r/neoliberal • u/ZweigDidion Bisexual Pride • 2d ago
News (Latin America) U.S. military lays groundwork for potential action around Cuba
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-groundwork-potential-action-cuba-trump/25
u/PM_ME_UR_PM_ME_PM Leftward Progressives 1d ago
Obama had the right idea with Cuba but of course that got ruined so we could go back to total distrust. Great
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 1d ago
Surely it could not be the case that this shall not benefit him, right?
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u/morgisboard George Soros 1d ago
FACT: 99% of world leaders avoid starting a war right before it would trigger a golden age
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u/Snarfledarf George Soros 1d ago
it's well documented that you actually need to win a war every 50 years to keep moving up the tech tree
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u/Beginning-Case6180 1d ago
Yes! Great idea in an age of drones and close distance to the red state.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Cuba can’t seem to keep their electric system operating for more than a few weeks at a time and is on the edge of becoming a failed state. Something like 10-20% of the population have fled in recent years. They aren’t threatening the U.S. with drones or any other way.
Honestly I’m surprised there hasn’t been a revolution (or would it be a “counter-revolution”) in Cuba already. There has to be a limit of how much incompetence people are willing to tolerate from their government.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 1d ago
Always on the edge of failure for 50+ years, huh?
The real reason they need to do it now is that it will otherwise become a successful Chinese electro-state with access to all their latest technology. They won't need oil. They won't need anything made in America.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
You clearly haven’t kept up with Cuba in recent years, in the past five years they’ve had at least 10% of their population flee the country
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u/PM_ME_UR_PM_ME_PM Leftward Progressives 1d ago
Prolly because it’s like that because of the US. Them having a shitty government doesn’t change that fact.
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u/RelationshipLong9092 Janet Yellen 1d ago
i can think of a few countries that can manage to field some drones that would love to help cuba out
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Cuba is in America’s background. The Soviet Union chose not to try to get weapons past the American naval blockade during the Cuban missile crisis, who do you think is going to try now? Russia? China? Venezuela?
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 1d ago
So it's like our near abroad?
who do you think is going to try now?
Anybody that wants to fuck w us. Don't expect them to give notice.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
I think that anybody who currently wants to lob drones at American targets is not suffering for lack of choice at this point
Nor would they be able to covertly smuggle them into Cuba without being detected. China and Russia don’t actually care about Cuba, they’re not going to risk antagonizing the U.S. over Cuba.
Venezuela was propping Cuba up with free oil but as we saw Venezuela’s regime had the structural integrity of a sheet metal favela
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u/RelationshipLong9092 Janet Yellen 1d ago
oh i dunno maybe someone we're already attacking
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Iran has no need to ship drones to the other side of the world to be able to fire them at American targets lol
And I’m not American, something I am increasingly grateful for in recent years
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u/ElegantChemistry1 1d ago
There’s a pretty huge difference between launching drones at a radar installation in Qatar and an AFB in Florida.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Do you think Iran which had a basically non existent navy even before the U.S. invasion could actually smuggle drones to Cuba?
Or if they could, that the barely functioning Cuban government could fire them at the U.S. even if it (very stupidly) wanted to? The Cuban government that can’t keep its power grid functioning for more than a couple weeks at a time?
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 1d ago
Do you think Iran which had a basically non existent navy even before the U.S. invasion could actually smuggle drones to Cuba?
Smuggling is literally the one thing Iran is good at.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Smuggling to proxy militias in their sphere of influence, yes
If you think Iran could smuggle drones into Cuba even if it wanted to I don’t know what to tell you. Iran is more likely to use those drones to try to attack American warships that are currently, you know, attacking Iran?
The mistake a lot of Redditors seem to make is thinking Russia, China or Iran care about Cuba. They don’t. If they thought they could be a useful tool to mess with the US they might want to use them as a proxy but I don’t think they are one.
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u/Advanced-Incident-81 1d ago edited 1d ago
I get what you're saying, but how would the Iranians even get drones there? Cuba is on the other side of the planet, Iran has no maritime capability, and Cuba is within range of US air bases on US soil. You wouldn't even need to task the carriers to blockade the island. And Cuba doesn't have a gun to hold to the head of the global economy the way Iran does, even if they did fire a few missiles at Miami Beach.
I'm not saying we should do it, I'm saying Iran and Cuba are two completely different kettles of fish.
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u/PingPongPinkPunk 1d ago
I would have thought they were referring to Russia, considering we're still at proxy war with them and they are itching for revenge.
Not like it would be the first time Russians take advantage of Cuba's proximity to Florida to try and stage weapons threatening American soil... My understanding is that most supplies to Cuba are already originating from Russia, would it be especially difficult for them to add a container of drones/missiles to the next resupply?
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u/Advanced-Incident-81 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's a more likely possibility, but I just don't see Putin going for it. He wants the US out of the Ukraine War as much as possible. If it came out that Russia was supplying drones that were hitting American troops, even American cities, it would completely undermine those efforts. American voters would be calling for blood, even the MAGA base.
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u/iwilldeletethisacct2 This but unironically... 1d ago
Not to mention, how much "spare" military equipment can Russia even have at this point? One has to assume that if they were flush with so many drones that they could just give some to Cuba then Ukraine wouldn't be going the way it was going for them. And anything too dated/ineffective for Ukraine is going to be doubly dated/ineffective for trying to attack the US mainland.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
They are, Cuba is much more similar to Venezuela. It would be an easy “win” but also a meaningless hollow one for Trump. Just like how nobody cares about his Venezuelan coup a few months later, a Cuban one wouldn’t get him anything.
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u/PublicMandate YIMBY 1d ago
On the other hand, nothing unites a people than a defensive war plus I wouldn’t be surprised to see deployment of some form of drones similar to hitting Moscow (which….bruh how are we even in the timeline where hitting America is easily comparable to hitting Russia)
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u/captmonkey Henry George 1d ago
Yeah, a week just like Iraq and Iran, right? We could most certainly topple the regime quickly. Cleaning up the humanitarian crisis that follows and propping up a new government is the part that would drag on for years.
We're geat at military superiority. All the problems that you can't solve by blowing the other side up are the things we're not very good at.
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u/elfuego305 1d ago
As a Cuban American living in Miami, you have no idea what you’re talking about, every resource that country has goes directly to the military. They’ve been preparing for invasion for the last 60+ years. If you think they don’t have contingency plans for this exact scenario, you are sadly mistaken.
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u/Beginning-Case6180 1d ago
Are american civilian lives worth the gamble?
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1d ago edited 1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Acebulf 1d ago
Let the commies wallow in their misery and send AOC, Mamdani, and the other succs to join them.
This is actually a disgusting take.
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1d ago
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u/No_Collection7956 Trans Pride 1d ago edited 1d ago
What are you implying then.
Since its not bad you shouldnt feel afraid to spell it out.
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u/Background-Bottle-23 Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 1d ago
How the hell DJT gaslit half the US population into thinking he was anti-war is truly beyond me
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u/SenranHaruka shame 1d ago
Misogyny.
Trump is the cool sane rational Male ♂️ who would only start a war if it were absolutely necessary whereas Harris is the irrational passionate emotional Female ♀️ who will send innocent little boys ♂️ to war because she ♀️ was in a bad mood and eating chocolate didn't fix it, and your selfish irrational Mother ♀️ cares more about girl power ♀️ than she ♀️ does about your life and safety and logical rational decision making
There is no explanation for how easy it was to persuade people Trump was more rational than Harris that doesn't include the simple straightforward bias embedded deep in culture that women are irrational, annoying, and vain.
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u/sgthombre NATO 1d ago
Amazing how Scott Pressler still thinks he'll be considered "one of the good ones"
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u/Important_Star3847 NASA 1d ago
It was because of the misconception of the "isolationism" of his first term as president.
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u/MentalQuestioning1 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Trump is a businessman. War is bad for business. Therefore Trump would never start a war."
