The weak suffer what they must

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

Writing in the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Thucydides wrote, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The quote reflected the power dynamics of the ancient world, in which powerful states dominated the affairs of weaker nations. The use of such raw power is back in vogue.

This kind of thinking prevailed for a long time. In 1884, European nations carved up Africa among themselves, disregarding the indigenous peoples. One hundred and fifty years later, the continent’s potential is stifled. Instead of a United States of Africa with the strength and power such an entity portends, there are 54 nations with 38 different currencies, most requiring visas for entry.

The same kind of divisions are found in Asia. One people, brothers and sisters, were divided along religious and political lines. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh emerged from the mess.

China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all draw swords against one another. In the last century alone, Japan invaded Russia (1905) and China (1931), China attacked Vietnam (1978), and Russia invaded Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan (1979) and Ukraine in 2022.

As early as 1823, the United States of America, in a projection of power, declared the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially claimed the Americas as its sphere of influence and warned other nations not to venture into its hemisphere. Washington intervened at will in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada and Venezuela.

The misadventures of mainly European powers led to rivers of blood. King Leopold of Belgium stole the Congo from its people, held it as his personal estate and killed upwards of 10 million Congolese in what was clearly a genocide of epic proportions.

European excesses led to World War I and World War II, with a combined death toll of over 100 million people. In WW11, Russia lost 27 million citizens and China 20 million. Most shocking to the European mind was that Hitler, the German leader, scapegoated and exterminated an estimated six million Jews. The word genocide took on new meaning as Europeans, shamed by the deadly massacre, proclaimed Never again. Such hypocrisy prompted Aime Cesaire, the brilliant Martinican anti-colonialist, Negritude intellectual, to mockingly declare that Europeans were belatedly concerned about genocide because the depraved savagery and brutality boomeranged to Europe.

It was out of this inferno of death and deprivation that the United Nations and the so-called rules-based order emerged. Peaceful settlement of disputes was said to be a priority.

Independence, sovereignty, and non-interference in the internal affairs of states became bedrock principles governing world affairs.

By 1960, two states, with capitals in Washington, DC and Moscow had become dominant players in international affairs. Both were armed with apocalyptic nuclear weapons. Neither side openly provoked the other because of the doctrinelabelled Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). And then the unthinkable happened. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the United States became the world’s dominant power, prompting some to prematurely declare a victory for “liberal democracy” and the end of history.

But the bargain which the United States made to crush the Soviet Union backfired. China, lured into breaking with the Soviet Union by President Nixon in the 1970s, and benefiting from massive Western investments (some estimates show that 50% of all direct foreign investment went to China). Over the next 40 years, it emerged as a rival and industrial powerhouse. By 2010, China had lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, built massive, advanced cities, strengthened its technological capabilities, and methodically expanded its influence across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

By 2015, Russia, which had stumbled badly under the drunken leadership of Boris Yeltsin,

began to reassert itself. India was also emerging as a significant economic power with a strong industrial and technological base. In South America, Brazil, a vast land with energy, agricultural and economic potential, joined with South Africa to form BRICS.

China’s Silk Road Initiative, which aims to enhance global trade and economic connectivity by developing infrastructure across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America, attracted attention.

Significantly, other countries with strategic resources and geopolitical locations, such as Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia joined BRICS.

More ominously, the BRICS nations began a slow but determined shift away from the US dollar as the global currency of international trade. The more trade and exchange are conducted in other currencies, the more American influence wanes. These developments, which threaten the US dollar’s continued dominance is driving much of the US’s reckless aggression worldwide.

These developments, which are never discussed on the BBC, CNN, FOX and other mainstream media, help to explain the invasion of Iraq and Libya. Saddam wanted to trade in currencies other than the US dollar, and Gaddafi proposed establishing the gold dinar as a continental currency to back a United States of Africa.

The Biden regime’s provocative decision to blow up the Russian Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022, intended to sell upwards of 110 billion cubic meters of gas to Germany and thereby create greater economic integration in Europe, must also be seen in this context.

Donald Trump second term represents a quickening of these aggressive actions. The Jan. 3, 2026 invasion and kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the demands from Washington that Venezuela break all ties with Russia, China and Iran, the American piracy on the high seas and seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers, the extrajudicial killings of Trinidadian, Venezuelan and Colombian citizens under the flimsy pretext that they were drug traffickers, the continued economic strangulation intended to starve Cubans to death, as well as threats of military action in Cuba, the demands that small, fragile Caribbean states accept refugees from the US in clear violation of international human rights law, the threats to invade and occupy Greenland and American imminent military attack on Iran all represents a desperate last ditch attempt by the US ruling elite to reassert America’s dominant place in the world.

But alas, the empire’s strength lies primarily in its military might and brute force. Its soft power has waned. It may be too late for the leaders in Washington, complicit in the genocidal bloodbath in Palestine, to burnish America’s image. But not before its reckless military actions turn the world into a hotbed of crisis, conflict and destruction.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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