Achieving an occupation of Cuba would require murder on the same scale as the Korean war. They can not occupy the country against millions of people willing to fight them without exterminating the people willing to fight them.
It would make Russia in Ukraine look positively friendly.
I'm not sure why they'd occupy. Cuba has nothing going on economically except sugar and the US grows plenty of sugar beets. Honestly, Idk why we'd invade Cuba at all except maybe to make an example of them. But then I don't really understand why the political class still has a hate boner for Cuba after all these years, either, so maybe I'm just not imaginative enough.
A not insignificant amount of US foreign policy is driven by the fear of looking "weak" to the US public. Look at the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how that dropped Biden's approval numbers. One major contributing factor to getting Reagan elected was Carter doing the right thing and handing over the canal to Panama. And the Vietnam war definitely went on as long as it did in part because every president back to Kennedy thought it would be political suicide to just "give up".
With Cuba, any olive branch a politician tries to extend gets painted as being soft on "dictators". Bernie got flak for speaking positively about Cuba. Karen Bass did too. Obama tried to open up relations more (maybe, I've also heard he just parroted the company line about how Cuba needs to become capitalist before the US will have a relationship with them) and also got raked over the coals. Politicians will not try and change status quo with Cuba because there's no incentive too.
At some point though, it would be useful to discuss the US public's role in empire and how we think anything less than pushing everyone's nose in the dirt is "weak".
I agree that the case for invasion is low. It doesn't make much strategic sense mainly because it would be extremely costly, long, difficult, and would not really be much of a gain. The position of the political class is probably driven mainly by the Cuban diaspora of business tyrants that were pushed out of the country.
Achieving an occupation of Cuba would require murder on the same scale as the Korean war. They can not occupy the country against millions of people willing to fight them without exterminating the people willing to fight them.
It would make Russia in Ukraine look positively friendly.
I'm not sure why they'd occupy. Cuba has nothing going on economically except sugar and the US grows plenty of sugar beets. Honestly, Idk why we'd invade Cuba at all except maybe to make an example of them. But then I don't really understand why the political class still has a hate boner for Cuba after all these years, either, so maybe I'm just not imaginative enough.
A not insignificant amount of US foreign policy is driven by the fear of looking "weak" to the US public. Look at the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how that dropped Biden's approval numbers. One major contributing factor to getting Reagan elected was Carter doing the right thing and handing over the canal to Panama. And the Vietnam war definitely went on as long as it did in part because every president back to Kennedy thought it would be political suicide to just "give up".
With Cuba, any olive branch a politician tries to extend gets painted as being soft on "dictators". Bernie got flak for speaking positively about Cuba. Karen Bass did too. Obama tried to open up relations more (maybe, I've also heard he just parroted the company line about how Cuba needs to become capitalist before the US will have a relationship with them) and also got raked over the coals. Politicians will not try and change status quo with Cuba because there's no incentive too.
At some point though, it would be useful to discuss the US public's role in empire and how we think anything less than pushing everyone's nose in the dirt is "weak".
Because it would be 100% necessary to.
I agree that the case for invasion is low. It doesn't make much strategic sense mainly because it would be extremely costly, long, difficult, and would not really be much of a gain. The position of the political class is probably driven mainly by the Cuban diaspora of business tyrants that were pushed out of the country.