The Insane Idea of Attacking Cuba

 

Posted onJuly 14, 2021CategoriesNewsAuthor by Daniel Larison 

Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, just casually suggested military action against Cuba today:

“Are you suggesting air strikes in Cuba?” MacCallum interrupted.

“What I’m suggesting is that that option is one that has to be explored and cannot be just simply discarded as an option that is not on the table,” Suarez responded.

Suarez is a politician in Miami, so he is probably just pandering to hard-liners there, but it is important to understand why military action against Cuba is absolutely not an option that “has to be explored.” It would be insane, immoral, and illegal.

It would be an act of illegal aggression against another state. There is no pretense here that the United States would be defending itself, so it would be out-and-out aggression against a small, neighboring country. This is the very sort of act that the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force was meant to discourage. Article 2 (4) of the Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Initiating hostilities against a weaker country because you want to exploit its internal political upheaval is not noble or admirable. It is criminal.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2021/07/14/the-insane-idea-of-attacking-cuba/