The struggle over the new world (dis)order

by Jim Hodgson

The first hours of the annual parade of world leaders at the UN General Assembly Sept. 22 showed again the sharp disagreement between the leader of the United States and many other leaders over multilateral cooperation and unilateral abuse of power.

In his speech, Donald Trump threatened to “annihilate” Iran, proclaimed his nation’s supremacy, and declared that “to the victor go the spoils.” He also called Cuba “a failed state,” though any “failure” is due to his country’s decades of interference, embargo and sanctions.

Trump’s speech followed those of UN Secretary General António Guterres (left) and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva (centre), who both emphasized the need for multilateral cooperation in the face of the ecological, political and humanitarian crises that confront humanity. Guterres also called for debt relief that is timely and effective.

“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together. The defiance of hope.”

Lula, who seeks re-election in October, warned that countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. In the current campaign, Trump has openly backed Flávio Bolsonaro, son of a disgraced former president. Trump previously interfered in elections in Honduras, Argentina and Colombia.

Lula urged world leaders to take stronger action in response to intensifying global conflicts and called on the UN to recover its capacity for dialogue and mediation. He added that it is time to choose between multilateralism or global fragmentation.

“Concessions to the law of the stronger have surpassed all limits. This is not idealism, but pure realism,” he said. “War is not the continuation of politics by other means; it’s the complete breakdown of politics.”

In his speech, Trump said Mexico was the “epicentre” of drug-trafficking in Latin America and that it had ceded some of its territory to the cartels. 

A day later, President Claudia Sheinbaum responded with irony: 

“I could say that it is very difficult to live next to a country with such a high level of consumption of illegal drugs. Or I could say that it is very difficult to live next to a country that produces so many weapons. But I won’t say that because we have a good relationship.”

(Sheinbaum did not attend the General Assembly; Mexico’s remarks were delivered Friday by Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco, who emphasized collaboration with other countries and reform of UN structures.) 

Trump gathers his “Shield of the Americas”

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the United States has tried to dominate its neighbours in the Western Hemisphere. The early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine (now dubbed “Donroe”) is revived to limit perceived threats in the region.

Over the past 13 months, the U.S. military has killed at least 230 people in about 70 air strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean. In January, U.S. forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his spouse Cilia Flores, and now holds them in a prison in Brooklyn across the East River from the United Nations building.

In April, U.S. and Ecuadoran soldiers launched an effort to dismantle a drug-trafficking group. On Sept. 24, U.S. troops and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration assisted Ecuadoran authorities in arresting more than 30 people with alleged ties to Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

During the high-level General Assembly session, Trump gathered leaders of the 14 countries allied with him in his so-called “Shield of the Americas.” 

They pledged coordinated action against 24 organizations designated as “narco-terrorist.” The declaration calls for sanctions, intelligence sharing, security cooperation and a commitment to invoke the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, or Rio Treaty, to consider collective military action against the groups.

New Canadian aid to Palestine and Haiti (but not Cuba)

Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, also emphasized multilateral collaboration in her speech. Canada’s foreign policy, she said, is guided by establishing autonomy in strategic fields to limit superpower coercion, along with aspirations to lead middle powers.

“Great powers are walking away from global economic co-operation, dismantling economic integration,” Anand said. State sovereignty “has been treated with disdain.”

“We are facing serious challenges in the global order,” Anand said.

“We will lead other middle powers to act collectively and decisively, because middle powers are playing a key role in building the framework for the new international order — which is being established as we speak.”

Earlier in the week, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged $100 million in aid for Palestine in an effort to preserve “the possibility of a two-state solution.”

The funding includes $80 million in humanitarian aid, while the rest is development funding for security initiatives, including top-up funds for a multi-year project to train police in the West Bank. 

Anand announced $25.4 million in new Canadian funding for Haiti to support security, governance and community resilience in Haiti. But there have been no new funding announcements for Cuba since commitments earlier this year of $13.5 million to the Pan-American Health Organization, the World Food Program and UNICEF for programs in Cuba.

