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.

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.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” act 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.

The UN Refugee Agency has announced the new figures for the world’s displaced: 65.9 million. That means that 65.9 million human beings live as refugees, asylum seekers or as internally displaced people. If the refugees formed a country, it would be the 21st largest state in the world, just after Thailand (68.2 million) and just ahead of the United Kingdom (65.5 million).

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton raised the matter of the American war in Afghanistan. The war has cost the U.S. at least $23 billion a year, with an additional $117 billion on reconstruction. Of that reconstruction money, 61 per cent, $71 billion, went towards the creation of the Afghan National Army.

The UN’s Martin Kobler warned of a ‘dangerous escalation’ in Libya. That phrase sounds shopworn. It has been used so often. There is no end to the war. Like a moving kaleidoscope the fighters change sides. Their loyalties are hard to read. It is even harder to understand the suffering of the people. At NATO headquarters they still smirk about their successful war in Libya. It is a war that broke this country.

President George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq was not an aberration in the War on Terror, as President Barack Obama suggested; it was its highest point, its defining action. Reason went out of the window and in its place came a jumble of anxieties mixed in with older currents of racism – hatred of Arabs who were seen to be inherently duplicitous and only able to learn their lessons through violence.

The miniscule American Left will have to dust off its electoral compromises and come to terms with the need to defend the gains of the civil rights movement, but also speak robustly against a trade policy that kills jobs and creates forgotten people. It is the failure to be bold and clear in the language of anti-neoliberalism that gave that space to Trump.

This is his vision. It is a far sight more humane than what passes for liberalism in the U.S. It is what appeals to the common sense of people who have found their own wealth disappear and their incomes deteriorate, who see children flounder with debt and their credit cards provide the means to maintain their standard of living.