The issue of Ukraine will not be resolved in favor of the West. We must go back to the genesis of the conflict, to 2014, when the coup and the color revolution brought down a government that was inconvenient for Europeans and North Americans and gave way to the chaos of successions that led to Zelensky's rise to power. The occupation of Crimea and later the crisis in Donbas were episodes in which geopolitical chess was being played. These were not ethnic clashes, nor were they about provinces, but rather about portions of land that served far more transcendental interpretations. A territory that could serve—as it has—as a proxy war against Russia, that is, a conflict of approximation in which forces are measured not so much in terms of defeat, but rather in terms of attrition.

These proxy wars are a geopolitical strategy that uses third parties as cannon fodder to avoid internal losses and the resulting crisis of governance. The Iraq War, with its high number of casualties, gave way to the implementation of force from other angles, such as intelligence, guerrilla warfare, irregular groups, the segmentation of enemies, or the manipulation of information at the level of social networks. All of this has been on the ground in Ukraine, a country in which the powers have tested conventional and non-conventional weapons, which can represent a strategic advantage. This means that, in war, the winner is the one who doesn't wage war or who wages it half-heartedly, with the fewest casualties and at the lowest possible cost. The objective, since these are enemies that can be neutralized, is attrition. On the other hand, the goal is to force Russia to negotiate and weaken it. This is what’s happening in Ukraine, and the chess game involves, on one side, the effects of the sanctions against Russia, which have rebounded to Europe, and on the other, the suffering of the United States as an economy dependent on global trade. It’s well known that for Washington there’s also a price to pay, beyond money or resources: the price of lost influence.

What has Trump done? He has flooded the negotiations, turned everything into a debate about himself, and ultimately Russia has emerged victorious, a power that has time on its side since it possesses a larger army than Ukraine. But more than that, Trump has given his electorate the impression that he was going to achieve peace, and what we have seen is almost a capitulation to the United States' adversaries. This places the administration in the position of a wounded beast, seeking a dramatic effect in any possible way (for example, a foreign war). It can be said that at present, nothing that was part of American intellectual power is working, and instead, we see an authoritarian and absurd drift that is focused in... The president's image is tarnished by empty boasts and baseless rhetoric. Did Trump want the agreement to use it as leverage for the Nobel Peace Prize? Perhaps not winning it led him to shift his focus to another arena. In any case, if anything characterizes this administration, that would be its inconsistency, its constant absurdities, its stupid laws, and the politically illiterate discourse of its members.

We've moved into the phase where the US president didn't win the Nobel Prize, and everything is concentrated on Venezuela. The European scene will be silenced by the uproar in the Caribbean and the ships destroyed at sea, without due process. The false positive has replaced the need for institutional coordination, and we've seen the weight that this carries. It has a say in decision-making. This is what happens when you have a cabinet not composed of political professionals, regardless of any cheap fascism.

What’s obvious in this global scenario, it's the confrontation to rewrite the post-Yalta world. That is, to define spheres of influence. And this is happening because the United States, once the world's policeman, can no longer possess forces across the globe, or at least be unassailable everywhere. Will the war in the Caribbean, should it occur, be the final act that marks the decline of the Anglo-Saxon empire? China seems to be nipping at its heels, with all the mineral and fuel trade in the region and the many vested interests. More than that, the Americans seem desperate and afraid to act, when it's known that at the height of their power they didn't even give warning and launched surprise, preemptive attacks. The US military, perhaps no longer the most advanced in the world, costs taxpayers millions of dollars in inflation, which are then taken from social security and programs that Trump is cutting to inflate his excessive, pathetic, and mediocre ego.

What no one ever imagined is that the decline of a superpower would be marked by ridicule, moral decay, and lies to the point of being defined geopolitically by the impact of its president's social media presence. In history—when studying the present—Trump's ego must be considered a variable, as his megalomania led his country to squander the last vestiges of a retreating power, leaving behind an inflationary currency and a service economy that raises tariffs for the people to pay. Such a government could only have come to power through elections governed by ignorance, a lack of widespread vision, and manipulation via the post-truth of social media. The segmentation of audiences, the manipulation of narratives. Trump will go down in history as the man who—driven by a complete lack of scruples—seized power by sowing division within society and creating around himself little more than a cult of worshippers whose capacity for analysis extends no further than the threat itself.

Will peace be achieved? It’s unlikely. In reality, we may see a worsening of the conditions under which this proxy war is being waged, with a greater cost for Ukraine and a null military outcome. Europe, impoverished by the unequal exchange resulting from the loss of Russian oil, is increasingly in American hands, while the United States tries to maintain a Yalta status quo that effectively declared the old continent a Yankee hunting ground. This means that the controversy surrounding borders will continue, as this ultimately opens the door for the West to wage proxy wars. Perhaps the Republicans will choose the Caribbean as the battleground, as it’s more conducive to their propaganda efforts. The specter of communism can't be fought against North Korea or China because temperatures are rising, so they use poorer nations as enemies to achieve an electoral rebound. That's what it's all about. The proximity of midterm elections puts the world on the brink of war, which Trump sees as opportunities to erase domestic problems and brandish patriotism. It's a populist strategy that offers nothing and has always relied on attack.

When the massive marches against Trump occurred and his popularity plummeted, it became clear that something was coming in foreign policy. The peace treaty with Ukraine is a disaster; the focus is shifting to the Americas. But Russia now holds the initiative and can use what's happening in the Caribbean as a pivot to advance. The United States can't sustain two fronts simultaneously, and the situation could spiral out of control. If he lacks the intelligence to govern a country at peace, imagine Trump in a country at war. His people's choice of him couldn't have been more misguided. And what about the Epstein Papers? That's also what's driving things to this point: wars, threats, the specter of communism, and also of drug trafficking. All so the media can't focus on those damned documents.

The United States isn't the same as before, but neither is the world. Peace in Ukraine isn't a formula that can emerge from a president's whim, but rather a geopolitical issue. Viewing it as a war between good and evil won't give us the clarity we need. Seeing foreign policy as an extension of domestic policy and using it to silence dissent is just adding fuel to the fire. When the man who orchestrated a coup against the Capitol during the transition to Biden was elected, many warned that none of his campaign promises were realistic or could be carried out. But post-truth was stronger, and there's the result. Now we have to see if the ruling class...The beasts who misgovern this system are willing—if they lose elections—to hand over power, with all that entails in terms of normalization and analysis of their excesses. Because in the realignment following the Republicans, there will be a reckoning and an investigation. And there, in the most ironic sense, wonders await.

The next chapter of this saga can be written as a comedy or a tragicomedy, but we can be sure it will be one of the last in this power group's long diatribe against common sense, professionally understood politics, and thought itself. Let's hope that happens as soon as possible.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff