THE FOUR HORSEMEN RIDE AGAIN
Analysis & Feature | February 19, 2026
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In the Book of Revelation, the prophet John writes of a pale horse — and its rider is named Death, and Hell follows close behind. There is something in the language of that ancient vision that refuses to stay buried. It resurfaces whenever the great powers of the earth begin their slow, terrible dance of confrontation: the rhetoric hardening, the sea lanes tightening, the diplomats speaking in the clipped, measured phrases that mean, to those who know how to read them, that the world is once again being divided into the quick and the dead.
Moscow, February 18, 2026. Vladimir Putin sat across from Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez in the Senate Palace of the Kremlin — a room whose very architecture is a sermon in power — and declared, with the quiet certainty of a man who has already made peace with catastrophe: ‘We do not accept anything like this.’
The ‘this’ in question: a new and aggressive campaign by Washington to strangle Cuba’s oil supply, severing the island from the fuel that keeps its hospitals lit, its water pumped, its bread baked. The United States — which has been squeezing Cuba since 1962 — has tightened the vise once more. And Russia, which sees in Cuba both a strategic outpost and a living symbol of resistance to American hegemony, has declared itself Cuba’s protector.
Somewhere in the straits between Florida and Havana, beneath the surface of waters that once brought the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation, the old leviathan stirs again.
“And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea…” — Revelation 13:1
I. The Trumpet Sounds in Geneva
The day was, if anything, almost operatically overdetermined. While Putin was warning the West about Cuba, his diplomats were simultaneously seated at a table in Geneva with their American counterparts, engaged in trilateral peace talks over Ukraine. The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was careful to note — perhaps too careful — that Cuba was not on the Geneva agenda. The two dramas were being kept, officially, in separate rooms.
This is the theatre of great-power politics in its most baroque form: simultaneous negotiation and confrontation, the handshake and the clenched fist, detente and deterrence conducted in the same breath. It is the diplomatic equivalent of Ecclesiastes — ‘a time for peace, a time for war’ — except that in 2026, those times are no longer sequential. They are concurrent, overlapping, braided into one another until the distinction loses meaning.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a parallel meeting with Rodriguez on the same day, reportedly urged Washington not to impose a full naval blockade on Cuba. The word ‘blockade’ is worth pausing on. A naval blockade is, under international law, an act of war. The last time the United States contemplated a blockade of Cuba — in October 1962 — the world stood at the precipice for thirteen days. President Kennedy called it a ‘quarantine’ to skirt the legal definition. No such linguistic courtesy is being offered now.
The biblical resonance is not merely metaphorical. Lavrov’s warning echoes the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of Gog and Magog — the great northern power descending from its fastness to challenge the established order of nations, to plant its standard in contested seas. ‘Thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts,’ Ezekiel writes, ‘thou and many people with thee.’ In the geopolitical imagination of our moment, that verse has never fully lost its charge.
II. The Island That Refuses to Die
Cuba is, in many ways, the strangest nation on earth — a country that has been dying for sixty years and refuses to complete the act. Subjected to one of the most sustained economic sieges in modern history, the island has lurched from crisis to crisis: the ‘Special Period’ of the 1990s, when the Soviet subsidies vanished and Cubans ate grass and rode bicycles to work; the rolling blackouts of the 2000s; the energy crisis of 2021 that sent hundreds of thousands into the streets. And yet the government endures. The revolution endures, or at least the apparatus of revolution endures — which is perhaps not the same thing.
Now Washington has moved to cut off Venezuela’s oil shipments to Cuba, and is leaning on third-party shippers and insurers to enforce the blockade without formally declaring one. It is a strategy drawn from the playbook of economic warfare, the kind of slow strangulation that the prophet Isaiah might have recognized: ‘I will cut off from Babylon the name, and remnant, and son, and nephew, saith the Lord.’
Russia’s pledge of ‘material assistance’ to Havana is not mere sentiment. It is a signal — sent simultaneously to Washington, to Beijing, and to every small and middle power watching from the sidelines — that the era of American unilateral economic coercion without cost has ended. Whether Moscow can actually deliver on that pledge is a separate question. Russia’s own economy labors under Western sanctions; its logistics are strained by the Ukraine war; its energy revenues are diminished. The patron who rides to Cuba’s rescue may arrive exhausted and underequipped.
