Dealing with China, Cuba, and Foreign Influence
The Trump Administration is sinking in the polls, with the president hitting lows comparable to George W. Bush in the darkest days of the 2006 cycle. However, the White House believes that fighting communism is a way to rally the base and win swing voters who believe the Democrats have gone too far. Donald Trump argued that the Communist program will always be “a loser.” Speaker Mike Johnson expressed confidence in the midterms, simply because the alternative is too terrifying to contemplate. “Are we going to maintain our status as a Constitutional Republic on our 250th anniversary, or are we going to make a new choice and go down some road towards a communist utopia?” he asked, with rather unfortunate word choice.
Yet the Cold War against Communism was not really driven by ideological considerations. Communism had a strong following among American intellectuals and policymakers, especially during World War II. It was only when the Soviet Union became a geopolitical rival that the American Establishment turned decisively against Communism and drafted the once marginal American Right to provide ideological ammunition. People are more likely to fight Communism if they see it as something “foreign” and explicitly promoted by geopolitical rivals as opposed to just an extreme ideology. The Trump Administration’s attempt to tie Communism to foreign foes is correct, but it isn’t going far enough. There must be practical action as well as greater ideological coherence about what it is that the president thinks he is defending.
America’s most serious geopolitical foe is China. In a speech widely ignored or boycotted by most of the mainstream media, the president charged that China was obtaining data on millions of American voters, that America’s election infrastructure is vulnerable, and that China was engaged in influence operations intended to undermine his Administration in 2018 and 2020.
The president alleged that members of the “Deep State” attempted to conceal or downplay such activity. He also said that China “sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him.” Natalie Winters argues that numerous journalists are effectively on the Chinese payroll because they participated in trips organized or funded by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, CUSEF. These include Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Brad Plumer, and other influential figures.
The main thrust of President Trump’s efforts is to convince the (nominally) Republican Senate to pass the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, among other measures. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been unable to deliver his caucus, not least because of defections from figures like Thom Tills (who is leaving office and no longer needs Republican voters), Lisa Murkowsi (who has won office through ranked-choice voting against the opposition of her own party), John Cornyn (who recently lost his primary), and Mitch McConnell (who may not be alive). The President urged Sen. Thune to abolish the filibuster and not let the Senate end its session, but Thune pleaded he did not have the votes. In response, President Trump already shifted to softer rhetoric about China just days after giving this speech. This renders the whole speech rather pointless.
Of course, China has historically been the preferred Communist state for leftist radicals in the United States as opposed to the Soviet Union. Non-western, anti-colonist, and anti-revisionist regarding Stalin (at least under Mao), it has long been a source of inspiration for anti-White radicals. Even today, Hasan Piker argues China is the “probably the closest” to “an example we should learn from.” He also promotes Mao’s Little Red Book. Identifying why China is an enemy, the ideological origins of its regime, and its material support for subversive movements within the United States should be the next step for the State Department, thus providing justification for fortifying election infrastructure and a crackdown on foreign agents within.
This has already been done when it comes to a Communist state closer to our shores with the State Department’s remarkable 100 page report on “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”[PDF] It argues that Cuba supports subversive groups throughout the American political system and is also the locus of an entirely new form of Communism, one that rejected the global class struggle and the universal proletariat.
“In Cuba’s telling, the oppressed peoples of the world – from Harlem to Hanoi – all shared one enemy. The same racist Yankee imperialism victimizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America was victimizing blacks and other minorities inside the United States. Che Guevera’s famous call for ‘two, three, or many Vietnams’ in his 1967 ‘Message to the Tricontinental’ – urging his fellow revolutionaries to open up a hundred fronts of war against the American empire – was not merely addressed to the Global South, but to American radicals in the belly of the beast.”
The phrase itself is now commonly used among leftists; the report notes that Hasan Piker worked with a group called Belly of the Beast LLC to produce a pro-Cuba documentary.
As the State Department notes, while the “old Soviet left had been built around the party, labor unions, and Marxist theories of economic class struggle, the New Left was animated by Black Power, radical feminism, Third World liberation – and – above all else – the radical rejection of Western culture, history, and identity in all its forms.” This was not merely ideological posturing, but what the State alleges was a deliberate foreign policy strategy. “Cuban operatives sought to aggressively recruit American minority groups as internal revolutionary agents,” the report says.
For example, former NAACP member Robert F. Williams spoke from Cuba with “Radio Free Dixie,” urging American blacks to take up armed struggle against their country” and serving as an important influence on the Black Panther Party. The Venceremos Brigade hosted many thousands of American left-wing activists over decades, including Bernadine Dohrn, wife of Bill Ayers. “The Brigade alumni rolls include not one but two mayors of Los Angeles,” Antonio Villaraigosa and current mayor Karen Bass. Cuba had not just an ideological but institutional role in developing Third World consciousness among black radicals, including providing a tour to Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael would later say blacks formed “internal colonies” within the United States and that blacks “see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world… there is only one place for black Americans in these struggles, and that is on the side of the Third World.” Carmichael’s formulation of blacks as an internal colony is now so mainstream that MS Now host Chris Hayes titled his 2017 book on race relations “A Colony in a Nation.”
