Several years ago, the thought of the president of Argentina coming to stand in Jerusalem and saying he would move his country’s embassy there would have seemed like something out of a novel. Now, Javier Milei flies in, prays at the Kotel, hugs families of the hostages, and keeps saying that Argentina will stand with Israel—openly, firmly, without apology.

In my earlier essay, Israel and Latin America’s amnesia, I argued that much of the Latin American left has forgotten its own story: cheering on “resistance” everywhere while denying Israel exactly the kind of anti-colonial struggle Latin Americans celebrate in their own national myths. That essay was about memory and hypocrisy. This one is about opportunity.

Because something really has shifted.

Bolivia has elected a post-MAS president, Rodrigo Paz, who cited restoring relations with Israel as one of his administration’s first foreign-policy priorities. Paraguay has moved its embassy back to Jerusalem. Chile has recently elected José Antonio Kast, an unapologetic pro-Israel conservative whose national priorities are security, borders, and civilizational self-respect, not revolution by imported slogans. And Honduras, which has been wobbling and hedging over the past several years, elects Nasry Asfura, who, upon taking office, made his first foreign-policy visit not to Washington but to Jerusalem.

Lula, the Brazilian president who has been the Latin American left’s pin-up since long before the pink tide, is battered and faces an uncertain re-election. The jewel of the pink tide, Venezuela, the most successful exporter of chaos in Latin America, has experienced a development that even Latin America’s most original conspiracy theorists could scarcely imagine: Maduro is gone. Trump quite literally doordash’d him out of Caracas. The White House is calling it an extraction. Critics are calling it an abduction. What matters is not the name as much as the fact that the man who turned what used to be one of the world’s richest countries into a failed state is no longer sitting in Miraflores, and the post-Maduro order is open.

However, the hemisphere’s ideological nerve center was never really Caracas, but Havana.

Cuba is not just another dictatorship among the many that have blighted Latin America: it is the original factory where the romantic vocabulary of revolution was mass-produced, shrink-wrapped, and shipped out to every campus and guerrilla movement from the Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego. For decades, it trained cadres, coached security services, and taught generations of politicians how to rebrand failure as virtue and repression as “sovereignty.” It kept Marxism alive as a kind of secular religion long after its moral, intellectual, and economic bankruptcy should have made it unpublishable.

So if, at long last, Trump goes further—if he succeeds in ending the Castrist dictatorship itself—he won’t simply destroy one more regime. He will cut off the head of the snake that has been spreading its venom all over Latin America for far too long. The expulsion of Marxism from the hemisphere, a task long overdue, will, for the first time, be complete. And in that strategic and moral vacuum, it must not default again to China, Russia, or Iran—if Israel is alert enough to make itself a partner of choice.

In other words: the tide is........

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