Last week, as Donald Trump returned from Beijing with a two-day summit that delivered more pageantry than policy -- no tariff relief, no binding commitments, no meaningful progress on any of the stated crises he arrived to address -- residents in Havana were banging pots and pans in the streets. Cuba had run out of diesel. The national grid had collapsed across the eastern half of the island. Blackouts stretched to 24 hours in the capital. Food spoiled in refrigerators. Traffic lights went dark. And the U.S. sanctions, tightened under Trump's second term, had cut off the Venezuelan crude that kept Cuba's power plants running. In a single week, the world witnessed both sides of the American story: its president returning from a choreographed summit where Xi Jinping invoked the ancient Thucydides Trap to warn of great-power catastrophe -- a frame that would have resonated with a Carney or been parsed with ease by a leader like Obama -- while Trump likely heard it as background noise for the cameras.
What Is the Thucydides Trap?
Xi reached back to ancient Greek history to remind Trump that when a rising power challenges an established one, fear and competition can push both toward catastrophic conflict. He asked whether the United States and China could "overcome the Thucydides Trap and establish a new paradigm for relations between great powers." It was a warning wrapped in a question -- and arguably a Global South message as much as a superpower one: the rest of the world cannot afford another great-power showdown waged over our heads and through our waters.
Trump Didn't Hear a Word of It
Trump, predictably, heard it as a verbal challenge and responded the only way he knows how. He declared that China's rise was proof of American decline under Biden, and that he had restored American strength. In doing so, he missed the entire point of Xi's warning. Xi was talking about systems. Trump made it about himself. Xi was talking about the danger of a rising China and a fearful America. Trump turned it into a domestic attack ad. That is the whole Trump method in miniature. A historical warning comes in. A campaign slogan goes out.
The Hypocrisy Is the Feature, Not a Bug
This is where the trap closes for the Global South. Trump has always treated foreign policy like a reality show: loudest voice wins, and the consequences are billed to everyone else. He is punishing countries for doing business with China or Cuba -- deportations, sanctions, trade wars, aid cuts -- while his own billionaire orbit quietly profits from the very same global currents he claims to oppose. He condemns others for foreign entanglements while his own movement depends on the same system of elite access and profit. This is not a side effect of Trump's politics. It is the politics itself.
Carney's Warning Was for Them, Too
While cameras followed Trump's Beijing visit, I was reminded of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's argument at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He warned that great-power rivalry should not be allowed to fracture the multilateral order, and that middle powers -- from Canada to CARICOM nations -- need to build resilience together rather than alone. He used terms like "variable geometry" and "middle power dependency" to describe a world where smaller states are treated as afterthoughts in great-power calculations. That is precisely the Caribbean's predicament. And it is why Carney's message was not just for Canadians: it was for anyone living in the crosshairs of American and Chinese competition.
CARICOM's Response: The First Collective Signal
From Beijing to St. Lucia, people are watching the same movie play out. Caribbean governments are quietly mobilizing to send food, medicine, and aid to a blackout-stricken Cuba that Trump has openly hinted is "next" on his regime-change list. At CARICOM's 50th Summit, the decision to send aid -- and to formally review U.S. relations -- marked the Caribbean's first collective signal that the region may finally be hearing Carney's warning and responding with organized autonomy rather than managed accommodation. The question is whether this is a beginning -- or the last gesture of a region that has not yet understood that the menu is already being printed, and the only way out is to build a different table entirely.
The Question That Remains
The question for Caribbean citizens, Global South governments, and U.S. voters is the same: do we accept a world where "sovereignty" and "principle" are tools that powerful men pick up and drop depending on where the money is? Or do we start calling the performance what it is -- a politics that condemns you for doing business with China and Cuba today, so it can buy your future on sale tomorrow? As Mark Carney put it at Davos, "If you are not at the table, you are on the menu." The Cuban blackouts are not an abstract consequence. They are the human cost of a strategy that treats sovereignty as a bargaining tool. Xi warned of the great-power trap. Trump sets one for the Global South. The only difference is that Trump's trap has already caught its first victims.
