Despite US attempts to sabotage and manipulate the event, the UN General Assembly has followed the request of the Cuban delegation to debate the “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”

While this debate has been an annually recurring event since 1992, this year its backdrop is particularly grim, as Washington has greatly escalated its longstanding economic-warfare campaign against Havana. At the same time, the US has also threatened a military attack, which may or may not have been delayed by the American defeat in the war against Iran.

But the Cuba debate at the UN also needs to be put in a much larger context: A quarter of a millennium after its founding and about four decades after the end of the last century’s Cold War in the late 1980s, the American empire is declining.

Two recent failed US wars have made that much clear. Under President Donald Trump Washington has scaled down – though not entirely abandoned – its commitment to the Western proxy war against Russia via Ukraine, leaving the expensive and cruel meat grinder to NATO-EU Europeans too shortsighted to know when to quit and too cynical to care what they do to ordinary Ukrainians.

The reasons for this relative yet significant American disengagement have little to do with Trump’s personal – and volatile – attitude toward Russia or, for that matter, Ukraine. The US establishment has simply recognized that the initial aims of the Western proxy war cannot be achieved: Moscow has not been defeated or geopolitically degraded; regime change has not occurred.

In its failed war against Iran and on behalf of Israel – even while it is sputtering on and may easily flare up into a full-blown conflagration again – Washington has exposed its own limits, if........

© RT.com