But the gesture carries its own weight. In the eschatological imagination — and make no mistake, Putin is a leader who thinks in civilizational time, who has quoted Orthodox theology in speeches about Ukraine — Cuba is not merely a client state. It is a test. A test of whether Russia still has the reach, the will, and the credibility to anchor an alternative world order. If Cuba falls to American pressure while Russia watches, the message to every government that has gambled on Moscow’s protection is devastating.
“For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…” — Matthew 24:7
III. The Pale Rider and the Oil Market
For Singapore, a city-state whose entire existence is predicated on the uninterrupted flow of global commerce, the events unfolding in the Caribbean are not abstract geopolitical theatre. They are, in the most direct material sense, a threat to the conditions that make Singapore possible.
Singapore handles approximately one-fifth of the world’s maritime container traffic. Its port — perpetually ranked among the two or three busiest on earth — is the pivot point around which Asian trade rotates. The city-state imports nearly all of its energy, nearly all of its food, and a significant portion of its raw materials. Its prosperity is not merely dependent on free trade; it is constitutionally inseparable from it. Singapore is, in the language of the ancient world, a city built on the waters. It has no hinterland, no agricultural base, no buffer. It is pure entrepôt, pure exchange, pure flow.
When great powers begin contesting sea lanes — even sea lanes ten thousand kilometres away — the tremors propagate. The Caribbean crisis is already exerting pressure on global oil markets. If Russia and the United States move toward a direct naval confrontation over Cuba — even a limited, face-saving one — the spike in energy prices will be immediate, severe, and global. Singapore’s refineries, which process crude oil from the Middle East and resell refined products across Asia, will feel the shock within hours.
There is a deeper vulnerability still. Singapore’s security architecture rests on a carefully calibrated balance: close defence ties with the United States, robust economic relations with China, and a studied non-alignment on issues where the superpowers conflict. This architecture has been under strain since at least 2018, when the first phase of the US-China trade war forced Singapore to begin choosing between supply chains in ways that its founding compact with globalization had never anticipated.
The Russia-Cuba confrontation adds a new and unwelcome dimension to this calculus. Washington will, in due course, ask its allies and partners to choose — to enforce the oil embargo, to deny port access to Russian vessels, to signal solidarity with the American position. Singapore has faced this kind of request before, over Ukraine, over Huawei, over the South China Sea. Each time, it has threaded the needle with extraordinary skill. But the needle grows finer with each passing crisis.
IV. Babylon and the City-State
Singapore’s founding mythology is, in its own way, a kind of scripture. Lee Kuan Yew’s vision — a rational, disciplined, incorruptible city-state that would prosper through sheer competence and strategic acuity — was always a wager against history. The great powers that surrounded Singapore had repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to sacrifice small nations on the altar of their rivalries. Singapore’s answer was to make itself indispensable: to be, as Lee once put it, ‘a bee that no one wants to swat because its sting is unpredictable and its honey is necessary.’
The honey is still necessary. But the swatting is becoming less unthinkable. In a world where the United States is imposing naval blockades (or near-blockades), where Russia is pledging to run them, and where China is watching with the calculating patience of a power that expects, sooner or later, to inherit whatever order emerges from the wreckage — Singapore’s position as neutral facilitator becomes harder to maintain. The city of Tyre, in the biblical imagination, was the great trading entrepôt of the ancient world, ‘whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth.’ And Tyre, too, eventually fell — not because it was weak, but because it was indispensable to too many competing powers, and indispensability, at a certain pitch of rivalry, becomes a vulnerability rather than a protection.
The prophet Ezekiel’s lament over Tyre is among the most economically sophisticated passages in the Hebrew Bible: a precise inventory of its trading relationships, its commodities, its shipping routes. ‘Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead they traded in thy fairs.’ Reading it in 2026, one is struck not by its antiquity but by its familiarity. Replace Tarshish with the United States, replace tin and lead with semiconductors and liquefied natural gas, and you have something very close to Singapore’s contemporary trading statement.
