The Three Resets That Outlast the Beijing Summit
Today’s video on my Power Pundit Youtube channel was the political argument: why Trump arrives in Beijing with three flags down. Caracas captured in January. Tehran cornered through February and March. Havana sending a white flag at seven fifty-two AM Eastern this morning.
That argument is correct as far as it goes. The summit ends Friday. The reset already in motion outlasts it by a decade. What follows is what comes next in three specific places, and why one of them decides who powers artificial intelligence by 2030.
Let me start with the smallest of the three pieces, which is also the loudest this week.
“Cuba is asking for help.” That phrase has a specific meaning in regime-collapse language, and the meaning is not “we want diplomatic dialogue.”
A regime asks for help when the lights go off in the hospitals. When the dialysis machines stop. When the rice stops moving from the port to the bodega. When the soldiers stop getting paid in food. The Cuban regime survived the Soviet collapse in 1991 because Venezuela showed up two years later with discounted oil. Cuba survived the 2014 oil price crash because Maduro doubled the discount instead of cutting it. Cuba survived the pandemic because Venezuelan shipments held.
In every one of those crises, the lifeline was Caracas, paid for in oil.
Caracas no longer sends oil at a discount. Caracas no longer sends oil. The man who ran the discount system is in a Brooklyn jail in a beige jumpsuit. The Venezuelan oil ministry that used to sign off on the Cuban shipments works under a new government now, and that new government has a different list of priorities. Cuba is not on it.
So when Trump posts that Cuba is asking for help, he is signaling that the regime crossed the threshold where the only options left are to negotiate with Washington or watch the lights go off permanently. Trump did not choose this outcome. The thermodynamics of the regime chose it. The Castros’ system was built on cheap subsidized hydrocarbons from somewhere else. There is no longer a somewhere else.
The timeline most analysts are not pricing in: Cuba is closer to the 1989 East Germany scenario than the 2019 Venezuela one. East Germany did not negotiate a soft landing. East Germany ran out of money, ran out of fuel, ran out of legitimacy, and the regime ended in nine months. Cuba’s running clock looks closer to that than to a decade of slow agony.
What “after the regime” looks like in Cuba matters for one specific reason that has nothing to do with Cuba. A non-hostile Cuba removes the Russian submarine problem from the American security perimeter. A non-hostile Cuba opens the Caribbean to American naval projection in a way that has not been possible since 1959. A non-hostile Cuba lets the United States move energy and trade through the Yucatán Channel and the Straits of Florida without watching the radar every twelve hours.
That is the piece most analysts will write about this week.
It is also the smallest of the three pieces.
Cuba is the loud story. The two quieter ones decide who runs the next decade, and one of them is happening in a country most analysts have given up on for ten years: