Despite his war of choice in Iran going none too well, Trump is shifting his sights to another military conquest, this time closer to home: Cuba. His administration has indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro and imposed an oil blockade. Now Trump is saying he may have “the honor of taking Cuba.”
CNN provides the details:
The Cuba gambit is the latest test of the administration’s strategy of ratcheting up economic duress by imposing a blockade while raising the prospect of the use of force to get enemies to capitulate. This worked in Venezuela—but Venezuelans are yet to see their hopes for democracy made good. A similar approach has been such a failure in Iran that Trump may have no option but to restart the war. Meanwhile, UN experts warned that the US oil blockade was threatening “fuel indispensable for electricity generation, water and sanitation systems, hospitals, public transportation, and food production.”
We’ve heard this story before: in Venezuela, where the Trump administration merely replaced one corrupt leader with another—Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president—and in Iran, where Trump falsely promised to bring freedom to Iranians protesting their regime. Trump cares nothing for the people of other countries and is not interested in helping them. What he does want is to start illegal wars to reinforce his image and try to bolster his flagging popularity. As Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego put it: “The American people are not asking for another war. They want us focused on building housing in Arizona—not bombing housing in Havana.”
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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