the vague omni-menace conjured by Trump administration hawks to justify their approach to Cuba, among other places. Last month, the State Department unveiled a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism. A seminal piece of MAGA propaganda, the document argues — laughably — that Cuba represents an existential risk to Americans through its sponsorship of “Third Worldism”: an anti-Western animus, replacing traditional Marxism, that supposedly unites resentful foreign hordes the world over.

Speaking with Fox News on the administration’s Cuba policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the report, stating: “To the average American, you see Cuba, a small country — but people forget that they actually are an influence and espionage superpower.” 

Rubio’s words were transparently aimed at integrating MAGA talking points with the, well, Third World grievances of his fellow Miamians. Figures like YouTube influencer Alex Otaola, businessman Marcell Felipe, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.). In fact, it’s these Miami neocons — of mostly Cuban but also Nicaraguan and South American descent — who, in a sense, refuse to assimilate to “Northern” concerns and aspirations, even as they reside here. They also command disproportionate influence on US foreign policy.

 Within the confines of South Florida, it’s hard to miss signs of Third Worldism of a more mundane variety: dead people sign off on building inspections in the Cuban-American suburb of Hialeah; Miami’s notoriously corrupt city council also attempted to cancel 2025’s municipal elections. For decades in South Florida, “Cocaine Cowboys,” such as the infamous drug kingpin Sal Magluta, evaded justice, including one occasion when Magluta walked out of jail after bribing officials. In the past decade, attempted overthrows of not one, or two, but three sitting foreign presidents were plotted by private citizens in Miami, one of which resulted in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.     

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Of course, in Miami, English is a second language. Stumble upon the odd heartland tourist in Miami Beach — like my Appalachian in-laws — and you’ll witness MAGA horror at the sight of hedonistic spring breakers mingling with “too many Latins,” many of whom don’t appear to speak English. Indeed, they don’t. Roughly 75% of residents of Miami-Dade County speak Spanish, with 25% lacking English proficiency. Yet the irony is that many of Miami’s Latin invaders are among the most fervent “anti-communist” supporters of President Trump.

Enter the household of your typical MAGA Miamian for “cafecito,” and you’re likely to view an angry YouTube stream from city native Alexander Otaola. A testament to GOP inclusion, the flamboyantly gay Otaola is an archetypal Miami neocon. Much like Fidel Castro, the bearded pundit diatribes extemporaneously for three hours every weekday, railing against the perceived enemies of US-sponsored “freedom and democracy.” With an audience of around 1 million, his show, ¡Hola Otaola!, is interladen with infomercials for Miami-based plastic surgeons, gold chains, and “anti-communist realtors.”

In 2024, Otaola ran a failed campaign for Miami-Dade county mayor. Naturally, the erstwhile Nixon and Trump consigliere Roger Stone was an advisor; in their shared appearances, the pair’s exchanges were consistently moderated by a Spanish-language interpreter. The fact that the Otaola doesn’t speak English likely cost him with English-language voters. 

Much the same can be said of Otaola’s countless controversies over his censorious — some might say “Third World” — tendencies. The Miami YouTuber rightly derides the Cuban regime over its rampant censorship, surveillance, and state-sponsored humiliations of dissidents. Yet Otaola himself promotes routine boycotts of Cuban artists from his “red list” of those who perform on the island. 

In 2023, he staged a protest caravan to censure a book talk, on the US government’s preferential policies toward Cuban immigrants, by Boston University professor Susan Eckstein. Otaola’s protesters also heckled Eckstein during the event, calling her “comunista”; his student supporters naturally claimed that her presence on campus made them feel “unsafe.” As one Cuban-born attendee later told me, Otaola’s antics reminded him of nothing so much as the Stalinist tactics used by the Havana regime to humiliate opponents, known as “acts of repudiation.”

Reacting to the release of the Cuba Report, Otaola lauded Rubio and the State Department for documenting “step-by-step, minute-by-minute how Havana has been training, funding, and organizing [Left-wing] groups in order to destroy free societies.” To be sure, the body of the report documents the very real affinities — and, in some cases, linkages — between Havana and Leftist radicals like the Weather Underground and the Democratic Socialists of America; last week, DSA co-chair Megan Romer mouthed the revolting words: “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.”

Yet the State report is, in some ways, a break with Miami-neocon orthodoxy. Contrary to the view of older exiles, who hold that Fidel was practically born a Communist, the State Department claims that Marxism “was not the original battle cry of the Cuban Revolution.” Instead, it was the far more insidious “Third Worldism”: a planetary struggle, erupting after World War II, between decolonized countries and “Western civilization itself.” Never mind that Washington supported postwar decolonization in Asia and Africa. 

Where is this stuff coming from? A possible source of inspiration may be the Cuban-American businessman Marcell Felipe. The head of several of Miami’s neoconservative jobs programs — including the media group América TeVé, Inspire America Foundation, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora — Felipe has been at the forefront of Cuban-American outreach within the MAGA Right.

As an attendee of the 2021 National Conservatism conference in Orlando, I was disillusioned to see Miami neocons like Rubio and Felipe alongside ostensible MAGA restrainers such as JD Vance and Michael Anton. During his address — titled, “Why Cubans Get the Marxist Threat” — Felipe presaged Rubio’s future report, arguing that Havana had adapted its communism in order to infiltrate US institutions via “cultural Marxism.” 

By definition, Miami neoconservatism is an evangelical, imperial ideology incompatible with the concept of national sovereignty. At every turn, Miami neocons, Rubio most notably, have found ways of integrating otherwise distinct foreign-policy objectives. Whether it’s fusing regime change in Cuba and Venezuela with the Iran war and the war on drugs, the view from South Florida hawks is that any and all evils trace back to a sinister, interconnected axis stretching from Beijing to Tehran to Moscow to Havana. “Third Worldism” is just the latest spin on this omnicause — one which conveniently centers Cuba and Iran.

Unsurprisingly, the Miami trio of lawmakers Carlos Gimenez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart are the most consistently hawkish on everything from fomenting proxy wars against Russia in Ukraine, Syria, and West Africa to putting boots on the ground in Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba. Within the trio, the most emblematic is Diaz-Balart, whose roots trace back to the highest echelons of the pre-Castro dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

A darling of the gangsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Batista turned Havana’s luxury hotels and casinos over to the US mob in exchange for a personal cut of casino earnings — a reality fictionalized in The Godfather Part II. In turn, his CIA-trained forces killed or disappeared at least 1,500 dissident Cubans during the 1950s. During this time, Diaz-Balart’s father, Rafael, served as Batista’s undersecretary of the interior and as majority leader in the Cuban House of Representatives. In many parts of the West, familial ties to a murderous Third World dictatorship would disqualify any politician in the eyes of voters. But in neoconservative South Florida, such ties portend a life term in Congress.

The irony is that Diaz-Balart’s father was a youth supporter of Batista going back to the dictator’s populist — and Communist-supported — first term in the 1940s. Batista featured members of the Marxist Popular Socialist Party in his cabinet until 1944 and maintained tacit support from the party until 1958. Indeed, the fact that opposition to Batista was both overwhelming and ideologically diverse contributed to the CIA’s pre-1960 determination that Fidel Castro wasn’t a communist; a further irony is that Diaz-Balart’s paternal aunt, Mirta, married Castro.

Naturally, all of this is glossed over by Diaz-Balart and other Miami neocons, who romanticize a pre-Marxist utopia on the island and ignore the legitimate grievances that led to the 1959 revolution in the first place. (In the same way, deluded progressives like DSA co-chair Ashik Saddique gloss over those who aided the revolution but nonetheless were jailed or executed for opposing Castro.)

