Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “peace president,” has already attacked two nations since the start of 2026 — engaging in regime change in Venezuela on January 3 and launching an air war on Iran on March 1 — and is now strongly suggesting that Cuba would be next. All three nations have been harmed by U.S.-led economic wars for years in the form of sanctions, which have hurt the countries’ populations en masse.

Kaveh Ehsani, an associate professor of International Studies at DePaul University in Chicago and contributing editor of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)’s quarterly online Middle East Report, told me in an interview that U.S.-led sanctions “pauperized the Iranian population,” and “decimated” the middle class. They also created the conditions that led to the internal unrest that Trump in part used as a pretext for his war of aggression against Iran.

Within a month of taking office, Trump imposed a slate of “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, one that the White House described as “a campaign aimed at driving Iran’s oil exports to zero,” and that pushed Iran’s economy — which was already weakened by years of international sanctions — over the edge. Ten months later, mass protests broke out in Iran as inflation skyrocketed and its currency plummeted, resulting in massive food and fuel shortages. The theocratic regime cracked down on dissent and by February 2026, more than 7,000 Iranians were reportedly dead.

Trump responded by announcing on social media that he stood ready to help Iranians against their government — as though he bore no responsibility for the sanctions whose impact they were protesting. At the same time he announced steep, 25 percent tariffs on nations doing business with Iran — business that might have helped improve the economic conditions that Iranians were protesting.

Ehsani pointed out that sanctions have had the opposite effect of helping Iranians. “If people are struggling to survive and feed their family and keep shelter or even buy basic foods, under these circumstances struggling for democracy becomes sort of a luxury,” he said.

The Iranian people’s most recent win against their autocratic government took place in the fall of 2022, when the state murder of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa (Jîna) Amini for “improper dress” (allegedly failing to wear a mandatory head covering) sparked a massive and historic mass mobilization that won real gains. The “Woman Life Freedom” movement resulted in a significant easing of gender-based government restrictions on dress. According to Ehsani, “women and their allies managed to actually push back the regime and normalize wearing whatever public dress you want in the street.” While the freedom of dress may sound relatively trivial, Ehsani pointed out that “this rule of hijab in public was an absolute pillar and a taboo for this government.”

Left to their own devices, there remained a possibility, however slim, of Iranians overthrowing their own government. But Trump’s harsh economic pressures and subsequent war on Iran have rendered that even more difficult.

In Cuba, where a historic left-wing and anti-imperialist revolution to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista was never allowed to fulfill its potential, a similar scenario has played out. The communist government has for 66 years been subjected to a U.S. embargo so devastating that Cuba has been artificially prevented from prospering.

The embargo sought to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, claiming that communism doesn’t work while stoking its failure through U.S.-led economic punishment. As Cuban politician Ricardo Alarcón noted in Monthly Review, an official U.S. Department of State memorandum on April 6, 1960, openly admitted that “The majority of Cubans support Castro,” concluding that “the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” The U.S. memorandum concluded:

Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba … a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

The U.S.’s decades-long economic warfare against Cuba proceeded based on this strategy.

Although President Barack Obama eased the embargo in 2014, two years later, Trump entered the White House, reversing the action and going even further by enforcing a complete ban on all economic trade with the island.

Meanwhile, Trump has also sought to keep alive the fiction that Cuba somehow poses a security threat to the U.S.

President Joe Biden, as one of his last acts in office, had finally responded to reason by dropping Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, given the stark lack of evidence that could justify including Cuba on such a list. But upon starting his second term, Trump immediately reversed that decision. Then, in early 2026, Cuba lost its main source of fuel after the Trump administration kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and cut off Venezuela’s oil exports to Cuba.

Ed Augustin, an independent journalist based in Havana, has covered the impact of the U.S.-led economic war in a short documentary on Cuba’s health care system. “I don’t use the word ‘embargo,’” he said in an interview. “I use the word ‘sanctions’ because an embargo is just if one country decides not to trade with another, but the U.S. sanctions are a broader regime of coercion that pressures third countries to cease trading and investing with Cuba.”

For decades, Cuba has been known for its thriving health care sector. The island nation, which once boasted the highest numbers of doctors per capita in the world, has long been known for its “medical diplomacy.”

Each year Cuba sent tens of thousands of its medical professionals to aid in international disaster relief and related missions, their services earning the state an estimated $8 billion in annual revenues. Where Iran exported oil, Cuba exported medical expertise.

But the Trump administration, under the leadership of Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio, started applying additional pressure to nations accepting Cuban medical professionals, effectively cutting off a main source of Cuba’s revenue. Starting in 2025, nations hosting Cuban doctors, including Brazil, Jamaica, and Guyana, began ending their agreements in response to what Cuba’s government said was U.S. pressure. Further, Cuba has been losing doctors and health care professionals at an alarming rate either because they left the field or emigrated elsewhere. Such targeted pressure, aimed at destroying Cuba’s economy, has laid waste to the field that was once the envy of the world.

The U.S.-imposed economic strain has also caused extreme poverty among ordinary Cubans, and the resulting impact on public health has been devastating. Augustin said that when he first moved from the U.K. to Cuba in 2012, life expectancy on the island was 78 years (it is currently 79 in the U.S., one of the world’s wealthiest nations). But since Trump’s harsh sanctions, according to Augustin, “statistics are now showing that, for example, infant mortality has more than doubled over the last six years,” and the overall life expectancy has dropped to 73. He squarely blames the sanctions, saying, “it’s a direct result of U.S. economic warfare.”

“Hardly any bank in Europe, Latin America, and even India will send money to Cuba,” explained Augustin. That is because the U.S. has “without any evidence — because there isn’t any — asserted that Cuba sponsors terrorism.”

Today Cubans are experiencing a massive humanitarian crisis as they rapidly run out of food, fuel, medications, and other basic necessities. And starting on March 16, the island experienced a massive nationwide blackout — a development that directly impacts Cubans en masse.

Neither Augustin nor Ehsani is a fan of the Cuban or Iranian governments respectively. And yet, both see U.S. sanctions as misguided, undermining people power rather than state power. The sort of economic warfare that Trump and previous U.S. presidents have applied in a bid to undermine governments they oppose rarely harms government leaders. According to Ehsani, “the repercussions of putting autocratic regimes in an existential bind are quite dire,” and declaring sanctions against a country “doesn’t necessarily dislodge the established ruling class or regime.” Instead, he thinks Iran runs the real risk of a refugee crisis, civil war, and ethnic separatism.

Augustin sees the same sort of grim future for Cuba if U.S. policy persists. “The strategy for a long time has been to drive down living standards so much that people cannot bear anymore and rise up to overthrow the government,” he said. But in reality, many dissidents have left the island and relocated to the U.S. or other countries, so the U.S.’s sanctions are highly unlikely to achieve their stated aims. Instead, like in Iran, the main effect of the U.S. sanctions against Cuba is to induce widespread humanitarian suffering.

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