Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are committed to a policy that will not cause China to surrender to the ambitions of the United States. Whether or not the US can backtrack from this policy orientation and begin a dialogue with China remains to be seen; doing so would be, of course, desirable.

Cuban medical internationalism goes back to 1960. I have interacted with doctors like Dr. Arronte Villamarín and Dr. Cabrera Paumier over the years and have been overwhelmed by their commitment to health and love, to human possibility. But it is important to remember that they are also human beings, people with lives that are folded into their internationalism.

The United States continues to have the largest total number of cases of COVID-19. The government continues to flounder as the number of cases escalates. Not one state in the country seems immune to the spread of the disease. Meanwhile, in China, ever since the virus was crushed in Wuhan, the government merely has had to contain small-scale localized outbreaks

Our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has developed a ten-point agenda for a post-COVID-19 world. Last week, I presented this agenda at the High-Level Conference on the Post-Pandemic Economy, organized by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). We are certainly in need of a New International Economic Order.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, May 3, speedboats left the Colombian coastlines and headed toward Venezuela. These boats had no authorization to cross the maritime border. They landed on the Venezuelan coastline at La Guaira. The people on the boats possessed satellite phones as well as uniforms and helmets with the flag of the United States of America.

The crisis has truly shaken the system. There is no doubt about that. A consequence of the failure of the austerity politics is that ideas that had been unthinkable just a few months ago – such as nationalization of hospitals and provision of substantial income support to unemployed workers – is on the agenda. We hope that this conversation develops into a popular global movement for a total reconstruction of the system.

On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. It does not mention Muslims.

For the past 40 years, the IMF has had the same agenda: to make sure that developing countries adhere to the rules of globalization set by the advanced capitalist states. Sovereignty of these developing countries has become irrelevant, as their governments have to accede to pressure from the IMF on fiscal and monetary policy as well as their trade and development agenda.

For all the talk of “human rights” and for all the hoopla about the human rights award from the Canadian embassy in Caracas, it is Canada’s Justin Trudeau who championed a $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia despite the many criticisms of the Saudi war on Yemen. It is one thing to talk about human rights. It is another to live by that credo. Canada does not.

The election is over. Predictably, the United States and Canada will increase their sanctions regime. The Lima Group ambassadors are home getting their instructions. They will likely downgrade diplomatic relations with Venezuela. None of this is a surprise. It is what they had already announced. They did not wait to see how the elections went. Isolation of Venezuela is their strategy.