Cuba and Albania

From Donald Trump's speech at a midterm election campaign rally in Fort Myers, Florida:

"We'll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran. We'll do a little stopover. No, we'll do a little stopover. Actually, what we're going to do with Cuba is we're going to come back from Iran, those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We'll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They'll raise up their hands, and then we're going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal."

What Trump says "should be taken seriously but not literally".  I hope he is being a stand-up comedian. His crowd loved it. 

A Romanian politician said to me recently that there's no way the United States will attack Cuba and I hope and think that that's right. I can't be sure. 

As John Mearsheimer says, we can be sure that Fukuyama's "end of history", which was never going to happen, is a long way back in the past. It was predicated on the idea that the final victory of America was the final victory not of American force but of liberal democracy, freedom and free markets. 

All these things are in trouble as France burns, there are riots in Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Italy and Albania is in turmoil. 

Who guessed that the revolution would begin in Albania but this wave of unrest did, provoked by the behaviour of Jared Kushner. Albania is playing the role that Tunisia played in the Arab Spring. 

Are we looking at another 1848? This time a revolt not against absolute monarchy, but against green policies, expensive fuel and in the Albanian case corruption linked to the Trump family including its former member Kimberly Gilfoyle?

To repeat an obvious point: the Cold War which was always pointless did not come to an end because of American force but because Gorbachev had the good sense to bring it to an end. Communism failed because the people who were administering it ceased to believe in it. The great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga described the Balkans after the Ottoman conquest as "Byzantium after Byzantium." What we have in Romania now is the communist structure of power after communism.