Instead, the congressman devotes most of his time to regime change abroad; Diaz-Balart’s office features an autocrat collage of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, Cuba’s Raul Castro, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega with the labels: “Arrested,” “Eliminated,” and “Indicted.” 

Accordingly, Diaz-Balart has celebrated the State Department’s screed against Cuban-sponsored “Third Worldism.” Yet much like his late relative-by-marriage Fidel Castro, the congressman has very recently embraced the anti-colonial cause elsewhere — in North Africa. 

Last month, tens of thousands of Moroccan migrants swarmed Ceuta, a city on the North African Coast which Spain has controlled since the 15th century. One could be forgiven for assuming that the Spanish-descended Diaz-Balart would be an avid defender of Spanish Christendom over the invading Muslim hordes. Quite the contrary: the Miami neocon has called for Moroccan annexation of Ceuta and its sister enclave, Melilla, arguing that the pair “are not in the geographic territory of Spain.”

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Wait — what happened to anti-Third Worldist zeal here? Shouldn’t an opponent of Third Worldism defend Christian Spain’s honor? 

Nope. Contrived as they may seem, the congressman’s words ultimately follow a neoconservative logic centered on Cuba. The Spanish government under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been harshly critical of Israel and of America’s conduct in Iran; the Islamic Republic is, of course, a staunch ally of Havana. In contrast, Morocco has taken pains to ally itself with Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — a fact which presumably validates the country’s decolonial grievances against Spain. This, even as Diaz-Balart condemns other forms of decoloniality as Third Worldism.

By far, the most damning aspect of Miami-neocon Third Worldism is the fact that the ideology is responsible for some of America’s worst homegrown terrorists. The State Department’s Cuba report rightly condemns Cuban support for Left-wing groups that carried out hundreds of bombings throughout the United States in the 1970s. “In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972,” the report notes, “the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil” by homegrown radicals. Yet the report conveniently omits that some of these radicals were Right-wing Cuban-Americans, and many of their victims were fellow Cuban exiles who were perceived as insufficiently anti-communist.

In the same decade, authorities linked Cuban-Americans to 113 bombings in the United States, including the 1976 car bombing of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, conducted in concert with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence services. Beyond the US homeland, Miami-based Cuban exiles were responsible for 45% of all bombings on the planet in 1974. In 1976, the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, headed by Miami terrorist Orlando Bosch, bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people on board; CORU was likewise responsible for killing Letelier days prior. Bosch was eventually arrested before being pardoned by George H. W. Bush, thanks to lobbying by Miami Rep. Ilean Ros-Lehtinen, who called Bosch a “patriot and hero” upon his release.

The sad truth is that the uniparty in Washington has long condoned Third Worldism on the part of the Miami neocons; Bosch worked at various points for the CIA. The fact that Miami Third Worldism has risen to new heights under Trump owes largely to the president’s choice of Rubio as secretary of state. As MAGA apostate Pedro Gonzalez has argued, moreover, Trumpism can sometimes display the aspects of a Third World movement; last December, Miami-Dade’s Hialeah suburb announced the construction of a bronze, 12-foot statue of “Donald Trump the Fighter.” Whether in rhetoric or substance, Trump resembles many hostile and friendly Latin American caudillos.

Come what may, it seems clear that competing strands of tinpot Third Worldism will continue to hold sway over the most jingoistic and deluded in MAGA and the DSA respectively. In the unlikely event of a course correction in MAGA or Miami, the city’s neoconservative Latinos would do well to emulate their Mexican-American peers. Aside from a handful of US-based elite Mexicans, most Mexican-Americans — many of whom have lived in the United States for centuries — neither know nor care what goes on politically south of the border; adults of Mexican heritage likewise have one of the highest rates of English proficiency: at 69%, compared 59% of Cubans and 51% of Venezuelans.

Until Miami neocons assimilate into the American polity by renouncing their faith in regime-change wars — and learning English — they will inevitably entangle the rest of us in the petty grievances of America’s Magic City.

The more the United States comes to dominate Latin America, the more Latin Americans will come to dominate the United States. 

Earlier this year, President Trump was taken with the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state. Such threats to annex portions of the Americas have become almost routine: Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Venezuela. Previous US expansion schemes failed in Baja California, the Yucatan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and even Quebec.

Yet it is worth dwelling on what an American Venezuela would mean for the United States. The Bolivarian Republic has a population just shy of 32 million people. As the 51st star on the American flag, it would be the second largest state in the union by population, behind only California and just ahead of Texas. Allocated a fair number of electoral college votes, it would overnight become the decisive swing state in any US presidential election, with more people than Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio combined. 

Presiding over the greatest expansion of US citizenship to a Latin American population ever would be an ironic outcome for MAGA. By comparison, the Reagan Amnesty of 1986 extended a pathway to citizenship to fewer than 3 million undocumented immigrants, predominantly from Latin America. The Trump administration is currently trying to strip 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States of Temporary Protected Status, a legal category that protects foreign nationals from deportation but does not offer a pathway to US citizenship. To then turn around and offer it to 32 million Venezuelans, who would then presumably be free to move across state lines, would be unexpected to say the least.

Assuming any deeper thought has been put into it, perhaps the kind of US citizenship envisioned for Venezuelans in this hypothetical 51st state is a second-class variety. This was the experience of the newly minted Mexican-Americans created by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and put the territories of New Mexico, and California under US control. The former Mexican citizens lost much of their land to white settlers during the Gold Rush, and were not able to call on the rule of law to defend themselves. De facto second-class status is already the case for US citizens of Latin American origin today, thanks to the Trump administration’s deportation policies and its reliance on racial profiling, a reality that has been driving an ever-growing number of Latinos away from Trump’s political coalition. Perhaps he simply hopes to create in Venezuela a population of US-citizen Latinos who would still like to vote for him. 

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In reality, the annexation of Venezuela is highly unlikely. Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has been accommodating to Trump since the US capture of her predecessor, but even for her, the prospect of complete annexation seems a bridge too far. The prospect of a prolonged counterinsurgency is probably unattractive. Indeed, guerrilla resistance was a major factor in protecting Mexican territory in Baja California, Sonora, and the Yucatan Peninsula from annexation by the United States during negotiations for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Members of Congress were also opposed, not just liberal opponents of the war, but also white supremacists. As slaveholder Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina put it: “Are we to associate with ourselves as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed race of Mexico?” There’s probably at least one Groyper in the White House wondering the same about Venezuela right now. 

Yet, it is worth acknowledging that becoming US citizens would suit many Venezuelans, Cubans, and Mexicans just fine. Many risk life and limb merely to work in America, even without the hope of becoming citizens. As unhappy as Puerto Ricans are with their commonwealth status, at least they can move to New York City or Miami at will, and vote the moment they get there. Many Latin Americans are envious. 

Furthermore, decisions that dramatically impact Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela are being made in Washington every day. Everything from Mexico’s security policy to Cuba’s ability to import oil is being decided by the White House. And Nicolas Maduro, nominally the head of a foreign state, is being treated not as a prisoner of war, but as a common criminal arrested under US law, and charged in a Manhattan court. If the lives of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Mexicans are going to be shaped by the US presidency and their sovereign leaders subject to US laws, wouldn’t it be fair if they at least got to vote on it? 

Many more millions of Latin Americans will indeed get to vote. Whether naturalized immigrants or their far more numerous US-born descendants, they are already one of America’s largest voting blocs. The first Latin Americans to obtain US citizenship at scale were the conquered Mexicans of the Southwest. Millions more Mexicans would later migrate north into the former Mexican territories, often actively recruited as cheap labor to work in the extractive industries of the American West. American military conquest similarly created the other large and permanent US-citizen population of Latin Americans when it annexed Puerto Rico after defeating Spain in 1898. If you are unhappy that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is eligible to run for president, blame President McKinley. 