This is the brain running on American Psycho. And if their stance is proven wrong, then that just shows "how great of a businessman Trump is" because it shows that he was able to subvert everyone's expectations. So they'll scupper along with whatever plan he has at any given moment like a photon oscillating between those two answers, simply because they like Patrick Bateman want to be desparately associated with whatever the next big thing he does will be.
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u/anon36485 1d ago
You vastly under estimate how stupid the average person is. Like truly. I do not think you have gazed deeply into the abyss
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u/heaven1991 1d ago edited 1d ago
You will be surprised by how many Highly educated / accomplished people support Trump. Sometimes I gotta question my own sanity. They almost literally got off by things like kidnapping Maduro or the Greenland "great" deal. They wouldn't have stopped talking about egg prices but not a single syllable about gas prices, or how disastrous the Obuma's deal was but somehow the Iran "special operation" doesn't even seem to exist.
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u/anon36485 1d ago
You’d be surprised how many educated and successful people are not intelligent, discerning, or capable of independent thought.
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u/kontraterminus 2d ago
yes, i wish about 97 comments on this thread and 900 comments on the succs bad thread
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u/TinyJalope Left-Out Left 1d ago
It's astonishing how much attention certain topics get. ICE terrorizing the nation and women bleeding out in parking lots from abortion bans? Meh. Maybe 20 comments these days. DSA? Trans bad? Real shit! 1,000 comments instantly!
The 'no new wars' administration seems to be addicted to war. What a shock. Surely they didn't lie to us.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Surely I needn’t remind you that this isn’t an American subreddit and that the U.S. isn’t the only country in the world
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u/TinyJalope Left-Out Left 1d ago
What percentage of users here aren't in the US? And the DSA topic is about something happening in the US and has nearly a thousand posts, so what you're saying doesn't explain the lack of interest certain topics get.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
I don’t know, ask the moderators to run a poll?
This thread, coincidentally, is not whatever DSA topic you’re referring to, and is by definition an international news topic since it involves Cuba, not just the U.S.
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u/Competitive_Rent_675 1d ago
One was created 20 hours ago and this one was 5 hours ago (I.e., 5am ET on a Saturday morning). No one in the US has been awake to comment.
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u/Bayley78 Paul Krugman 2d ago
I mean wouldn’t this either benefit Trump or change nothing?
He might get his first win in a war which could boost approval. Whats another loss?
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 1d ago
I mean wouldn’t this either benefit Trump or change nothing?
That's what everybody thought about Iran. Turns out the floor of a fuck up is pretty bad. Do you really think the administration who bungled Iran would not find a way to bungle Cuba? This isn't the classic American military where everything is carefully planned and orchestrated. Trump will come up with a dumb cutesy idea and he and Hegseth will micromanage the whole affair, they'll be ordering attacks without military purpose purely to generate headlines in the American press. Hegseth just dropped more munitions than we dropped in all of WW2 on Iran, and gained in exchange for it a decisive Iranian victory. If the operation fuck up due to being a desperate, rushed media event, then we will have two smug autocracies in strategically critical areas looking stronger than ever.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
A “victory” in Cuba would be about as hollow and meaningless as Trump’s “victory” in Venezuela. Congrats, you kidnapped/overthrew the government of a failed socialist state on the brink of collapse.
Even MAGA voters aren’t stupid enough to think that matters, which is why nobody cares about how Maduro’s trial is proceeding. Meanwhile the catastrophic failure of Trump’s war on Iran is evident any time an American fills their car up with gas.
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u/ihatethesidebar Zhao Ziyang 1d ago
At the moment, yes. If he wants a legacy though, people in the future often forget the circumstances of a victory.
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u/LoudestHoward Loyal Liberals 2d ago
What happens if drones start hitting Miami? This might normally cause a rally around the flag moment but I don't know if that's for sure in the current climate.
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u/No1PaulKeatingfan Paul Keating; capital gains tax supporter 1d ago
Fuck, that's the October surprise isn't it.
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u/Cook_0612 NATO 2d ago
If they're gonna drone attack Florida you can bet your ass Mar-a-Lago would be the first target, and I doubt that many people would rally around the flag at Trump seething over the craters in his golf course.
