The assertion by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—that Israel's U.S.-backed military assault on Gaza has "set the stage" for collective punishment in Cuba—represents a provocative intervention in contemporary geopolitical discourse. Issued amid reports of intensified U.S. economic pressure on Cuba under the Trump administration (including an oil blockade threatening civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and air travel), AOC's statement draws a direct analogical line between the humanitarian blockade and starvation tactics documented in Gaza since 2023 and the renewed escalation of U.S. sanctions on Cuba in early 2026. While the remark does not explicitly invoke the Islamic Republic of Iran, the query's emphasis on relational dynamics invites an extension of this critique to Iran's long-standing experience under U.S.-led sanctions regimes, which similarly blend security rationales with broad economic coercion affecting civilian populations.

Theoretically, AOC's linkage posits a shared logic of imperial governance across disparate regions: the Middle East (via proxy support for Israel's operations) and the Caribbean (via direct U.S. embargo mechanisms). This framing echoes Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, wherein state power manages populations not merely through sovereign violence but through the administration of life itself—regulating access to food, fuel, medicine, and basic infrastructure to discipline recalcitrant regimes. In Gaza, the blockade and military campaign have been critiqued internationally as forms of collective punishment prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, targeting an entire population for the actions of Hamas. Similarly, U.S. policies toward Cuba—intensified in 2026 with measures risking humanitarian collapse—punish civilians for the persistence of the socialist government, normalizing the idea that entire societies may be deprived when their political systems are deemed objectionable. Extending this to Iran, decades of "maximum pressure" sanctions have produced parallel effects: chronic shortages, inflated medicine prices, and civilian hardship justified as leverage against nuclear ambitions and regional influence, despite humanitarian exemptions that often prove illusory in practice.

Central to this analysis is the role of U.S. hegemony in exporting models of governance that prioritize security over humanitarian norms. Post-Cold War liberal internationalism once professed a commitment to protecting civilians in conflict ("innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war," as AOC phrased it), yet bipartisan consensus has increasingly tolerated—or actively enabled—strategies that weaponize deprivation. The U.S. provision of military aid to Israel, diplomatic cover at the UN, and vetoes of ceasefire resolutions have contributed to normalizing population-level coercion as a legitimate tool against non-state actors or adversarial states. This pattern recurs in Cuba, where economic warfare revives Cold War containment tactics, and in Iran, where sanctions regimes (layered since 1979 and intensified under multiple administrations) serve as a form of punitive diplomacy without direct military invasion. Such approaches reflect what Giorgio Agamben termed the "state of exception" becoming the norm: emergency security logics suspend ethical constraints, rendering collective suffering administrable.

AOC's intervention also illuminates shifts within liberal consciousness and dissent in the American political spectrum. As a prominent voice in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, her rhetoric marks a departure from centrist bipartisan foreign policy consensus, framing U.S. actions not as defensive realism but as complicit in a "new era of depravity." This reflects broader ideological fractures: the Gaza conflict has radicalized segments of the American left, eroding faith in liberal humanitarianism when it fails to constrain allied powers. Her statement thus functions as discursive power (in Foucault's sense), contesting dominant narratives that portray U.S. interventions as exceptional or morally superior, instead revealing continuities in imperial practice across administrations.

The psychological and sociological dimensions of this dynamic warrant attention. Populations under sustained sanctions or blockade—whether Palestinian, Cuban, or Iranian—experience chronic anxiety rooted in existential precarity: the fear that basic needs (fuel for hospitals, food imports, medical supplies) hinge on distant geopolitical calculations. Media cycles amplify this through selective outrage or normalization, fostering what Lauren Berlant termed "cruel optimism"—the attachment to promises of security or rights that the system itself undermines. This produces a generalized state of anxiety within the "grid" of interlocking systems: political (hegemonic alliances), economic (sanctions as financial weapons), and cultural (media framing of "rogue" regimes). The result is a depoliticized acquiescence or despair, where populations internalize their vulnerability as inevitable.

Historically, these patterns recall Cold War containment doctrines: the U.S. embargo on Cuba (since 1960), akin to earlier punitive measures against "communist" states; Iran's isolation mirroring strategies against revolutionary regimes; and Gaza's siege evoking earlier colonial counterinsurgency tactics. Yet AOC's claim suggests escalation: the post-2023 Gaza crisis may have lowered normative thresholds, making overt civilian deprivation more palatable in Western capitals. While the analogy risks oversimplification—Gaza involves active warfare, Cuba economic siege, Iran a hybrid of sanctions and proxy conflicts—it usefully highlights how imperial power adapts, exporting coercion models that erode distinctions between wartime and peacetime governance.

In sum, AOC's assertion, while rhetorically bold, invites a necessary critique of how U.S.-centric hegemony sustains a global grid of control, anxiety, and deprivation. A genuinely liberal response would demand not only scrutiny of specific policies but a reckoning with the biopolitical logics that render entire populations expendable in the name of security—a reckoning that remains elusive within mainstream discourse.