Puppeteers: In separate arenas, the White House is again reverting to blackmail and bullying to achieve desired goals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban emigrants and a native Spanish speaker, has told his kin that America has nothing to do with the island’s suffering, this despite a months-long naval blockade that has starved Cuba of both fuel and medical supplies. The Communist regime was to blame for any suffering, he said, and the blockade was simply exacerbating age-old problems that only a political upheaval could repair. To make its point, the United States issued an arrest warrant for 94-year-old Raul Castro, who with his brother, Fidel, and others brought down a U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959. In Europe, the president himself has said he will withdraw thousands of troops from NATO member states to punish the alliance for failing to embrace his war on Iran, a war he started, and join in a military plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Amid this crisis-like uncertainty, Russia and Belarus just completed three days of opportunistic nuclear drills, of the kind that once would have put NATO on high alert. On the domestic front, the threat of license revocation has forced venerable network CBS to divorce Stephen Colbert, a popular late-night satirist who refused to relent in his criticism of the White House. More such heavy-handed censorship is likely to follow. In bare bones terms, this president cannot distinguish between right and wrong and, with Israel, disdains all international law, undoing the political and social contract that in another era would likely have led to massive Washington street protests. But no such protests are in the wings, in part because the post-9/11 era, with its color-coded terrorist alerts and its draconian Patriot Act, created a “be very afraid” ethos that made citizens reluctant to challenge presidential authority. This is no longer Make America Great Again, but America, reinvented to suit a puppeteer whose global show some may criticize but all defer to.