Trump Shouldn’t Make Another Iran Mistake in Cuba

Foreign Affairs There is little upside and much downside in a gamble on regime-change in Havana. Photo by ADALBERTO ROQUE / AFP via Getty Images Even as the Trump administration doubles down on its failed Iran war, it’s also laying the groundwork for military action much closer to home, in Cuba. The Trump administration claims Cuba is a nefarious presence in the Western Hemisphere and a local proxy for Russia and China. Now it seems intent on toppling the Havana government. The Pentagon has reportedly been weighing military options for the island, while the State Department recently released a fever dream of a report alleging that Cuba is behind a decades-long campaign of subversion to bring down the United States. All of this comes on top of a U.S. sanctions regime designed to starve Cuba of fuel, tank the island’s tourism industry, and compel other governments to shut down Cuba’s medical missions. While the Trump administration claims that Cuba is a direct national security threat, the reality is the island poses no real danger to the United States and is on the verge of failure. Cuba is unable to keep its electrical grid running because of a U.S. energy blockade, while the country’s economy has been hollowed out by a 64-year-old U.S. embargo. The biggest threat the Cuban government poses to the U.S. is its potential collapse. While Cuba maintains positive relations with Russia and China, neither is particularly interested in providing continuous subsidies as the Soviet Union once did. The alleged Russian and Chinese listening posts operating on Cuban soil are probably an irritant for the United States, but hardly a new development that warrants panic. The Cuban armed forces, tiny compared to the United States’ even at their Cold War–era peak, have shrunk to a negligible size, with an air force that barely flies and ground forces whose job is to defend, not export, the so-called Cuban Revolution. In short, Cuba is a small and weak country hanging on for dear life, not a self-confident aggressor. The question for the United States, then, is how best to manage a quasi-failed state 90 miles from Florida with the least amount of risk. Ramping up the economic pressure, as the Trump administration is doing, merely intensifies a strategy that has consistently failed to accomplish the reformation of Cuba that U.S. officials ostensibly want to see. If anything, current U.S. policy has given the Cuban government even more reason to seek cooperation with China or Russia in order to deter their powerful neighbor to the north. Cuban officials have ample historical reason to seek deterrence: Prerevolutionary Cuba was an informal U.S. colony, and after the 1959 revolution, Cuba was subject to a U.S.-backed invasion, multiple assassination attempts, and terrorist attacks. There’s a better alternative to Washington’s failed hardline policy. The United States could normalize relations with Cuba, an act that would increase trade, strengthen tourism, and open up Cuba to further liberalization and internal reform. This is precisely what the Obama administration began pursuing in its second term, a process aborted in President Donald Trump’s first year in office in favor of the kind of “maximum pressure” policy he pursued against Iran. We know how well that turned out. Trump is more interested in sticks than carrots and has talked vaguely about “taking Cuba.” But as Washington is relearning the hard way in the Middle East, military interventions have unintended consequences. The risks of blowback from an invasion of Cuba are heightened by the island’s proximity to the United States. An attack on Cuba is likely to lead to large refugee flows to neighboring countries, including the United States, exacerbating an already inflammatory political issue. It could also create a proliferation of armed groups and turn the island into another platform for regional drug trafficking, following Haiti’s trajectory. While some U.S.-allied right-wing governments in Latin America would applaud U.S. military action, it would likely incentivize other states in the Western Hemisphere to seek support from outside powers like China or Russia to help balance against a belligerent United States. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Trump has said that he views the special operation against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January as a precedent for a future Cuban intervention. The example of Maduro’s capture, however, does not form an easy analogy with Cuba. In Venezuela, the Trump administration principally demanded concessions over oil and determined fairly quickly that regime change was impractical. As a result, the U.S. left the Chavista government in power. The operation to black-bag Maduro and prosecute him in the United States was political theater, not a foreign-policy imperative. The Trump administration’s demands on Cuba, however, cannot be satisfied by a deal over natural resources—only by regime change. Having suffered a strategic defeat in Iran, the White House may now try to regain some face by knocking off Cuba. This is the way gambling addicts think at the racetrack, not the way prudent leaders pursue policymaking. The White House should instead make a deal to start reopening relations and easing sanctions in exchange for Cuba cutting security and intelligence ties with outside powers. This would be a significant diplomatic victory Trump can brag about after decades of failed policy by his predecessors. As with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez, Trump can shake hands with a former enemy and declare that he’s made a new friend. As the Russia–Ukraine War shows, weak states often have to accommodate their foreign policies to more powerful neighbors to avoid conflict, but powerful countries also need to avoid getting drawn into costly wars to impose their diktats. Trade and comity between the U.S. and Cuba would be a better alternative to another pointless and risky war, this time in our own backyard.