On the eve of Turtle Bay’s busiest week of the year, Secretary-General Annan was in Havana, pressing the flesh of Presidents Ahmadinejad of Iran, Chavez of Venezuela, and Bashir of Sudan, and being honored with a meeting with Cuba’s now reclusive leader, Fidel Castro.

As they arrive at the annual General Assembly gabfest this week, American policy-makers should not mistake the Havana summiteers for a dying breed best symbolized by the ailing Mr. Castro, their Non-Aligned Movement’s new president. Using Cuba’s communism only as a crutch, a scary new alliance is rising.

Mr. Annan, who began his tenure 10 years ago as Washington’s darling, seemed at home in the Cuban capital at a summit that at times resembled a Friars Club roast — with America the object of the comedians’ insults.

While he was hobnobbing with petroleum-empowered strongmen like Mr. Chavez — who in all likelihood will represent this bunch at the U.N. Security Council come January 1 — Mr. Annan obviously was not seeking human rights votes. As Mr. Bashir made abundantly clear when he said Sudan would fight any U.N.-led force that dared to defend Darfur’s genocide victims, many in NAM consider Turtle Bay itself an enemy. Why, then, was Mr. Annan there?

Simple arithmetic is at work here. One hundred eighteen countries, or two-thirds of all the members of the General Assembly, currently belong to NAM. To escape the wrath of the majority, sooner or later any secretary-general — including the next one — must adjust to this reality.

In his Havana speech, Mr. Annan stressed the need to reform the Security Council, which is now suffering from a “democracy deficit,” he said. America and other democracies, he seemed to be saying, undemocratically have too much power at Turtle Bay.

After it was “reformed” earlier this year under Mr. Annan’s tutelage, the human rights council stopped even raising issues not related to Israel. The Security Council can similarly correct its “deficit” by defining democracy down — just like the last NAM declaration, which supported “democracy” as a virtue but stressed the right of Mr. Chavez to form whatever type of government he pleases.

Meanwhile, Washington’s struggle to block Mr. Chavez by supporting Guatemala’s Security Council candidacy seems to have backfired.

“We will make it,” the new Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Francisco Javier Arias Cardenas, told me. Speaking through an interpreter, and forced to scream over a live band playing a terrific merengue during a recent party at Venezuela’s U.N. mission, Mr. Cardenas expressed confidence that NAM’s built-in majority will deliver a council seat for the Bolivarian republic.

Mr. Chavez helped his cause by launching a worldwide tour. Not far from Tiananmen Square in oil-hungry Beijing, he denounced America as a “police state.” In Damascus, after announcing that Venezuela had broken diplomatic ties with Jerusalem, Mr. Chavez compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Syria, which for decades has hosted its share of ex-Nazi scientists, was not the only nation nodding in agreement. A NAM declaration last week condemned Israel’s aggression against Lebanon and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs.

The Non-Aligned Movement has always been steeped in Marxist demagoguery. The group was a Soviet ally in 1961 when it opened for business in communist Belgrade, and democratic NAM members like India have rarely called the shots since then. Shortly after Havana last hosted the alliance’s summit, in 1979, Mr. Castro’s Moscow masters invaded Afghanistan.

The most definitive statements coming out of Havana last week were those made by “axis of evil” leaders. North Korea “would not need even a single nuclear weapon if there no longer existed a U.S. threat,” Pyongyang’s second in command, Kim Yong Nam, said. America is “turning the Security Council into a base for imposing its politics,” Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is concerned about sanctions against Iran, said.

The petroleum haves, like Messrs. Chavez, Bashir, and Ahmadinejad, are fueling Third World resentment while attempting to split the oil have-nots in Europe from their natural Western allies. An increasingly assertive China is using its economic purchasing prowess to empower its oil-exporting allies. And the wild card in all this is Islamic fervor.

In Havana, it all added up to pure anti-Americanism. Misunderstood in Europe as “unilateralist,” the Bush administration’s past, uneven attempts to confront these fearsome trends head on recently gave way to more conciliatory internationalist policies. The result so far is a growing chorus of jeers from Tehran, Caracas, Havana, and, increasingly, even Turtle Bay.