(Images: http://www.lajornada.com.mx)

Cuba warns against ‘law of the jungle’ as its foreign minister denounces U.S. pressure

by Jim Hodgson

Even as Cuba’s foreign minister rose to speak Saturday in the United Nations General Assembly, CBS News reported that the U.S. Army Reserve is considering how it can support the military’s Southern Command in coming months.

James LaPorta of CBS News reported that the reserve is looking at providing support units, including police forces and medical personnel, to the Southern Command, which covers Latin America south of Mexico, the waters around Central and South America, and the Caribbean, including Cuba.

The memo reviewed by CBS doesn’t say for what operation the troops would be needed “in 90 to 120 days,” but LaPorta reported that “multiple U.S. officials” said the planning is for a potential operation aimed at Cuba.

“Lies!” Image: Trump speaks at UN as Cuban delegation walks out. By Avilarte in Juventud Rebelde, Sept. 27, 2026.

Days earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump told the General Assembly that Cuba was a “failed state” and that he was seeking a “fundamental change” on the island, declaring that “freedom will be coming to Cuba.”

The speech Saturday by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla was partly a rebuke to Trump, but he also called for the United Nations to be preserved and strengthened while becoming “more democratic and effective” and closer to the peoples it serves.

“We are convinced that the current course of international relations, of disrespect for international law, contempt of the United Nations, and the imposition of the unilateral will of the most powerful on other countries, through intimidation and coercion, is dangerous and unsustainable. The law of the jungle cannot be the future of humanity,” he said.

Image and headlines from Cubadebate.

Rodríguez repeated that Cuba remains willing to engage in dialogue with the United States to seek resolution of bilateral differences, but without “interference or pre-conditions.

Actions you can take:

  • Before October 11: if you are in Canada and have not done so already, please sign this House of Commons petition. It will be presented in the House by opposition Members of Parliament on October 12.
  • Common Frontiers and its allies have revamped their Take Action so that you can press the Canadian government to support Cuba in a UN General Assembly vote on October 27 or 28 to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Canada must also increase humanitarian aid to Cuba.
  • If you are in any other country, please write to your representatives and/or foreign minister to press for support to the Cuba resolution in the UN General Assembly and to increase aid to Cuba. The 2026 annual threat assessment from combined U.S. intelligence agencies largely portrays Cuba as an “enabling environment” for “larger geopolitical competitors” like Russia, China and Iran, rather than as an independent strategic threat.

U.S. military lays groundwork for potential action around Cuba [Section adapted from the CBS report cited above.] 

Earlier this year, U.S. forces conducted reconnaissance operations on the seafloor and maritime approaches that surround Cuba, multiple U.S. military personnel told CBS News. Separately, U.S. airpower components were placed on heightened readiness and directed to pre-stage personnel for potential deployment. Those plans, however, did not come to fruition.

CBS News reported in May that U.S. intelligence officials were assessing how Cuba would respond to possible U.S. military action. 

In July, CBS News reported that U.S. military planners had examined a range of options for possible action against Cuba, including an Army-led air assault involving thousands of U.S. soldiers to be carried out by the 101st Airborne Division, the only unit trained for such a task. 

U.S. officials who spoke to CBS News in July stressed that the briefings were not an indication that the president or the Pentagon had decided to go forward with an operation.

“Siege warfare:” unilateral coercive measures

Meanwhile, the Trump regime has continuously upgraded its sanctions on Cuban government entities and officials.

For an excellent description of how the Trump administration is using “starvation and misery” to achieve regime change in Cuba, please read Joy Gordon’s long analysis in Lawfare. She concludes: “what the U.S. is doing to Cuba is illegal, it is indefensible, and it is indecent.”

Colombia’s Gustavo Petro seeks to contain the growth of “hyper-fascism” in Latin America

by Jim Hodgson

During a visit last week to Mexico City, Colombia’s former president Gustavo Petro declared he would work with others to prevent “hyper-fascism” and “techno-fascism” from taking control of all Latin America.

