America’s history of intervention in Cuban internal affairs goes back to 1899 and the Spanish-American War. President William McKinley insisted on going to war in Cuba in order to fight the “barbarities” and cruelty of the Spanish imperial government against the Cuban people.
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That war was America’s first true moral crusade abroad. It set off more than a century of global adventurism by the American regime. These wars for democracy have been enormously expensive in both blood and treasure. Instead of defending the persons and property of the American people, our progressive government has adopted a program of global management in the name of uplifting the oppressed.
This project is antithetical to the core purposes of our regime. Our tax dollars are taken from us, under penalty of law, to be used on utopian schemes abroad. The vast military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus designed to enforce this system are opposed to the ordinary people of this country. It strips them of their liberty, defrauds them of their property, and serves the interests of the ideological Left.
President Trump is the first president of the postwar period to seriously challenge, at least rhetorically, the validity of this system. It is no wonder that President Trump has often found his fiercest critics and enemies within the foreign policy blob in Washington.
Trump’s war on Iran represents a noteworthy shift in his approach. The president who could say, truthfully, that he had not started any new wars can no longer say as much. Claims that this is catastrophic for Trump or that it represents a “betrayal” of the base, however, are not correct.
Nevertheless, foreign war does not serve Trump’s interests. It distracts from his core domestic political aims: his focus on immigration restriction, law and order, and economic recovery, leading to a new golden age.
Of course, it is far easier to justify American involvement in Cuba than in Iran from an America First perspective. Cuba is a communist nation in our own immediate sphere of influence. The Cuban regime has long protected and encouraged anti-American activists, criminals, and infiltrators.
Seeing Cuba transformed into a capitalist, democratic, free-market nation would certainly be better for America than the continued socialist regime on the island remaining in place. Yet, I still argue that Trump should not attempt to overthrow Cuba’s government using either outright military force or subterfuge.
Every problem that Cuba meaningfully poses to the United States can be solved through immigration restriction, ordinary law enforcement activity, and strategic patience.
If Cuban agitators cannot get into America, their ability to do damage here will be much lessened. If leftist groups organize with Cuban agitators to disrupt or overthrow the government of the United States, then they should be arrested and prosecuted.
Moreover, communist governments are inherently impoverished and weak. Cuba is not a military threat to the United States. It is a backwater suffering under its own foolish economic policies. In time, these socialist states will sink further and further into disintegration. One of the great errors of the postwar period among conservatives was to assign far greater potency to communist regimes than they deserved.
Internal left-wing agitation is a far, far greater danger than external invasion. Again, with an aggressive immigration policy that weeds out leftist agitators, the risks posed by internal subversion are much lessened.
By contrast, trying to overthrow the government of Cuba with military force poses real risks—there is a chance that Cuban insurgents resist American attack or occupation with violence and that American troops die. There is also some chance that if we install a pro-American government, it will prove to be ineffectual and unpopular, much as Fulgencio Batista was in the 1950s.
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War with Cuba will cost taxpayer dollars. Subversion of Cuba will empower the American intelligence and spying apparatus. This was one of the worst aspects of America’s Cold War strategy—the domestic institutions created to overthrow foreign governments imported these tactics back into American life.
This should be avoided.
In the end, however, the best case against intervention in Cuba is that it is a distraction. The domestic American Left is a far greater threat to our rights and liberties than any foreign power.
For instance, the United States government gives $120 billion a year in student aid of all kinds to American college institutions. This is greater than the entire sum of Cuba’s annual GDP that is being given, in cash, to American universities—overwhelmingly leftist institutions that gatekeep economic, social, and cultural power.
This number does not include the other $65+ billion in direct research grants the feds give to these same universities.
If we really wanted to do damage to the threat of communism in America, we would start by simply removing the direct funding that the American taxpayer is already compelled to give, under penalty of law, to left-wing institutions.
This is just one example. The modern federal government is rife with these kinds of leftist giveaways. The whole federal bureaucracy is a jobs program for the Left. One minor example: the United States Postal Service has 640,000 employees. Ninety percent of them are members of the National Association of Letter Carriers, a union that has consistently endorsed Democrats throughout its existence. It gives millions of dollars a year to Democrat-aligned PACs and candidates.
The Post Office not only loses huge sums of taxpayer money ($9 billion a year) despite its legal monopoly on delivering the mail, but it is, to boot, a leftist jobs and giveaway program.
It cannot be stated often enough—our real problems in America are right here at home. Everywhere you turn, you can find evidence of ways in which the progressive administrative state advances the cause of the Left. The state is the vehicle that facilitates mass migration, anti-white DEI policies, affirmative action, attacks on American heritage in public schools, and indoctrination in our universities.
If we want to address the crisis of communism, we should start by working here at home! Yes, it is easier for the president to launch wars abroad than to upend the liberal gravy train, but that is a feature of this order, not a bug! The reason is that domestic politics matters in a way that foreign adventures do not. That is why the Left goes knives out in order to defend their power and transfer payments here at home.
President Trump has already made real progress against the Left both culturally and politically. Trump’s successes on immigration are immensely important. His cuts to USAID and the federal workforce are the most important and substantial restrictions on the federal bureaucracy since the New Deal.
Trump has a real opportunity to go further and to do even more. But that will take time, resources, and energy. It will mean focusing on what is happening at home more than what is going on abroad.
I encourage President Trump and his administration to adopt that posture, to end the war in Iran, to leave Cuba to its own idiotic devices, and to adopt a position of armed neutrality towards the rest of the world. This posture will give the president the time and space to focus on the crucial task of undoing the leftist apparatus in America.
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