Meanwhile Cuba, while not formally annexed, was subjected to near-total US economic and political control, a quasi-colonial reality only broken by Fidel Castro in 1959, though Trump is now attempting to reverse the outcome. The political and economic entanglements with Cuba created a vast Cuban diaspora in the United States, even before Castro came to power. For example, Marco Rubio’s parents came to Florida not as political refugees but as economic migrants two years before the Cuban Revolution. 

In more recent history, US trade policies like NAFTA created dislocation and job loss in Mexico’s agricultural heartlands, at a scale similar to the destruction of the Midwestern Rust Belt. Millions of Mexicans headed north to build new lives in the United States, very belatedly meeting the hopes of the Spanish Crown in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries to settle its vast North American empire with Catholic Spanish-speakers. And these pioneers in the 1990s and 2000s largely remain in the United States today, excluded from citizenship, essential for our economy, and having in most cases already produced US-born offspring. They are increasingly joining electoral populist revolts of both the Right and Left — and have proven to be open to Trump’s pitch. Yet if you deport their parents, they have the ability to punish you at the polls. 

Despite its recent Latino support, Trumpism first emerged as a backlash to the post-NAFTA wave of mass Mexican migration. Earlier Anglo-American backlash, such as the state-level efforts of Proposition 187 in California or Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona had already made immigration the defining conservative issue in the American Southwest, an issue that ultimately helped shift both states blue. The restrictionist tendency has found its champion in Trump. Yet the US has already become a Latin American country in ways the Trump presidency is unable to reverse. And this would still be true if every undocumented immigrant were somehow deported tomorrow. 

The United States is already home to more native Spanish-speakers than any country other than Mexico. Latin American cultural influence abounds — the Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl was remarkable precisely because of how mundane it was. And the American Right itself is ever more Latin American. In 2024, Trump won his second term in large part because of historic levels of Latino support. Marco Rubio, the first man since Henry Kissinger to simultaneously serve as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, records tributes to the United States’ distinctly Hispanic and Catholic roots. The Border Patrol agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are both Mexican-Americans. Hispanic authoritarians from Bukele to Pinochet to Franco are figures of open admiration in many corners of the American Right. The infamous Nick Fuentes is proud of his Hispanic heritage. In Donald Trump’s America, even our Nazis are Mexican! 

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Geopolitically, a US shift away from Europe and towards Latin America is also a defining feature of Trump’s second term. The White House endorses presidential candidates in Latin American contests as routinely as if they were governor’s races in a US state. And often, the MAGA label is attractive to voters in Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Rubio’s “Americas First” foreign policy — experienced by Latin Americans as bullying and Europeans as abandonment — can nevertheless be read as Washington finally realizing exactly where it is and who it shares the continent with. The rumored possible shift in the US position on the Falkland Islands — from backing Britain to backing Argentina — should be understood as merely the geopolitical manifestation of America’s increasing Hispanization. The United States today is as much part of Latin America as it is the Anglosphere. It is, in Trump’s words, “OUR hemisphere.” And the more Latin America belongs to the US, the more Latin American the US will become.

It’s already happening. For Anglo politicians from the Southwest like Beto O’Rourke or George W. Bush, the ability to deploy Spanish is now an indispensable part of retail politics. Down the class ladder, white guys aspiring to work anywhere from a kitchen to a construction site need to pick up a fair amount of español just to talk to the other guys. Even Pope Leo, the first American Pope, is really more of a Latin American, admitting he would prefer to root for Peru in the World Cup over the United States. The pontiff is simply the highest-profile example of the reverse assimilation into Latinidad that will become an ever more common part of 21st-century American life.

It is natural then for both Republicans and Democrats to want to elevate Latino candidates to win over an increasingly Latino electorate. Based on recent 2028 polling, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a frontrunner for the Republican one. The 2028 campaign for the White House could well be between a Miami Cuban and a Bronx Boricua. That’s what a Monroe Doctrine gets you.

A Latino-on-Latina presidential contest in 2028 would be an objectively funny way to finally bring the Trump era of American politics to a close. A political movement which began with “Build the Wall” as its defining slogan and has lately devolved into “annex Venezuela” was never going to reverse centuries-long migration and demographic patterns. Whether these changes usher in a Lusotropical Neoconservatism or a Mestizo Socialism remains to be seen. Yet the arc of the moral universe is bending inexorably towards Latinidad. This may be the future that MAGA deserves: oprime 2 para inglés. 

And so Pedro told Tony his life story: his rustic childhood in Villa Clara, his polio diagnosis, his days in Havana, his stint as a lector in a cigar factory, reading adventure novels to the cigar rollers. Pedro also told Tony about the greatness of the United States. One day, sitting on the porch, Tony made a promise to his grandfather: when he grew up, he would “lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba”.

Even after Little Tony had become US Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio, he never forgot that promise. In his memoir An American Son (2012), in which he reminisces about that Miami porch, he describes Pedro as his “tutor”. And it seems he is still trying to make him proud. Since January, the Trump administration has been closing in on Cuba. It has tightened its embargo and sent the US navy to circle the island like a shiver of sharks. The US Justice Department has also indicted former leader Raúl Castro for murder. As always, the Cuban people are bearing the brunt of the US campaign of maximum pressure. Blackouts take place daily, and food and medicine are hard to come by. And as always, the pinchos grandes are comfortable in their fortified mansions, with their back-up generators and well-stocked fridges.

Against this dramatic backdrop, rumors abound that the US will invade. “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years,” Trump mused back in May, “and it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.” Rubio’s message has been much the same of late. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba,” he said, “as long as these people are in charge.”

Whether this is fighting talk or just bluff is anyone’s guess. Given the Iranian quagmire, Trump and Rubio might choose instead to play the long game with Cuba. “What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves,” Rubio told Axios last week. “One of the things we’ve lost in American foreign policy is the concept of patience and persistence. My level of confidence is that when this administration is over, at a minimum, Cuba will be on an irreversible glide path toward a different future.” The future Rubio envisions is pretty clear: he wants to bring down the communist leadership and privatize the economy. And he is prepared to wait. It’s difficult, however, to imagine Cuba resisting for that much longer. 

For Trump, getting the better of Cuba is a crucial part of his Donroe Doctrine. After getting rid of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, he wants to further US dominance in the Southern Hemisphere. Despite its tiny size, Cuba carries huge symbolic significance. It was the outpost of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and today is a Chinese ally. American presidents since John F. Kennedy have tried to oust the communist regime. Not one has even come close. To pull it off would be legacy-defining. After Trump’s humiliating climbdown in Iran, he needs a win to restore his tough-guy image — and Cuba makes for easy prey.

For Rubio, however, this is personal. He has been harboring a grudge against Cuba’s leaders since childhood, biding his time. Dale tiempo al tiempo, as the Latin American proverb goes. Give time to time. Now, at last, he may be nearing his grand finale. In a video message in Spanish to the Cuban people, Rubio promised “a new path between the US and a new Cuba”. He added, “The only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.” 