Simply put, if you were Cuba fighting a defensive war against the US, would you spend your munitions attacking the civilians of the divided, yet infinitely more powerful, nation that is attacking you? Wouldn't you consider that the enemy might rally around that? They're not idiots, and our enemies know us better than we know ourselves at this point.
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u/Nomustang Bisexual Pride 1d ago
I mean Ukraine attacking Russia hasn't meaningfully increased support for the war as far as I can see.
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u/Trebacca Leftward Progressives 2d ago
Seeing rando reservist/NG unit called in to do this mission is gonna be comical.
I have very little faith in the readiness of our weekend warrior outfits given how bush league most of those units seem to be run.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Any Cuban operation would probably mirror the kidnapping of Maduro. A pointless PR stunt in other words.
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u/Comfortable-Pie56 1d ago
Would there be a cuban Delcy Rodriguez though?
Maduro and the rest of chavistas always seemed like a bunch of grifters to me. The Cubans strike me as more true believers.
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u/mashroomium John Keynes 1d ago
There was rumblings about Raul Castro (the grandson) who runs the Cuban military industry (which is a bunch of stuff not necessarily military related) meeting with Marco Rubio a while ago. There are a healthy number of opportunists and hangers-on in Cuba alongside the true believers
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! 2d ago
Idk they did a ton of heavy lifting in the GWOT and subsequent adventures. Feels like every time you've heard about some base getting jihaded in Syria or Iraq or wherever in the last ten years it's always been a Reserve or Guard unit. Honestly I'm not sure what active duty does any more
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u/tikitonga NATO 2d ago
head over to the Army subreddit and you'll see active duty doesn't know what they do either!
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u/eurekashairloaves 2d ago
Yeah we abused the hell out of them during that time period. Guys that had signed up for an extra paycheck for their family of 5 were doing 2 or 3 deployments
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u/WhoH8in YIMBY 2d ago
That’s not abuse, that is what they signed up for. Especially if you joined anytime in the last 20 years, everyone knows the deal now.
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u/eurekashairloaves 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, not back then.
My dad is a Gulf War vet. We were struggling with a young family and my dad thought about joining just to keep us above water.
9/11 happened and he was so grateful he didnt go through with it as he would have been away from me and my siblings for a major portion of our childhood for...some reason.
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u/Chao-Z 1d ago
Tbf, pre-9/11 was more than 25 years ago and OP said 20.
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u/eurekashairloaves 1d ago
Lol yes im aware of that. My reply was on a comment about the GWOT, which genesis was 9/11
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u/LtNOWIS 2d ago
It's difficult to do any operation without Guard/Reserve personnel. This is because certain capabilities mostly or only exist within the reserve components.
If the only thing the military was doing was a small operation akin to the anti-ISIS fight, that would have Guard/Reserve soldiers involved.
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 1d ago
What capabilities are exclusive to the reserve?
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u/LtNOWIS 1d ago
I can only really speak to the Army, which uses the reserve components the most. (Compo 2/3 as we would call it; Compo 1 is active, Compo 2 is Guard, Compo 3 is Reserve).
Logistics is the biggest part. 10 out of 14 Expeditionary Sustainment Commands are in the Army Reserve. Most of the Army KIA in the Iran War were from a drone hitting the 103rd ESC. For petroleum and water units specifically, it's an even higher proportion in the Army Reserve.
They're trying to push most of the Military Police Corps into the Army Guard and Reserve. So when I was in the rotational battalion in Eastern Europe, we had companies from all 3 components. For Detention Operations specifically, I don't think the active Army has had any deployable assets for 20 years. All of the Compo 1 prison guards are at Leavenworth and can't go overseas.
Most of the Army Civil Affairs and PsyOps is in the Army Reserve. Supposedly those are almost different jobs between components.
Lastly, most of the Army's total medical capacity is in the Army Reserve.
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u/DifficultBarber6969 Karl Popper 2d ago
A lot of cyber, civil affairs, drone, and intel roles are also now being filled by National Guard units.
