More than a decade ago, when Noam Chomsky was asked what was special about the US; he was not aware of the present Doomsday Missile at all at that time; the eternal critic and the most powerful intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century, said that the US is the doomsday for many other countries most of which may not deserve it at all. The arch critic of the warfare led by the US, in his intellectual discourses and writings; I have at least half a dozen books of and on him in my personal library; he unfailingly declared that the world would be better if the US does not exist as a country. He said it while he is still living, speaking out and publishing in that country.
On 03 March 2026, a report from Washington stated that the Doomsday Missile titled Minuteman III, the intercontinental ballistic missile, was sent to the Marshal Islands in the Pacific Ocean by the Global Strike Command and it reached its designated target. The missile can travel and destroy even targets located ten thousand kilometres away in minutes. The best proof of it was available, when 165 children and 23 teachers were killed in Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, a girls’ primary school, in Minab, located in southern Iran; indeed, one of the most brutal killings after what was done by the German Fuhrer during the Second World War.
The United States is a rich country and has no regrets about attacking and subduing any other country for political and economic exploitations, the latter hidden in the former. During the last half a century, the US attacked and took over the administration of many countries. In the case of Venezuela, it even arrested a democratically elected president and very undemocratically and unethically brought him to the U.S. Americans gained monopoly over the oil trade in Venezuela and thereby enriched themselves.
Through their war in the Middle East, it became the controller of the largest number of companies dealing with oil, thereby scaling over Saudi Arabia and Russia, who were the larger producers of oil till then. In May 2026, the United States sold more than one crore barrels of oil, strong in comparison with the other two nations who were exporting more before the Middle East war, and who export less now. So, political reasons are a veil for economic exploitation by an already economically developed nation.
The United States was blessed with famous presidents like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama who contributed to both the development and peace of the world. However, now it is led by a man who has nothing in common with those gentlemen mentioned above and more importantly, does not function on the frontiers of cognition or peacefulness, and leads American people directly and other peoples in the world indirectly with his unwise disastrous decisions.
After his subduing of Venezuela, he infamously stated that the next would be Cuba. While reading that, I thought of one of my school teachers who always targeted one student and used to tell him that he would be next when the teacher was angry with any other student. So, Cuba has been a target for the United States since the war of Bay of Pigs and the unchallenged leadership of Fidel Castro until a few years ago, who survived all attempts by the United States to kill him.
The United States banned banking operations by other countries associated with it in Cuba and did not allow any country which has an agreement with it to supply oil to that country. Cuban president Miguel Diaz Canel said recently that his country was willing to avoid a confrontation and if it was unavoidable, ultimately to win it.
He said this when he addressed the people in a rally in Havana where they assembled to mark the sixty fifth anniversary of the failed US invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs. Mr Diaz disapproved of the reference to Cuba as a ‘failed state’ by the US president and said that his country was not a failed state; instead, it was a ‘besieged state’ and will stay with ‘unyielding resistance’.
Towards the end of March, despite the US embargo, Russia’s shipment of its oil tanker, Anatoly Kolodkin, carrying seven hundred and thirty thousand barrels of crude reached Cuba because Russia is a close ally of Havana. This was the first shipment after the US disallowed Venezuela supplying oil to Cuba.
Russia’s help would be a massive support to a desperate Cuba. Blockade by the US, which has been in place for several years; the prohibition of foreign subsidiaries of US from trading with Cuba; blocking ships that had docked in Cuba from entering US ports; designating Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism though no terrorist was ever identified as a Cuban; the stopping of nickel mining operations in Cuba by Canadian companies; and lastly, the recent threat to Cuba as it would be his next target, the president of the United States have made Cuba, into a miserable condition. Its people are struggling for food and comfortable livelihood, because of lack of power as that country’s 85% of power is generated through oil. One does not know what misery will happen to Cuba when it will be next, and if it happens, it will be a great tragedy that stifles a developing nation.
One only hopes that some wisdom will dawn on the very little intelligence that is left with an old generation school teacher with a stick in hand like president of the United States, who seems to have developed himself with no head over his shoulder and accidentally occupy position power that can make a mess of the world like the aftereffects of the Middle East war. A possibility of a Cuban war can make the mess worse.
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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru.
He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru.
Email: [email protected]