As unimaginable as it may sound, President Donald Trump is seriously considering invading yet another country. The Trump administration’s escalating pressure tactics against Cuba resemble the ones the U.S. used against Venezuela before ousting its president and proudly seizing control of its oil. Bored with his misadventure in Iran, the mad emperor appears to be eyeing another toy.
But an invasion of Cuba is highly unlikely to go the way the attack on Venezuela did, and the president is in a far worse position to sell the idea to the public — including his die-hard base. That Trump appears to be building toward a new military action while still mired in his self-made crisis in Iran illustrates just how disconnected he’s becoming from even the most basic political constraints. And his party is doing nothing to stop him.
The decision to potentially invade another country speaks to Trump’s increasingly radical disregard for public opinion.
Trump has been floating the idea of regime change in Cuba for months, but his saber-rattling has become loud in the past week. The White House parked the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and its escort warships in the southern Caribbean Sea on Wednesday in what appeared to be a show of force. The same day, the Justice Department announced murder charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro over the 1996 downing of two small planes by a Cuban fighter jet. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said he expects Castro to show up in court in the U.S. by “his own will or by another way.”
On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Cuba was a “national security threat” and accused it of being “a leading state sponsor of terror.” He also said that he preferred a negotiated agreement with Cuba but that “the likelihood of that happening is not high.” Trump told reporters the same day that previous presidents have looked to intervene in Cuba for “50, 60 years” and “it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.”
Politico, citing a U.S. official and a person familiar with the administration’s discussions on Cuba, reported last week that Trump and his aides have “grown frustrated” that even though his pressure campaign — including an oil blockade — has wreaked havoc on the island nation, it has not led the Cuban government to agree to reforms. Now the administration is “taking the military option more seriously than previously.” Those actions, Politico reports, could include an extraction operation of the kind used against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but they could also involve attacks ranging “from a single airstrike meant to scare the regime into concessions to a ground invasion meant to uproot it.”
I had already deemed Trump a mad emperor for launching a war in Iran with no clear rationale or plan. Remarkably, it looks like he may be angling to do that again, even though his efforts in Iran have failed spectacularly and left the global economy hostage.
Trump may think of Cuba as just another scenario like Venezuela — his aggression there had limited effects on the country’s stability and on the surrounding economy. But in Iran he’s already seen proof of how interventions can easily slip out of control and alter the global arena in unexpected ways. And Cuba is not Venezuela.
As Daniel R. DePetris, a fellow at the Defense Priorities think tank, noted in a column for MS NOW in in March, “the Cuban Communist Party is more unified and durable than Maduro’s regime ever was, which means attempts by the Trump administration to crack it by searching for a more pliable successor will prove more difficult.” Trump could quickly get caught up in another bloody, destabilizing intervention. And the search for a Cuban equivalent of Delcy Rodríguez (Maduro’s former vice president, who is now working with the Trump administration) could be futile.
No matter how Cuba ultimately goes, the decision to potentially invade another country speaks to Trump’s increasingly radical disregard for public opinion. The war with Iran is one of the biggest errors of his political career. High gas prices have hurt his standing with his base and the public more broadly, and he has infuriated supporters who believed him when he promised “no new wars.” How is he contemplating another one?
One more intervention will further diffuse Trump’s attention, which ought to be laser-focused on ending his catastrophic war of aggression in Iran. It will further convince disillusioned elements of his base that he was lying to their face when he said he would not be another American president obsessed with meddling in other countries’ affairs. And it will be far more difficult for Trump to manufacture a pretext or imperialistic “reward” to justify it. Iran has been a U.S. adversary with nuclear ambitions for a long time. Venezuela has oil. But nobody is going to believe that Cuba poses a serious national security threat to the U.S., or that pursuing regime change in that tiny, impoverished and isolated nation is necessary or would be clearly advantageous to the U.S.
A YouGov poll conducted in late February showed that a plurality of Americans disapproved of Trump’s oil blockade against Cuba, and 61% said they would oppose the U.S. using military force to attack Cuba. It’s hard to imagine those numbers looking better for Trump after his fiasco in Iran.
Because Trump is saber-rattling at the same time as he’s sowing other chaos at home and abroad, including two foreign interventions, it’s difficult to comprehend how close we may be to a third. A rebuke from his own party could cause him to think twice, or limit his ability to wage war, but we know by now that the GOP has surrendered itself to Trump’s malicious desires.
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