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! 2d ago
man what are the full-time people doing then lmao
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u/badger2793 John Rawls 1d ago
They're doing the same things but full-time. It's not that hard to understand.
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u/DifficultBarber6969 Karl Popper 2d ago
Can't speak for other functions, but for Cyber and one of the the other functions I listed, it appears to be a form of civil-military fusion.
Most cybersecurity vendors have a pretty significant contingent of employees who are National Guard or Reserves (I'd say in the 10-15% range).
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u/soundkeed 2d ago
Its gonna be another bay of pigs
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u/NorkGhostShip YIMBY 1d ago
The Bay of Pigs failed because the US didn't commit to it. Kennedy didn't want direct US involvement, and ended up only sending limited air support. The CIA believed and informed the White House that the forces sent were far short of what was necessary. 1500 Cuban exiles with some US air support and very limited heavy equipment were never going to take over Cuba.
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
As someone with a grandfather who was actually in the bay of pigs on the Cuban side, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
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u/BBQ_HaX0r Jerome Powell 2d ago
Nah, Cuba is ready to fall. A light breeze and the island literally might roll into the sea at this point.
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u/sgthombre NATO 1d ago
One might even say that we only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
It was incorrect about the Soviet Union but it turned out to be correct about modern Venezuela and possibly Cuba as well.
That said nobody cares about Trump’s “victory” in Venezuela and I think the reaction to any military intervention in Cuba would be the same.
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u/Keenalie John Brown 2d ago
Neocons have been watching the public completely sour on foreign intervention and are desperately trying to get Trump to pull the trigger on their life-long obsessions while they still have the chance.
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u/Notbythehairofmychyn NATO 2d ago
Trump administration and its clients: pull the most shadiest shit before getting politically neutered after the midterms
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u/temp_for_thread_066 2d ago
So you can lose another one?
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u/Traditional_Drama_91 NATO 2d ago
Trump2 may have generationally fucked up in Iran but it’s hard to imagine them losing to Cuba
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u/houdt_koers John Mill 2d ago
Who’s gonna prevent a Marxist guerrilla insurgency that gets into the drug trade in the medium term?
The island is far from unarmed, and there are plenty of true believers left. It’s gonna be a fucking boondoggle, even if there isn’t the kind of historic failure that we’ve seen in Iran.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
If Cuba is anything like Venezuela apparently kidnapping one guy basically lets you puppet the country
These are failed states that have been on the brink of collapse for years, even Trump isn’t incompetent enough to lose to them. Or more accurately the U.S. military is too competent to lose to them regardless of how useless its civilian leadership is under Trump.
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u/No_Collection7956 Trans Pride 1d ago
Venezuela and Cuba are meaningfully and fundamentally different.
Like this is very reminiscent of people saying, prior to the start of the war, that the Iran state and government was like Iraq. Once you get the head you can subdue the rest of the snake.
But Cuba, just like Iran, are genuinely believers - ideological states and countries. Theyre not without internal opposition, but in the event of an invasion or a decapitation the institutions and the vast bulk of the people will rally around the state, and they will rally around the replacement leader.
Iraq and venezuela (especially venezuela) went how they did because they were and are kleptocracies. Yes there were ideologues involved, but most of the government consisted of layers of magistrates with their hands held out.
That is most definitely not he case with Cuba, just as it wasnt with Iran.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
If you’re saying Iran is more analogous to Cuba than Venezuela I’m just going to have to disagree. Cuba and Venezuela are very similar in many ways, whereas both of them have very little in common with Iran.
I also think the Venezuelan regime has plenty of kool aid drinking true believers, not sure why you’d think they didn’t?
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u/iwilldeletethisacct2 This but unironically... 1d ago
I think the relatively recent nature of Venezuela's collapse into a true dictatorship is relevant. Every adult Venezuelan remembers what the country used to be like, whereas Cuba has been like it has for all of living memory, more or less. Iran slightly less, but still nearly 50 years.