Cuba also provided refuge to convicted murderer Assata Shakur, allowing her to parley her radical reputation into becoming an activist icon.
Such support continues to the present day, with the official Black Lives Matter organization pledging “unequivocal support for Cuba” in 2021 even amidst large-scale anti-regime protests on the island. Cuban intelligence, cited by the report as being notably superior to old Soviet intelligence because of its reliance on “true believers” rather than money, backs numerous front groups including The Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP), the National Network on Cuba, and well-known leftist groups like the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, and The People’s Forum. The latter is heavily funded by the network of Neville Roy Singham, a tech entrepreneur closely linked with the Chinese Communist Party, showing Beijing’s support for Third Worldism.
“Singham network groups have been involved in a disproportionate share of the total left-wing political activity in the United States over the past decade, organizing hundreds of protests and street actions, from anti-ICE clashes in Minnesota to the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations across the nation. (The network’s professional, mass-produced protest signs have become a ubiquitous presence at left-wing demonstrations across the country). At the same time, many of the network’s nodes have become fused with the Cuban influence infrastructure.”
Though it is fashionable to dismiss Cuba as a small island, Cuba has also been extremely active and successful in supporting left-wing movements throughout Latin America and Africa. One of its most successful campaigns was in backing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, supplying weapons, training cadres, hosting Sandinistas in Havana, and gradually turning Nicaragua into a “forward base for further Cuban expansion, creating a revolutionary state that would serve as a sanctuary, training base, arms conduit, and political model for the next generation of Castroite insurgencies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and beyond.” Daniel Ortega, now returned to power in Nicaragua, recently made headlines for vowing that he would never allow elections again. Unsuccessful interventions in Boliva (where Che Guevera met his end), Panama, the Dominican Republic, and numerous African and Middle Eastern countries, as well as support for terrorist movements in Puerto Rico, did not meet with success. However, Venezuela did, with Cuba provide major support to the Chavez and later Maduro regime.
“The result was a new model for the post-Soviet Cuban network,” claims State, “one that had perfected the art of cultivating ideological allies, embedding personnel inside state institutions, converting social organizations into revolutionary infrastructure, hollowing out both state and non-state organizations from within, and transforming democratic institutions into regime beachheads.” The Maduro regime in Venezuela was toppled by direct American military action, but other fruits of this more subtle form of subversion are unlikely to be stopped so easily. Indeed, the report admits that many of the former radical stances of the Cuban regime and its New Left allies are now thoroughly mainstream, as exemplified by the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) serves as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism. The DSA was not founded as a Cuban intelligence or influence front; it was born in 1982 as a fusion of socialist organizations from both the Old Left and New Left factions, including veterans of CPUSA (Communist Party) and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Today, it maintains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime – not because the group is controlled by Cuban agents, per se, but because that commitment is now simply the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left.”
Unfortunately, it is not truly “far left” but eminently mainstream, holding power in New York City and preparing to send a sizable caucus to Congress after the midterms. It unquestionably has the largest following among young Democratic voters. This raises the deeper question raised by both the State Department’s Cuba report and the President’s speech on China. If subversion has become mainstream, is it still subversion, or just the new normal?
If it is the new normal, then America is already defeated. Patriots must resist this conclusion. For subversion to be identified, there must be agreement on what precisely is being subverted. During the Cold War, America took pains to identify itself as Christian (“In God We Trust” was added to paper money in 1957), capitalist, and Western, with the Cold War itself framed as the West versus the East. Even this extremely vague identity has been lost. What constitutes American culture and what makes America unique? There can be no hope of defeating Third Worldism unless there is a definition of First Worldism.
Marco Rubio partially provided such a definition when he spoke to European allies in Munich in February 2026. “[F]or us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe,” he said, stressing America’s desire to be allied to a Europe “proud of its heritage and its history.” A First Worldist strategy requires not just a recognition of America’s European roots, but an establishment of those roots as the foundation of the polity. Other races may operate within the polity as citizens, but they have no right to undermine it, nor to reverse the history that began after Plymouth and Jamestown. “Decolonization” is not simply a political ideology, but an attack on the legitimacy of America itself. First Worldism, properly defined, is the explicit defense of European political and cultural institutions and higher civilization throughout the world wherever sons and daughters of the Continent have settled. In some ways, the Trump Administration has already pioneered this policy, notably by defending white South Africans, yet it must go farther and define it explicitly.