The Summit That Wasn't -- The Pressure That Was Real
Xi Jinping invoked the Thucydides Trap to counsel restraint -- a warning that great-power competition, if treated as destiny, tends toward catastrophe. Trump heard it as affirmation that America's purpose is eternal dominance. As analysts across New York and Beijing noted within hours, the summit produced little of substance: no agreements on Nvidia chips, no tariff rollbacks, no progress on Iran. But it served a different function. The pageantry -- the handshake, the press conference, the warm rhetoric -- gave Trump the optics of peacemaker while his administration continued to ratchet up pressure on Cuba, Venezuela, and the Caribbean nations that dared to maintain independent relationships with both Beijing and Havana. Xi spoke of cooperation. Trump left Beijing with a headline that read like victory, regardless of the empty ledger.
Cuba Is Dark -- And Trump Says "Next"
While cameras followed Trump through Beijing, Cuba's energy minister acknowledged the country had "absolutely no fuel." Eight aging thermoelectric plants -- some over 40 years old -- were failing or shuttered. The estimated deficit exceeded 2,000 megawatts during peak evening hours. Satellite images published last week show the night lights of 2025 and 2026 tell a stark story: when the fuel stops, the island goes dark.
Since the U.S. tightened restrictions on Venezuelan shipments in early 2026, only one Russian tanker has reportedly reached Cuba. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel called it a "genocidal energy blockade." For the average Havana resident, the question is not geopolitical theory -- it is whether the refrigerator works, whether the hospital has oxygen, whether the traffic light turns green. Meanwhile, the White House offered a $100 million "humanitarian aid" package -- conditional on U.S.-approved reforms that would open energy, telecom, and tourism to private investment. CARICOM, at its 50th Summit in St. Kitts and Nevis, agreed to send aid to Cuba and established a committee to review the relationship with the United States. One bloc sends solar panels. The other sends terms.
"If You Are Not at the Table, You Are on the Menu"
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech was described as one of the most consequential speeches of the decade. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in January 2026 -- before the Cuba crisis deepened but after the Greenland tariff threats and the territorial provocations had begun -- Carney described a "rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality." His words now read like a weather report accurate enough to predict the storm.
Carney's central thesis: middle powers are no longer safe within the rules-based order that once protected them. The WTO, the UN multilateral architecture, and the COP agreements -- these institutions are under threat, and hegemons are converting economic integration into weapons. His solution was not nostalgia but "variable geometry" -- different coalitions for different issues, built on shared values rather than forced alignment. Canada, under Carney, has negotiated new trade arrangements with China, Qatar, India, ASEAN, the Philippines, and Mercosur. It formed buyers' clubs for critical minerals. It pursued a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union. The logic is straightforward: "When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself."
But the line that lingers is this: "Middle powers must act together, because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu." And negotiating alone with a hegemon, he warned, is not sovereignty -- it is "the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination."
The Trap That Is Not About War -- It Is About Control
Here is what the Thucydides Trap misses when applied from Beijing: it assumes the stakes are military. But for the Global South, the contemporary trap is not about ships and missiles -- it is about fuel subsidies, tariff threats, aid conditionality, and the slow conversion of sovereignty into a transaction. Trump's domestic trap runs parallel: manufactured crises -- Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China, immigration -- are the pretext for emergency declarations, executive orders, and the normalization of a presidential authority that operates above institutional constraint. The same performance that plays as strength abroad functions as consolidation at home.
Xi sees the Thucydides Trap as a structural risk between two superpowers. Trump sees global tension as an instrument for loyalist consolidation. And Carney sees what both fail to acknowledge: that the nations caught between them are not bystanders, they are collateral, and they are organizing to resist it.
What the Middle Power Playbook Means for the Caribbean
Carney's speech was not written for St. Lucia, Barbados, or Jamaica -- but they were listening. Every Caribbean nation currently navigating the pressure to "choose" between Washington's demands and its own sovereign interests now has a framework that says: you are not alone, and you do not have to choose. The model is not confrontation but diversification. The lesson is that "strategic autonomy" -- in energy, food, trade, and finance -- is not isolationism. It is the only basis on which any nation can negotiate without being reduced to a menu item.
Cuba's current collapse is the ultimate demonstration of what happens when a small nation is left without options. The question for CARICOM is whether the Caribbean -- which comprises nations with a combined population smaller than that of a single American state -- can build the same kind of pooled sovereignty, the same buyers' clubs, the same diversified trade architecture that Carney is building for a middle power with 40 million people. The answer may determine whether the region remains a stage for American performances -- or becomes a bloc with its own script.