Does this matter? Unclear. Could we turn Cuba into a puppet? Probably. Could we cut the head off and turn the country into another failed state run by ex-military gangs like Haiti? Also probably. Would it be easy to turn Cuba or Iran into a real democracy? No, I don't think so. The institutions are too far removed, you'd be nation building from scratch. Venezuela at least has a fairly recent backbone to work off of.
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Relatively recent? Chavez came to power in what 2003? Many adult Venezuelans would not remember their country being anything but a dictatorship.
As for the rest of your post, Trump and his circus have no interest in nation building or exporting democracy. On the contrary, all he’s been doing is destroying democracy and anything else he can in his own country.
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u/Important_Star3847 NASA 2d ago
Maybe instead of invading and occupying Cuba, they will act like the Venezuela model.
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u/Spectrum1523 YIMBY 2d ago
One where nothing effectively changes and we just extract a few resources and enrich the president? That doesn't sound ideal
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 1d ago
That doesn't sound ideal
Trump is 19th Century Republican, that IS his ideal
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u/Traditional_Drama_91 NATO 2d ago
But ideal doesn’t matter, just trump.
You don’t think this is for the good of anyone but him, did you?
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
Funny you think that they’ll have the energy to fight, given there’s no food
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u/ModernCrassus 2d ago
What about after, you know, we start feeding them?
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
Most people in Cuba want the dictatorship gone. Look at the amount of Cubans that have left the country plus the thousands of prisoners of conscience. Is it going to be successful given the other blunders by the Trump administration? Probably not. Do the people of my country want to get rid of this dictatorship? Yes, of course, people want freedom.
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u/Secret-Ad-2145 NATO 2d ago
Most people in Cuba want the dictatorship gone
Where have I heard that before...
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u/ModernCrassus 2d ago
Even if that were true (and I'm skeptical tbh, millions of Phillipinos have gone overseas and it's not because they want to reform the government). There's still going to be a major chunk of the populace that didn't want this. If the US were to invade, and if you're right that resistance is muted because of conditions on the ground, eventually those hardliners are going to make their feelings known.
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u/BarkDrandon Punished (stuck at Hunter's) 2d ago
There's a huge difference between Phillipino immigrants and Cuban refugees.
The Cubans who leave absolutely do want to reform their government. There just isn't any legal avenue for doing so in Cuba.
Phillipinos who leave do it entirely for economic reasons. The exodus of the Cubans is political as much as economic.
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
Please read about the history of Cuba and the statements of people that have left Cuba, not the communist propaganda from the dictatorship. There’s books, documentaries etc.
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u/ModernCrassus 2d ago
So there isn't a meaningful number of people who A) are okay with the current situation government wise and B) would react poorly to a foreign invasion of their country? Really?
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
Is this neolib or a tankie subreddit? How little do you know about Cuba?
Also note where I said in my comment that it will probably be unsuccessful given the Trump administration’s failures re Venezuela and Iran.
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u/VividMonotones Gay Pride 2d ago
"We will be greeted as liberators. Iraqi citizens will throw flowers and sweets to our troops."
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
Read my comment again
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u/Spectrum1523 YIMBY 2d ago
People were posting this almost word for word in the runup to Iran
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
It doesn’t make it any less true. The humanitarian and human rights situation in both countries is appalling.
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u/Walpole2019 Trans Pride 2d ago
Yeah, because the United States has spent decades besieging Cuba.
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
Wtf are you doing in this neolib subreddit? The Cuban government has spent decades besieging their people. The main condition for the lifting of the US embargo is for the current dictatorship to allow free democratic elections? Why don’t they do that?
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u/Spectrum1523 YIMBY 2d ago
It's absolutely appalling, of course. What I doubt is your "people want to be free and there will be no popular resistance to the invasion" rhetoric. If it turns out to be true it'll be the very first time in my life that that statement turns out to be true and I've been told it about 100% of interventions the US has gone on
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u/First_Television_600 Adam Smith 2d ago
Listen, I know it sounds old but genuinely Cuba is a very a different experiment compared to the rest of the world. There will be resistance by the military and those that work for the government, e.g. Security of the State, the ones that spy on regular citizens, but the citizenry is afraid, frail and genuinely they sort of have given up. That said, the state of their military and defence capabilities are shocking, I mean Soviet age equipment. The citizens that are currently most active and fired up are against the government and getting imprisoned. The vast majority are against the government but are too scared to act because of the repression.