Their country is also Rubio’s, although he has never set foot there. He was born in Miami in 1971, 12 years after the revolution which saw Fidel Castro sweep into power in Havana. Castro promised to free the island from the rule of Fulgencio Batista, a military strongman backed by the US. But it soon became obvious that Castro had no interest in democracy. In 1961, he came out as a Marxist-Leninist and aligned with the Soviet Union. Between 1959 and 1973, more than 600,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States. Castro called them gusanos (worms). They called themselves exiles. The vast majority settled in Miami, congregating south of downtown in a cheap neighborhood now known as Little Havana. Soon there were Cuban eateries and Cuban barber shops and Cuban jewelry stores. Castro’s kid sister, who hated him, even opened a pharmacy there.

Rubio grew up not far from Little Havana. Although he lived between the ages of eight and 13 in Las Vegas, where his father worked as a hotel bartender, he is a true product of Cuban Miami. He liked to tell people that his parents fled Cuba in 1959, the year of the revolution. This origin story fueled his rise in the Republican Party of Florida and later in national politics. In 2009, during his run for the Senate, he tweeted: “Thank you USA for welcoming my parents 50 years ago.” Two years later, Rubio told an interviewer that “the direction we’re going in Washington, DC, would make us more like the rest of the world, and not like the exceptional nation that my parents found when they came here from Cuba in 1959.”

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Except that’s not quite how it happened. In 2011, two American reporters, Manuel Roig-Franzia and Alex Leary, broke a big scoop: Rubio’s parents had actually settled in Miami in 1956, three years before the revolution. At the time, Castro was in Mexico plotting the revolution. This means the Rubios left Cuba in search of the American dream, rather than to escape communism. In Miami’s exile community, pre-Castro economic migrants are derided as verduleros (vegetable street vendors).

One can guess why Rubio preferred to say his parents arrived in 1959: it surely made for a better, neater story. Critics who insisted he lied purely for “political gain” were missing the point. His attempt at self-mythology tells us a lot about how he sees himself and his political mission. It seems Rubio has internalized his community’s history. Three years naturally makes a big difference to journalists, but I imagine they make little psychological difference to a Cuban kid growing up in Miami.

“Look, that’s not the way it was discussed in our family or by many people in the exile community,” Rubio explained after the story broke in 2011. “It’s more about the loss of their home country.” In the minds of Cuban exiles, their native island is akin to the promised land. “Next year in Havana!” is a popular slogan in Miami, a riff on the Jewish phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem!”, pronounced during Passover.

Besides, Rubio’s grandfather, Pedro, did leave Cuba after Castro’s takeover. He had actually first moved to the US in 1956 to be closer to his daughters, according to Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of Rubio. But after the revolution he moved back to the island. He struggled to make a living in the US and didn’t want to be a burden to his family. At the time, there was still hope that something positive would come out of the revolution. Pedro even found a decent job as a clerk in a government ministry. But he couldn’t stand the oppressive atmosphere. Soon, he was back in Miami.

Immediately after the revolution, Cuban exiles began plotting ways to reverse it. Young Rubio wasn’t the first to dream of toppling Castro. As early as 1960, the US government had set out its Cuba policy in a secret memo: “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US.” How would it do that exactly? “Covert action.” And who would carry that out? Cuban exiles, for the most part.

The opening shot in the contrarrevolución came in 1961, when the US landed 1,500 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba. Castro’s forces were ready for them and struck back hard. The only chance of success would have been for the US to provide air support. President Kennedy refused, and the invasion was defeated. But the exiles, and the CIA, never stopped plotting to take down Castro. Through the decades, Miami buzzed with intrigue. 

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Rubio came of age in this feverish urban swamp. At home or in his car, he would tune in to Radio Mambi or WQBA, which broadcast round the clock about the evils of Castro and the heroism of the exiles. This time, the master plan would work out, this was the one. Next year in Havana! Business deals and secret plots were hatched at corner tables at restaurants like Versailles or the Tropical. And violence was never far away, as journalist Ann Louise Bardach reveals in her 2004 book Cuba Confidential. Hardline exiles targeted anyone deemed too soft. Dialogueros, who supported negotiations with the Cuban government, were traitors. And there was only one way to deal with traitors: with a bullet to la cabeza. Between 1973 and 1976, anti-Castro groups carried out more than 100 attacks in South Florida. The exile banker Bernardo Benes told Bardach that “Miami is like Guatemala”. Benes lived in constant fear for his life after brokering a deal in 1978 that freed 3,600 political prisoners from Castro’s jails. “No one is interested in free speech in Dade County. Only in Havana.”

The exile community was hierarchical. The Rubios, who had working-class jobs and went out for pancakes every Sunday morning, were nowhere near the top. El jefe was the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the billionaire founder of the Cuban American National Foundation. His statue now overlooks Miami Beach. He was a power broker who spoke like a heavy in a Forties film noir. Once, when lobbying a congressman, he reportedly said: “If you cooperate with me you get the honey. Otherwise, I hit you with the jar.” Another heavyweight exile was Rafael Díaz-Balart, former brother-in-law of Fidel. At the turn of the century, two of his sons went into politics and were elected to the US Congress. In Little Havana, they were hailed as the chosen ones, destined to free their homeland. 

Yet it was a young campaign volunteer who would reach the top. By now, people called him Marco. After graduating from law school in Miami, Rubio set his sights on a political career. At 34, he became the speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Five years later, a US senator. And at 53, Secretary of State. Among ambitious Cuban-Americans, he was never the most likely to find himself in this position. Others were richer, better connected. And yet here he is. A talented, hungry politician with a killer instinct. 

Now comes his biggest political test yet. Rubio has long been seen as the archetypal Republican hawk. His idol is Ronald Reagan. Growing up, he writes in his memoir, his grandfather Pedro would tell him: “America must be a strong country.” That belief in American exceptionalism motivates Rubio as much as his hostility towards the Cuban regime. To be sure, US leaders shouldn’t conduct foreign policy based on desires of revenge. And if they are the children of immigrants, they shouldn’t import their parents’ feuds. But this isn’t the case here: Rubio’s feud with Cuba is also America’s feud. The island nation remains a hub in the anti-American axis. 

When Rubio was 13 and still went as Tony, his grandfather Pedro was admitted into hospital. He didn’t have long. Tony was at his bedside throughout, and as Pedro died he took his hand. “I swore I would do something with my life and make him proud,” Rubio wrote in his memoir. Decades later, he is in the unique position to vanquish one of America’s oldest foes, and avenge his family. Will he succeed?

So there might be a temptation to cheer the latest crisis at the International Criminal Court, which throughout its short existence has been the prime locus of “internationalist” legal folly. Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, was expelled from office July 24, following a two-year saga shrouded in convoluted bureaucratic mystery. Ostensibly centered on allegations of sexual impropriety, they were always really more like allegations of allegations: the nature of what was even being alleged is still a morass of murk, at least insofar as any scattered details have been publicly disclosed.

The drama has been made all the more inscrutable by the “ad hoc” bureaucratic rigmarole set up to adjudicate these “allegations,” with oversight opaquely passing back and forth between an internal ICC disciplinary unit, an enigmatic ICC administrative body, a hazily affiliated division of the United Nations, an improvised secret judicial panel, back to some non-specific ICC limbo, and then finally to the “Assembly of States Parties” — thought to be the ICC’s supreme governing authority, which proceeded to terminate Khan, albeit based on authorities that hardly anyone could seem to quite ascertain, not least Khan himself.

As his day of preordained reckoning drew near, Khan remarked that “in terms of the procedure” put forth to eradicate his career and reputation, even he was being kept assiduously “in the dark … I mean, it’s amazing.” So here was one of the foremost expositors of “international law” — who had just earned rapturous applause from “international-law” enthusiasts the world over for orchestrating a series of “arrest warrants” against the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin — marveling that even he had no clue what ad hoc methods had been devised to exact punishment on him for offenses he steadfastly denied, and which had only been the most faintly articulated. Khan was only able to learn of the latest developments, he said, “from the media,” and from “speculation.”

The ultimate claimed basis for Khan’s removal? Certainly not any somber acknowledgment of the failures of “international law,” following a sustained period of careful self-examination. Instead, of course, it was some multi-dimensional sexually implicative “adult-grooming” scandal — the core offending conduct of which remains almost indecipherable to the untrained eye, and only made putatively scandalous by the very same blinkered pathologies that have come to pervade liberal-Left NGO culture. 

While Khan’s alleged wrongdoing has been widely referred to in media reports as centering on accusations of “sexual misconduct” or even “sexual assault,” a recent lengthy CNN interview with the central accuser — a putative lawyer in her late 30s named Sarah Hishan — failed to elucidate with any tangibility what, in fact, she was even accusing Khan of doing wrong, beyond transgressing the latest nebulous frontiers of “consent” and “power imbalance” theory — the bleeding edge of which one would expect to find marinating in workforce environments such as the ICC. 

Khan objected, reasonably enough, to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of the proceedings that were initiated against him, starting in April 2024, when they were supposedly prompted by the 39-year-old’s unveilment of her sexual-grievance story. One might even say there’s an element of karmic justice in his banishment, as “international law” is nothing if not a thoroughly make-it-up-as-you-go-along enterprise. But with Khan’s ensuing downfall, the tactics brought to bear against him have received an outsized boost of validation — which could mean similar tactics may well soon be coming to an institution near you.

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The hollow campaign targeting Graham Platner

By Michael Tracey

It’s nearly impossible to circumnavigate the organizational, political, and personal factors that seemingly gave rise to this two-plus year debacle, but one factor that’s been less examined might simply be the most bog-standard of factional workplace resentments, which, as they are increasingly wont to do circa 2026, always find a way to inevitably escalate into vague imputations of sex crime. 

Media leaks in an earlier phase of the saga tried to contextualize the genesis of the “accusations” by reference to Khan’s underlings declaring him “an unpopular boss,” who “ran the office [of the prosecutor] as a top-down operation,” and who imposed what some of them apparently saw as “controversial policies” — such as the “requirement that staff working on a particular case be based in the field.” That is, a requirement that ICC employees charged with investigating “international law” violations in far-flung places like Mali or the Philippines have to actually go and work in those places, rather than “Zooming” in remotely from their comfy work-at-home stations in Bezuidenhout or wherever. That this was apparently so “controversial” to the rising generation of “international law” advocates may speak to the general empirical soundness of “international law” fact-finding, or lack thereof. 

One strangely open question — which, in a way, crystallizes the entire affair — is to what degree the main accuser, Sarah Hishan, can even be correctly described as a “lawyer,” as the CNN headline accompanying her July 16 interview labels her, as have innumerable other media reports. Inasmuch as the word “lawyer” connotes a person professionally accredited to practice law in a particular jurisdiction, there is scant evidence to indicate this label should properly apply to Hishan, who has conspicuously demanded anonymity for her media interviews, which the journalists conducting them have invariably granted without any real explanation.

While an online bio attributed to her states that she “completed the Bar in England and Wales,” Hishan does not appear on the Barrister’s Register or Solicitors Register maintained by the Bar of England and Wales. Her LinkedIn page — which she seems to have recently amended to partially anonymize herself — suggests she was enrolled more than a decade ago in something called a “Bar Professional Training Course,” administered by something called “The University of Law” — a for-profit educational venture located in Britain. 

Other than this, there is no sign she has “completed” any conventional lawyering licensure. An email sent to the ICC public-affairs office, requesting clarification as to whether Sarah Hishan is currently admitted to practice law — in either Britain, Malaysia (her country of origin), the Netherlands (her country of residence as an ICC employee), or any other country — has not been returned. (That she has seemingly drawn a full ICC salary from April 2024 to present, ever since she ignited the ICC’s slow-rolling immolation, only adds another layer of self-defeating irony to the whole ordeal.)   

Hishan does claim various other professional certifications — including a two-day “e-learning” course on “genocide” in 2022, another two-day 2022 “e-learning” course pertaining to “international law and the conflict in Ukraine,” and yet another two-day “workshop,” this one seemingly in-person, held by the Interagency Diversity and Inclusion Network in 2020, from which she was duly certified as completing a “training of trainers,” which thenceforth empowered her to become somebody who could purport to deliver “Gender, Diversity and Inclusion trainings to staff members working for international organizations in The Hague” — with an emphasis on concepts such as “disabilities” and “mental health.” This novel certification, perhaps more than anything else, provides the most clarifying window into her professional background, and her stem-winding odyssey in the field of “international law.”

Some skeptical observers have been keen to emphasize the presumed role of Israeli sabotage in engineering Khan’s defenestration, and there is no doubt the ICC arrest warrants he announced in May 2024 against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant provoked intense animus from Israel’s impassioned supporter network, which was then happy to seize on any perceived Khan vulnerability that may surface. But if there was a “conspiracy” afoot, it lies in plain sight. With or without any Israeli involvement, organs of “international law” such as the ICC, not unlike culturally harmonious organizations such as the Democratic Party, are more than sufficiently susceptible all on their own to these spiraling cycles of shambolic collapse the moment some sexual impropriety can be conjured or alleged, no matter how abstruse the core “allegations.”

Of course, it is true that the Jewish state, at least in the person of Netanyahu, would exploit any “allegation” that could be contrived to cast doubt on the credibility of a prosecutor who had generated enormous worldwide publicity by charging top Israeli officials with crimes — as would any defendant charged with crimes, should their prosecutor have liabilities emerge. So it’s no surprise career Israel backers and Netanyahu emissaries like the late Sen. Lindsey Graham went around whipping up whatever “accusation” whispers they could to undermine the ICC’s prosecution process. Newly released audio and video footage from an unfinished documentary, as reported in The New York Times, reveal Graham strategizing by phone with Netanyahu just before the 2024 presidential election as to how they could best amplify the “sexual-misconduct” rumors, as if Graham and Bibi were deeply concerned for the welfare of Hishan.

Netanyahu even indulged in some strategically inflammatory sex talk himself, telling the website Breitbart in August 2025 that a then-anonymous woman in Khan’s office had accused him of “raping her and sexually assaulting her for over a year.” This turned out to be a total load of hogwash, as the woman herself eventually explained to CNN that she has expressly declined to “put a label” on the conduct she was allegedly victimized by, including when someone once asked her directly if she had been raped — an episode chronicled by UN investigators who took charge of the Khan inquisition in November 2024, and eventually leaked to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The woman’s reasoning, she told Amanpour, was that “I am not a lawyer in this. Even though that’s my profession” — and so “It’s not my place to label anything.” 

No one has to propose any sprawling clandestine “conspiracy” to note the obvious exploitability of the “ad hoc” adjudicative process concocted to determine Khan’s fate, which rested with a quasi-legislative “international-law” assembly convening in a nondescript chamber in New York City. For one thing, the final expulsion vote was conducted by secret ballot, thanks to an inexplicable provision of the original Rome Statute that established the ICC. 

If the end-result of the cockamamie “international-law” tribunal was influenced by a desire among certain ICC member states to placate their American hosts in the Trump administration, this would only be surprising as cold political reality, whatever the egalitarian-flattening pretensions of the high-minded “international-law” theorists who drafted the ICC’s founding documents. US primacy has certainly remained in full force since the ICC started operations in 2002, as evidenced in miniature by the ICC governing body continuing to be physically housed in the United States, despite steadfast US refusal to join the ICC, and dare surrender any of its sovereignty to “international law.”