Ezekiel’s point, of course, is that no trading empire is permanent. That the wealth of Tyre, its sophistication, its art, its ships, did not protect it when the tide of history turned. The waters that were its highway became its grave.
“By thy great wisdom and by thy traffic hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches.” — Ezekiel 28:5
V. What Singapore Knows That the World Forgets
And yet — and this is crucial — Singapore is not Tyre. Singapore has survived precisely because it understands, with a clarity born of smallness and necessity, what Tyre and Babylon and every great entrepôt in history understood too late: that the system of rules and norms that makes trade possible is more valuable than any individual trade, and that its erosion is the prelude to a world in which only the strong survive.
Singaporean foreign policy has therefore been, for five decades, an argument — patient, persistent, sometimes lonely — for the primacy of international law, multilateral institutions, and rules-based order. Singapore has been a consistent voice at the UN, at the WTO, at ASEAN, for a world governed by norms rather than power. Not because Singapore is naive about power — it is perhaps the least naive country on earth — but because it understands that in a world governed purely by power, Singapore loses.
The Russia-Cuba standoff is a direct assault on that argument. Putin’s declaration that US sanctions are ‘unacceptable’ is, in its own way, the mirror image of Washington’s willingness to impose them unilaterally. Both powers are asserting the right to act outside the structures of international law when their interests demand it. Both are, in the language of the book of Judges, doing ‘that which is right in his own eyes.’ The result — a world of competing unilateralisms — is the world that Singapore most fears.
Singapore’s government, in the measured language of its official statements, will express ‘concern’ and call for ‘dialogue’ and ‘de-escalation.’ Its diplomats will work the corridors of the UN and ASEAN to prevent the crisis from spreading. Its military will quietly run exercises and update its contingency plans. Its port authority will model disruption scenarios and begin identifying alternative supply routes. All of this is competent, prudent, and entirely consistent with how Singapore has navigated every previous crisis.
But competence and prudence have limits when the architecture of the international order itself is under assault. Singapore can manage shocks; it cannot, alone, arrest the slow erosion of the system that protects it from shocks. That requires something more: a coalition of middle powers willing to pay the political cost of defending multilateralism against the centrifugal pull of great-power rivalry. Whether such a coalition can be assembled — whether the world’s Singapores, its South Koreas and Switzerlandss and Norways, its careful and cautious beneficiaries of the liberal order, can find the collective will to defend what they have — is the defining political question of our moment.
VI. The Rider on the White Horse
There is one more passage from Revelation worth quoting in full. In the nineteenth chapter, John sees a rider on a white horse, whose name is ‘Faithful and True.’ He comes not to negotiate, not to balance, not to manage — but to judge. ‘And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.’
Geopolitics, needless to say, does not work this way. There is no white horse. There is no faithful and true arbiter descending to sort the righteous from the wicked, to vindicate the small against the great, to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain. What there is, instead, is the grinding machinery of power, the slow accumulation of miscalculations, the cascade of events that each actor believes they can control and none of them, in the end, can.
The Russia-Cuba confrontation is not, in isolation, an apocalyptic event. It is a regional crisis with the potential to become something larger. Whether it does depends on choices not yet made: in Washington, where the administration must decide whether the political benefits of squeezing Cuba are worth the geopolitical costs of provoking Russia; in Moscow, where Putin must decide how far he is willing to commit Russian resources and prestige to an island that cannot repay the investment; in Havana, where a government that has outlasted ten American presidents must decide whether to accept Russian patronage on terms that may compromise its sovereignty; and in capitals around the world — including Singapore — where middle powers must decide how much of the rules-based order they are willing to fight for, and how much they will quietly let slip away.
History, unlike prophecy, does not have a predetermined ending. But it is not without patterns. And the pattern of 2026 — the hardening of blocs, the weaponization of trade, the return of naval coercion, the decline of multilateral institutions, the revival of explicitly civilizational rhetoric from Moscow to Washington — is a pattern that students of history recognize. It is the pattern that preceded 1914. It is the pattern that preceded 1939.
It does not have to end the same way. But the pale horse is already in the paddock, and someone has left the gate ajar.
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” — Revelation 6:8
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