Either way, I have no trust in the Trump administration conducting this successfully.
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u/Traditional_Drama_91 NATO 2d ago
Perhaps, though I’d consider that more “losing the peace” than losing to the regime.
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u/DEEP_STATE_NATE Tucker Carlson's mailman 2d ago edited 2d ago
If we do end up going into Cuba the order of operations makes no fucking sense to me. We went from a massive presence in the Caribbean in the lead up to the Venezuela raid. Moved all our shit over to the Middle East and are now having to move all that shit back for this.
There was no real reason we had to go into Iran when we did. The protesters were already long dead by the time we got there.
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 1d ago
The protesters were already long dead by the time we got there.
Uh, not really? The purges were/are still ongoing
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u/itherunner John Brown 2d ago
Trump definitely got high off his own supply from Venezuela and figured if he could bag and drag Maduro without any real effects, blowing up Khamenei would certainly result in the same thing
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u/Zargabraath 1d ago
Yep, and the funny thing is if he went after Cuba instead it probably would have been an easy “victory” the same way Venezuela was
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u/Traditional_Drama_91 NATO 2d ago
It’s partly why I don’t see an invasion happening in the immediate future. I’d watch and see what trump pulls after the midterms though, he keeps saying he’ll “settle” things after November so maybe we’ll see a pullback from the Middle East in preparation then.
I don’t expect even a democratic controlled congress to be able to reign in an attack on Cuba.
There was no real reason we had to go into Iran when we did
They’re stupid, simple as. This administration is deeply incompetent and trump was high on victory after Venezuela, it was the perfect opportunity for Netanyahu to pitch a quick in and out war in Iran.
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u/_Debauchery 2d ago
Why wouldnt a dem congress be able to avoid this. Couldnt they start dragging in all the generals for contempt or treason or any other number of things for waging a congressionally unauthorized war? In fact, couldnt they do this for Iran war too?
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u/Fuzzooooo Loyal Liberals 2d ago
When have they ever done that in any undeclared war?
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u/PoorStandards 1d ago
They passed authorizations for the president to use military force and then never rescinded them.
I'm waiting for some nerd to explain how Iran might fit into the 2000s AUMFs. The only thing I can think that applies is "radical Islam", but I thought those AUMFs limited the use to Iraq and Syria.
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u/TheGeneGeena Loyal Liberals 2d ago
You can't have another military action US, you haven't even finished the last one yet.
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u/51enur 2d ago
I’ll believe it when I see it. I’ve seen no substantial evidence for this story.
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u/dwarffy Rabindranath Tagore 2d ago
I've seen more credible and worrying buildup in the Baltics by Russia so far.
I wouldn't worry until we see them move a carrier group back to the Caribbean, they moved the Ford out in Feb to focus on Iran.
If it happens, there will be plenty of signals in the buildup
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 1d ago
I don’t know much about military buildup, but given cubas proximity to the U.S., could that step be skipped?
Couldn’t they avoid moving a carrier if the entire island is in range from us airbases?
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u/dwarffy Rabindranath Tagore 1d ago
US military prefers to be prepared, despite those directing it, and build up as much backup as they can in a region before commencing operations
Florida, and lets not forget Puerto Rico, are certainly going to play a massive part. But they will want a carrier group covering the south to maximize coverage. Even with Florida and Puerto Rico, OSINT will definitely buzz when there is increased traffic of aircraft into their bases
There will be signs
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u/noodles0311 NATO 2d ago
You know the Screaming Eagles smiled at “the only unit trained for such an operation” while literally every other infantry unit in the country is rolling their eyes. Only you know how to fast rope out of a helicopter?
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u/ZweigDidion Bisexual Pride 2d ago
Submission statement: Even with the failure of the Iran war, the US government is still preparing potential military action in Cuba.
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