Perhaps the current Trump administration’s attitude on the Khan question was a political variable that these “Assembly” members, operating in an expressly political capacity, might have foreseeably taken into account as they pondered the proper recourse for Sarah Hishan’s weighty “allegations.” Khan had already invited a simmering fury for his breach of bipartisan understandings — which he had carefully cultivated with the Biden administration, and even Senate Republicans — with the allegedly “rushed” May 2024 application for arrest warrants he brought against the top Israeli officials. (Three senior Hamas officials were also charged on the same occasion, reflecting Khan’s attunement to political sensitivities, but this had no material effect in terms of dampening the fallout.) 

Then soon came an incoming Republican administration already primed for baseline ideological hostility against the ICC, and which had been given all the more reason to go scorched earth. As he barreled in for his second term, Trump wasted no time imposing maximum reprisals on the ICC and Khan individually, sanctioning him by name as one of his first orders of business on Feb. 6, 2025. Among other things, this sanction appears to have barred Khan from physically attending any of the disciplinary proceedings related to him in New York, not to mention cutting him off from the US-controlled international financial system — “international law” be damned. Bank accounts frozen, no more credit cards, and travel overall severely limited. Other ICC officials were then hit by Trump-backed sanctions several months later. 

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MAGA’s samurai justice in Venezuela

By Michael Lind

Given this fraught political situation, one could easily see the faction of ICC member-states in the US-supplicating orbit — say, the EU-NATO bloc — having an interest to retain whatever favorable standing they could with the mercurial Trump. As such, these countries could have been particularly peeved with Khan for the wholesale US assault on the ICC his actions seemed to have precipitated — an especially wrenching turn for the countries that had optimistically watched a growing US-ICC truce. 

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Washington had been turning toward a gradual but non-trivial embrace of the ICC, after decades of scathing antagonism. Suddenly, the US and ICC found themselves happy to set aside old differences and collaborate on going hard after Russia. Even eminent Republican congressional figures such as Graham — who previously would’ve been known as among the ICC’s most boisterous haters — were glad-handing with Karim Khan during the Biden years, a detente clearly stemming in part from the concerted effort undertaken by Khan himself to smooth relations with both Republicans and leery Democrats. 

These efforts had seemingly paid off, as bipartisan 2022 legislation authorized US officials to “render assistance” to the ICC in an anticipated prosecution of Putin, by placing him in the same category of unique evildoers as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Slobodan Milošević, whereby America would allow an exception to the standard prohibition against any US collaboration with the ICC. Long gone were the days when Graham & co. had championed an infamous law that could theoretically authorize a US military invasion of the Netherlands, in the event that any American servicemen were ever scooped up and brought to The Hague.

But in this new Ukraine-heady period, the US presidential administration was being led by reverential devotees of Rules-Based International Order. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken had already seen to it that executive order(s) from Trump’s first term, which even then had slapped the ICC with retributive sanctions, were revoked almost a year before Putin aroused the flames of liberal-internationalist fervor all the more epically by invading Ukraine.

Bolstered by this period of glorious bipartisan unity against Russia, and thus an improbable upsurge in official US-ICC tolerance under Karim Khan’s tutelage, Biden and the Democrats did all they reasonably could to keep the momentum going. In April 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland even dispatched a DOJ prosecutor to The Hague to provide the ICC with “significant resources,” courtesy of the US taxpayer, for use in a multitude of “ad hoc” efforts aimed at activating otherwise-flaccid EU-based instruments of international law which might be utilized to “hold accountable” the war-making Russians, up to and including Putin himself. The prior default flaccidity of these mechanisms suddenly stiffened like magic, thanks to a virile overnight infusion of US hegemonic zeal.

But this moment of glory was soon squandered … and capped off by an “adult grooming” fiasco. 

One theory goes that as the first murmurs of “accusations” emerged against Khan in April 2024, he suddenly switched tactics from steady US-ameliorating to willful US-antagonizing. No question Khan was politically astute enough to know that dropping a Netanyahu arrest bombshell would promptly upend whatever collaborative trajectory might have been in progress with his American partners — even under a Democratic administration, at least one helmed by self-proclaimed Zionists such as Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken. He must also have anticipated the tentative new cohort of ICC-curious Republicans, personified by Graham, would erupt into instant vindictive frenzy. And that the reverberations were destined to extend to the faction of ICC member states that maintain allegiance to Israel, namely the EU-NATO bloc of Germany, Britain, and France (kind of) — which also happen to be outsized contributors to the ICC’s operational budget — as well as miscellaneous others like Poland (kind of), Hungary, the Baltics, etc.

So much for that brief, shining moment of Ukraine-inspired harmony! 

One thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, it’s July 13, 2026 — 11 days before the scheduled vote to oust Khan — and there’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, striding forth on behalf of the Trump administration to announce a “sweeping campaign to dismantle” what he declared was the “intolerable threat” the ICC posed to American sovereignty. (As if all those gender-diverse folx on temporary Dutch visas were getting ready to storm down Pennsylvania Avenue.) Rubio vowed “no diplomatic option will be off-limits” in this invigorated anti-ICC campaign. Meaning, it would presumably not be “off-limits” to politely encourage the ICC member states and their New York-based diplomatic reps to please consider voting to remove Karim Khan the following week. For added laughs, they could even tearfully act like they were doing it to honor “grooming” survivors.

The brave investor was Ali Ansari, a fervent supporter of Ayatollah Khamenei’s dictatorship and proud owner of a £33-million London mansion. He did not have to strive hard to obtain bank loans from the Ayandeh bank, which he fully owned and which offered high interest rates to attract deposits. Because everyone knew that Ansari was close to the regime, depositors were sure that they would be repaid and they were quite right. When the bank, whose largest client was Ansari himself, collapsed in October 2025, it was taken over by the long-established state-owned Melli bank, which immediately paid back the depositors with banknotes printed by Iran’s central bank.

But it was all too much for Tehran’s Bazaar merchants who could not unsee the obvious corruption at the heart of the regime that the Ayandeh bank scandal had exposed. To compound matters, the bank’s depositors were repaid with freshly printed banknotes that could only produce more inflation, on top of all the ocean of money printed for the Revolutionary Guards and their now-defeated Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi appendages.

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Trump must resist nation building

By Edward Luttwak

Traditionally religious, the Bazaaris continued to support the regime until its costly non-stop extremism finally resulted in direct warfare with Israel itself. The 12 days and nights of unresisted Israel air strikes from 13 to 25 June 2025 destroyed nuclear sites and army bases, as well as the regime’s military reputation. Even before Donald Trump’s B-2 bombers delivered their 14 heavy bombs on multi-billion-dollar nuclear installations as the final blow, the ever-boastful Revolutionary Guards had been exposed as incompetent buffoons who could not even protect their top generals and nuclear engineers from assassination in their own homes.

When the value of Iran’s rial collapsed, falling below one million to the dollar by October, the Bazaaris could no longer restock anything at all, imported or not, thanks to the ever-rising prices. They closed down on 28 December, announcing a strike and triggering protests that have since spread nationwide. Unable to find food, would-be shoppers were the first to demonstrate, quickly attracting others to generate increasingly large protests.

On 8 January this year, Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah, called on Iranian city-dwellers to go out to “conquer and control the centers of the cities”, specifying an 8pm start time. When many thousands heeded his call, Reza acquired instant credibility with the Washington officials and Arab rulers who had long ignored his claim that he could summon Iranians at large to challenge the Ayatollah regime. That Trump scoffed at the claim even after the mass demonstration is a curious error prompted by the isolationists lurking in the White House, who are contradicted by the photos and films of tens of thousands marching under the Iranian royal flag. Reza also appealed to the Artesh, the regular army, to assert itself. Long overshadowed by the much better-funded but now discredited Revolutionary Guard, its 300,000 men could step in and take over — if, and only if, the Revolutionary Guards are first targeted by the US.

