Dem
47
GOP
53
It is hard to think of a president that, faced with the train wreck that is Iran, would not learn a little humility. The best historical example is Lyndon B. Johnson, who had as big an ego as any man ever to occupy the White House. Even he was taken down several pegs by the mess he created in Vietnam.
But Donald Trump is not like any of his 44 predecessors. And so, even while the Iran debacle unfolds before our very eyes, he's still behaving very cocksure about the United States' prospects when it comes to Cuba. That nation's energy infrastructure failed yesterday, in substantial part because of an ongoing U.S. oil blockade. Shortly thereafter, Trump predicted that the end of the current regime is near, and bragged to Fox entertainer Peter Doocy that " I do believe I'll be having the honor of taking Cuba" and that "I think I can do anything I want with it."
Trump is mucking around in so many countries these days, and with so little explanation, that we have absolutely no idea what his thinking on Cuba is. We suspect that he doesn't know much better than we do. He talked yesterday about how "They have no money, no oil, no nothing, they have nice land, nice landscape, it's a beautiful island." That sounds an awful lot like his verbiage about Gaza, and the luxury resorts that he and Jared Kushner would like to build. Maybe to grasp his vision, all you have to do is watch the first 90 minutes of The Godfather, Part II.
We also imagine that, because the current leadership is pretty poor, Trump thinks that the U.S. will be greeted by the Cubans with open arms. This is probably a miscalculation, because while many Cubans don't like the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel, they don't much like the U.S., either. After all, the U.S. is the country that has helped create the current humanitarian crisis by starving Cuba of food, fuel, medicine, etc.
Actually, as long as we're speculating, we'll also add that we think Trump is probably making a very similar kind of error in Cuba as in Iran, namely paying WAY too much attention to the views of Cuban Americans and Iranian Americans. The problem here is that the Cuban/Iranian Americans are about as far from a random, representative sample as you can get. In fact, the Cuban-American diaspora and the Iranian-American diaspora were made up almost entirely of people who fled the regimes in those nations. Of course THEY hate the current government. That doesn't mean they speak for all (or even most of) the people of Cuba or Iran.
In the end, the most important question is really this: Why is the U.S. still embroiled in this weird cold war with Cuba? Yeah, it made sense back in the 1960s, when Cuba was a client state of the Soviet Union, and the Soviets were using Cuba as a potential base for missile silos. But today? Cuba isn't exactly a client state of Russia anymore and, more importantly, the Trump administration does not care about hemming Vladimir Putin in. So, that excuse for involvement in Cuba just doesn't pass the smell test.
The only real motivator we can see is that high-profile Cuban Americans in the administration, most obviously Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and latter-day Cold Warriors, most obviously Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), just have a bug up their a**es when it comes to that nation, and they will not be satisfied until the U.S. takes a sledgehammer to it.
Given the oh-so-long list of U.S. successes in Latin American nation-building, this figures to go oh-so-well. Meanwhile, people who voted for Trump because he promised to keep the U.S. out of wars are on the cusp of getting their third disappointment on that front in just this year (for reference, Venezuela was invaded on January 3). At this rate, the U.S. will be at war with half the United Nations by Arbor Day 2027. (Z)