Despite assuring voters that his foreign policy vision was rooted in restraint, Donald Trump has spent his second term launching military strikes in Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia and Iran, as well as several dozen attacks against civilian boats in international waters.
The question now is whether Cuba will soon join the list.
About a week after starting the ongoing war with Iran, the Republican president suggested he was prepared to use military force to take control of the island nation, 90 miles from the U.S. coast. “It may not be a friendly takeover,” he said.
A week later, Trump added, “Taking Cuba in some form, yeah. I mean, whether I free it, take it, think I can do anything I want with it.”
This month, he’s been even less subtle. On May 1, the American president explicitly said Cuba is a country “which we will be taking over almost immediately,” adding that he intends to deploy an aircraft carrier in Cuba’s direction.
All of which set the stage for this week, when Trump spoke at the Coast Guard Academy’s commencement ceremony, declaring, “From the Gulf of America to the frozen waters of the Arctic, from the shores of Havana to the banks of the Panama Canal, we will drive out the forces of lawlessness and crime and foreign encroachment just like we’ve been doing.”
Around the same time, his acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, appeared in Miami, where he announced an indictment against 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on murder charges. Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer, didn’t elaborate on how, exactly, the Justice Department intends to get Castro to the United States to face the criminal charges, though he did say the administration expects “he will show up here by his own will — or by another way.”
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Soon after, The New York Times reported, “The aircraft carrier Nimitz and its escort warships entered the southern Caribbean Sea on Wednesday and will remain in the region for at least a few days as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Cuban government, according to the military’s Southern Command and a U.S. official.”
All of this coincides with CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s meeting in Havana less than a week ago, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio filming a video that addressed the Cuban public directly in Spanish, urging them to stand with the Trump administration.
Nothing about this is subtle. Indeed, it’s eerily familiar. As The Wall Street Journal summarized, “With the murder indictment of Cuban leader Raúl Castro, President Trump is applying the playbook he used to upend Venezuela’s leadership to force Havana’s Communist government into submission.”
For its part, Cuban officials are understandably terrified and telling anyone who will listen that they’re eager to negotiate with the U.S. To date, those attempts at diplomacy have gone nowhere.
There’s no evidence that the American mainstream has any appetite for yet another foreign military intervention — recent polling shows an electorate far more interested in gas prices and the affordability crisis — but by all appearances, Trump simply no longer cares. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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