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The curious liberalism of the ‘Axis of Evil’

By Arta Moeini

That is how a Trump air strike could change the course of events. Its targets are obvious: the two headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran, the Nasser-e and Quds-e, each housed in buildings well separated from civilian housing; and their equally distinctive buildings in Iran’s other cities starting with Mashad, Isfahan, and Shiraz.

The argument for the air strike is that it could bring down the now hated regime, but also that it would make Trump a man of his word. He distinctly threatened attacks if the regime started killing people, as it has done on the scale of thousands, with more deaths every day. As of now, however, Trump says that the regime assured him that there would be no more executions, to the great joy of J.D. Vance and his fellow isolationists.

The latter’s argument is that things could go wrong even if the US action is confined to several air strikes in the course of a single day. That is, of course, perfectly true of any military action — but it did not happen on 22 June last year when the nuclear targets were destroyed without incident. Nor did it happen when Mr and Mrs Maduro were lifted out of Caracas without any American being bruised in the process.

In addition to Vance and his cohort, our beloved Saudi friends are also very much opposed to any US intervention that might release 90 million Iranians from the cage of the clerical dictatorship. However hostile they are to today’s regime — which has attacked them more than once with missiles that burned oil installations — the Saudi monarchy and the lesser princedoms would be far more threatened by their close proximity to an exuberantly democratic Iran, which would be further liberalized socially and culturally by a flood of returning exiles from Hollywood, Stockholm and all points in between.

For others around Trump with darker thoughts, there is another reason to oppose any US action against the murderous Ayatollah regime. In addition to the Iranians and uncounted Yemenis, Iraqis, Syrians and key US interests right across the Middle East, Israel might also benefit from the demise of its most persistent enemy. That is reason enough for Tucker Carlson, and other vocal critics of Israel, to oppose any military action against the failed and murderous regime.

So once again it is up to Trump and his super-loyal and highly effective Secretary of State, Marco Rubio — the same one who argued that Maduro could be removed swiftly and cleanly. Luckily, Rubio paid no attention to Tucker Carlson’s predictions about Iran last year. So much for a war that “would kill thousands of Americans” and “which we would lose”.

Early on, there was some hope that the White House would forgo the first term’s amateur coup attempts and moralistic posturing against Maduro. Among his first acts in 2025, President Trump dispatched special envoy Richard “Ric” Grenell to broker an America First understanding with the Caracas regime.

Under the deal, Chevron could continue to export Venezuelan crude Stateside through the renewal of a Biden-era oil license. In exchange, Caracas agreed to accept deportation flights of its citizens — a vital priority given the subsequent suspension of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the US homeland. The administration thus made good on two campaign pledges: boosting fossil fuels and deporting illegal migrants. 

Sadly, this understanding underwent a series of erratic twists in the ensuing months, a turn of events caused mostly by Miami’s community of Right-wing Latin-American exiles.

Fly to Miami from the American heartland, and you’ll find what can appear like a Right-wing foreign country, where Spanish prevails over English; and where denizens of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and, especially, Cuban extraction pray at the altar of neoconservative ideology. This, even as they have recreated the clientelist politics of their homelands within the city council. 

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Trump’s deportation bust

By Juan David Rojas

Drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as state- and nonstate-sponsored regime-change operations across the hemisphere form part of the city’s past and present mythology. Influencers like Alexander Otaola grandstand in the form of three-hour, Castro-esque rants on YouTube, offering any and all justification for toppling regimes from Havana to Tehran.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s initial pragmatism on Venezuela didn’t play well in Miami. Similarly, many were also blindsided by the administration’s DOGE-era austerity drive. In tandem with the virtual dismantling of USAID, the White House slashed more than $100 million in grants for the National Endowment of Democracy and related South Florida NGOs set up to combat the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan regimes. In March, two of the city’s hawk honchos — Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, the spokesperson for the NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart — assured the Spanish-language network Telemundo that the administration would restore funding for the city’s neoconservative jobs programs.

Sure enough, Miami elites deployed their man on the inside, Marco Rubio, as well as the Miami-Dade trio of lawmakers Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez, and Maria Elvira Salazar. The secretary of state (and later acting national-security adviser) quickly got to work restoring the various regime-change programs and helping appoint a list of allies to key government offices, including Miami native Mauricio Claver-Carone as special envoy to Latin America, former Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Cabrera as ambassador to Panama, Florida neoconservative Mike Waltz as national-security adviser and later UN ambassador, and longtime hemispheric hawk Christopher Landau as deputy secretary of state.  

The trio of representatives threatened to sink Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in Congress unless the administration rescinded Chevron’s oil license. The White House caved, with severe consequences for the welfare of the oppressed Venezuelans that Miami neocons claim to represent. 

Unable to deport them to their home country after the deal was nixed, the administration labeled 238 Venezuelan nationals as “narcoterrorist” combatants, deporting them to El Salvador’s gruesome Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Yet 87 percent of the deportees lacked criminal records, which reportedly infuriated Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, who had explicitly insisted that only hardened criminals be sent for imprisonment in the CECOT. 

All the more ironic was the revelation that many of the same deportees qualified as Venezuelan dissidents, having suffered persecution from the regime after participating in anti-Maduro demonstrations during the 2010s. Beyond the Salvadoran debacle, the administration’s draconian treatment of legal and illegal immigrants — and in some cases, US citizens — has stirred animosities in South Florida.

Historically, Florida Republicans have been more than willing to “import voters” via an open border with Cuba through the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Activists like Gutierrez-Boronat have argued that any and all Cubans are eligible for asylum on account of the island’s repressive conditions as a Communist country. Similarly, Rubio was an ardent defender of the Biden administration’s Temporary Protected Status program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans up until he joined the Trump administration.

Like Rubio, local influencers and elected officials have since attempted to spin mass deportation to a conflicted South Florida constituency; in my hometown of Coral Springs, Fla., agents in military gear surrounded a home with rifles to arrest an unarmed handyman with no criminal record. Accordingly, Rep. Salazar cosponsored the bipartisan Dignity Act, pairing national and mandatory E-Verify with a path for certain illegals to obtain legal status. For this crime, MAGA luminaries like Ryan Girdusky called for Salazar to be primaried.

But amid the back and forth, Rubio again got busy cultivating his influence operation. Miami’s dutiful son is today simultaneously serving as secretary of state, national-security adviser, and US archivist. Seeking to placate Bukele and to outflank Grenell, Rubio brokered a three-way prisoner swap repatriating CECOT’s Venezuelan nationals in exchange for the release of 10 US citizens under Venezuelan custody. Chevron’s oil license was once more renewed, which subsequently led to the resumption of deportation flights to Venezuela in July.

But apparently, to Rubio’s mind, this was a temporary reprieve. The secretary soon focused his efforts on persuading MAGA’s militarist and Jacksonian factions, which have long yearned for cartel wars in Mexico, to redirect their fire and fury toward Venezuela. In addition to Rubio and his allies, it’s worth noting that Trump is surrounded by Florida natives well versed in the narrative of Venezuelan “narcoterrorism,” including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.