He met with President Claudia Sheinbaum in the National Palace (above); spoke with students at Mexico’s National Autonomous University on economic policy in the climate crisis; met with Colombians living in Mexico; and sat down for an interview with Miguel Ángel Velázquez of La Jornada daily newspaper.

In that interview, Petro spoke of his complicated relationship with the administration of Donald Trump. The two have differed sharply over Israel’s treatment of Palestine, climate justice, relations with Venezuela and Cuba, and the U.S. “war” on drugs.

Petro’s four-year presidential term ended on Aug. 7 when his hard-right successor, Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in. Petro had been Colombia’s first president from a party of the left. He had tried (unsuccessfully) to bring about “total peace” in a country torn for decades by civil war and violence tied to drug-trafficking. It was Jan. 3, when the United States kidnapped Petro’s Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, that fear set in.

“After the crucial day, when they bombed Caracas, Trump said: ‘Watch your back, because now I’m coming for Petro.’ That day I thought: ‘A missile is coming for me.’”

After talks among diplomats and with Republicans in the U.S. congress, Petro and Trump met in the White House on Feb. 3. Trump called the conversation “terrific.” Petro said it was “constructive.” (In the La Jornada interview, Petro added that others behind Trump “worse than him” are driving the key decisions.)

Their rapprochement did not last. In Colombia’s presidential election, Trump and his officials backed de la Espriella, calling the other candidate, human rights defender Iván Cepeda, a “radical left Marxist.” This was one more instance of U.S. interference in Latin American elections (after a presidential vote in Honduras and mid-term contests in Argentina). 

Now, countries from Argentina and Chile to El Salvador and Trinidad and Tobago have governments of the hard-right that are solidly attached to Trump’s agenda. The next election to watch is in Brazil next month, where progressive President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva faces Flávio Bolsonaro, son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Across the region, right-wing parties are backed by a large-scale disinformation network, La Derecha Diario (“The Right Wing Daily”). A failed murder-for-hire plot in Bolivia has drawn wider attention to the network’s activities. 

In his interview with La Jornada, Petro spoke of his vision of the political moment: 

“We live in a planetary shell; it’s the matrix of lies. We act like in The Matrix, like in the movie. Suddenly you find a bot farm. It’s not made up of human beings, but rather profiles that automatically react to any Latin American leader because they want to degrade political discourse and reduce it to insults. That’s why I call it the matrix of lies. In this shell of falsehood, some parts escape because they are strong, like states, but the intention of this matrix is ​​to enslave human beings, and it’s not just a physical chain, but a mental one, to enslave human beings to allow the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, for example.”

Petro explained the counterattack: “Mathematics is required, because it’s a mathematical, algorithmic attack, both in the bots used to manipulate human beings and in the elections themselves and their final results.”

In a subsequent editorial, La Jornada wrote:

“Petro’s contribution to the political debate serves as a wake-up call to increase vigilance regarding foreign agents who exploit communication tools such as social media to promote neo-fascist rhetoric, spread misinformation, incite hatred, and manipulate electorates to benefit their external and internal sponsors – namely, the White House and a sector of big business resistant to democracy. 

“Alongside the bleak picture he paints, there is a message of hope. In his country in 2022, the people elected the first progressive government in history, and this experience cannot be seen as a failure. Societies are not defenseless against technofascism, he says, because they can protect themselves with strong minds and with the same resources used by oppressors: mathematics. Education is fundamental to the resistance that he joins and invites others to join.”

Yes. And, to me, hope is in revival of the networks of social movements that gave rise to the “pink wave” of progressive governments a quarter-century ago.

A postscript: In a Labour Day essay, Canadian politician and activist Charlie Angus offered a similarly sharp warning about the power of the big-tech corporations in the Trump White House. He recalled that in his farewell address, Joe Biden warned that the Silicon Valley elite were capable of destroying democracy and damaging the future.