The secretary has likely persuaded the president as well as Stephen Miller that removing Maduro would not only halt drug flows, but also enable further deportations by installing the subservient Venezuelan opposition. And while Maduro has allegedly offered to hand over all of Venezuela’s resource wealth to Washington, the hawks no doubt argue that the opposition, once in power, would hand over the country’s oil anyway; in October, Trump ordered Grenell to halt further outreach to Caracas. 

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Trump is coming for Venezuela

By John Masco

Finally, the White House’s about-face on Venezuela also serves a clear electoral logic. In 2024, Trump won a historic 45% of Latinos, including 70% and 50% of Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, respectively. A year later, the president’s approval rating with the same group has fallen to just 27%, including an 18-point drop among Latino Republicans. Electorally, regime change in Venezuela provides a strong incentive for Latino neocons to overlook abuses like deporting a Cuban national without charge or process to a maximum security prison in Eswatini. When I asked my Venezuelan neighbor on the subject, he said he resented Venezuelans being treated like animals but would look the other way if Washington deposed Maduro.

Yet there are significant flaws in the plan. Venezuela has been on the cusp of failed-state status for more than a decade and is the third most corrupt country on the planet. Regime change via foreign military intervention could trigger complete state collapse, inviting warlords and armed groups to carve up the country into criminal fiefdoms. Leftist guerrillas like the ELN and FARC are deeply entrenched within Venezuelan society and have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution.” A violent insurgency of the kind waged by both groups during the Nineties in neighboring Colombia against a US-installed government would likely lead to calls for further interventions from Washington; quagmires in Latin America are no more pleasant than those in Mesopotamia.

Such a scenario could trigger more emigration to neighboring countries and eventually the United States, not to mention jeopardize oil production and ironically strengthen the drug trade. Trump has claimed that for every boat bombed in the Caribbean, 25,000 lives were saved in the homeland. Yet Venezuela acts mainly as a transit country for no more than 13% of Colombian cocaine and zero percent of the far deadlier fentanyl.

Under Trump, fentanyl flows through the southern border have declined by more than 40% thanks to the president’s border policies and historic cooperation with the government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. So far this year, Sheinbaum has extradited nearly 60 drug lords north of the border, including Chinese fentanyl kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang on Friday; fentanyl precursor chemicals are known to originate in China before being shipped to Mexico. Why divert energy and focus from these efforts to a regime-change war in a country that, though misruled, has little to do with fentanyl?  

As for regime change, in 2019, Marco Rubio posted a bloodied image of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in response to protests against Maduro. But Gaddafi’s overthrow was in retrospect a disaster, creating state failure and disorder that continues to radiate in North Africa and Southern Europe. Overthrowing Maduro willy-nilly could create similar conditions — only much closer home. Rather than enable a post-Gaddafi Libya in our hemisphere, the Trump administration would do well to sideline Rubio and his allies and cut another deal with Maduro.    

Some $36 trillion in debt underscores the wide gap between America’s expansive international objectives and its limited capacity to attain them — a condition famously described by the New Deal journalist Walter Lippmann as foreign-policy “insolvency.” Continuing the hubristic course we have followed since the Nineties would be disastrous.

Trump gets all this. Which is why he is aiming to lower the temperature across various international theaters, counterbalance the power of rival states, and reset America’s global engagement. His own shorthand, Reagan-borrowed description of the strategy — peace through strength — is apt. His ability to deliver on this vision is still an open question, however. To a large degree, it depends on the people he taps to carry it out.

Richard Nixon faced a somewhat similar situation at the start of his presidency. America was overextended abroad in an unwinnable Vietnam War that bore little connection to the nation’s vital security interests. An increasingly confident Soviet Union was flexing its muscles in Czechoslovakia and Egypt and threatening to race past parity into superiority over the US nuclear arsenal. Economically, an overvalued dollar was crippling exports and rendering the United States highly vulnerable to a foreign-induced financial crisis. At home, the country was riven by violent clashes over Vietnam and racial injustice.

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Nixon’s signature foreign-policy actions — making peace in Vietnam, pursuing détente and arms control with the Kremlin, opening diplomatic talks with China, stabilizing the Arab-Israeli conflict, and ending the gold standard — were aimed at aligning America’s goals and means abroad. At home, Nixon sought a breathing spell in which the United States could heal its internal wounds. By and large, it worked.

Although the particulars differ, Trump appears to be pursuing a similar vision of settling regional conflicts, stabilizing great-power relations, rebalancing American foreign trade, and buying time to mend internal rifts. He clearly recognizes that the so-called unipolar moment — the period when US power so greatly outmatched that of any other nation that the world had little choice but to bend to Washington’s will — has long been over.

As his secretary of state and interim national-security adviser, Marco Rubio, has concisely put it, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world. You have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest.”

Trump drove these points home last week in a seminal speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia. “We were the only power in the world,” he said, “and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

The proponents of this model, he continued, “wrecked far more nations than they built and the [interventionists] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” The contrast with President George W. Bush, Trump’s most recent GOP predecessor, couldn’t be more stark. In his Second Inaugural Address, remember, Bush called on Washington to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Can Trump realize his more realistic vision?

The early signals from abroad give reason for hope. The interim tariff-reduction arrangement struck by US and Chinese negotiators last week is a sign that a compromise trade deal is realistic. Iran has cautiously indicated an openness to a pragmatic nuclear deal, while key Arab states are increasingly attracted to Trump’s vision of a modernized Middle East no longer riven by conflict and dependent on oil and gas exports.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s initial skepticism over Trump’s intentions has given way to growing optimism that he seeks not just an end to the war in Ukraine, but genuine rapprochement. Europe, too, is beginning to adjust to the reality that it can no longer simply outsource its security to the American hegemon, albeit with a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Team Trump’s success last week in defusing a looming nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan demonstrated impressive diplomatic skill.

Success requires much more than winning over foreign leaders, however. To implement deals, his administration must also engage effectively with the many moving parts at lower levels in foreign governments and manage those broader relationships. For this, Trump must bring Washington into line — and here, the early signs are more sobering.

Part of his challenge is institutional: the US government spent much of the past three decades building policy bureaucracies devoted to transforming foreign societies, and these groups have a clear self-interest in resisting Trump’s vision. The period of unipolarity also encouraged bad habits in the parts of the government supposedly designed to conduct and support diplomacy, because America’s coercive capabilities made the traditional arts of balancing the power and interests of foreign competitors seem unnecessary.

Part of the challenge is personal and political. There is a good deal of truth in the old Washington adage that personnel is policy. Finding staff that has the requisite combination of talent, experience, and loyalty is no simple matter, particularly when large parts of the GOP, and nearly all mainstream media, remain convinced that diplomatic engagement with adversaries constitutes appeasement and is therefore counterproductive.

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Trump’s painful first-term experiences with opposition within his own administration have made him unusually sensitive to this problem. Still, there is no easy solution. Few of the officials who have been overseeing America’s long string of fruitless wars and failed democratization campaigns favor a new approach. And many of those calling for change lack the diplomatic polish and administrative dexterity born of experience. The large number of unfilled foreign-policy slots in the administration and the recent controversies over appointments at the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff underscore just how difficult solving this issue is proving to be.

So while there is cause for optimism, the reality is that the much-needed change Trump is seeking in American foreign policy will be agonizingly difficult to achieve. It will certainly not come quickly. For Nixon, finalizing a peace accord in Vietnam took years. Full diplomatic relations with China were not established until well into the Carter administration. If Trump achieves even half of what he envisions during the next four years, he will have made remarkable progress. But his legacy will be that much more enduring and important if he manages to select and build a new cadre of able experts that share his foreign-policy ideas and carry his work forward.

Correction: Due to an editorial oversight, an earlier version of this essay misstated the size of the US debt.