It doesn’t take much imagination to see that if even a portion of the air support used in the military operation in Venezuela had been provided at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the Cuban missile crisis—which nearly brought the world to the edge of nuclear war—might have been averted. And averted at the same time would have been the oppressive regime in Cuba, which destroyed a once vibrant economy and spread its malign influence through the hemisphere—and beyond. Could it really have fallen to Donald Trump, of all people, to complete the work that John F. Kennedy left undone, or bungled?
Henry Taylor, in his classic work The Statesman, observed that “it sometimes happens that he who would not hurt a fly will hurt a nation.” Kennedy, with all his study of international politics, was perhaps overly cautious in that first test of his power. Trump, serenely detached from reading serious books of any kind, has not had the slightest qualm or hesitation in flexing his power. His vice is that he wants it clear to all who can see that good things spring from his touch and his will alone. He produces wreckage wherever he goes, and yet his swashbuckling use of power may indeed rid us of the regimes in Iran and Venezuela—maybe even Cuba, as the last shoe to fall. Through his swagger and confidence, he may find himself ironically resolving unfinished business left by four or more of his predecessors.
In later years, Kennedy did not hesitate to use the well-timed cruelty that Machiavelli described as a tool of statecraft. He gave the green light for the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam, in 1963. And with that move he unsettled the ruling structure of the country and escalated the war. But he was able to keep that hand of brute power hidden. Not so with the Bay of Pigs. It was clear that America was backing the Cuban brigade seeking to reclaim their country.
Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations wanted to conceal the American involvement in helping refugees from Cuba restore a non-communist regime. Kennedy was sensitive to the leaders of Latin America, who held to the high principle of not intervening in the affairs of other countries—a maxim that nicely fended off intervention against any of them. The same principle has been invoked today against the American intervention in Venezuela—and invoked with high moral posturing.
And yet it is the character of international law to avoid moral judgments on the various regimes in the world. Surely the sovereignty of the French government under Marshall Petain was violated when Allied armies landed in Normandy in 1944. And under a liberal reading of international law, the Second World War might have properly ended when Allied armies pushed Germany back to its prewar frontiers and stripped the Nazi regime of the fruits of its aggressions. But the understanding of the time was that the war sprang precisely from the nature of that Nazi regime—and nothing would be settled until that regime was removed and reconstructed from within.
Why all of this agonizing, then, over “regime change” in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba? The most consequential data of political life have always involved the shift in regimes, from the Germany of Weimar to the Germany of Hitler, from the Cuba of Batista to the Cuba of Castro. In Natural Right and History, my late professor Leo Strauss remarked that “when the classics were chiefly concerned with the different regimes, and especially with the best regime, they implied that the paramount social phenomenon, or that social phenomenon than which only the natural phenomena are more fundamental, is the regime.” Regimes are fundamental social realities. If we’re not out to change the vicious regimes in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, why are we there at all?
Abraham Lincoln never doubted that the right of human beings to be ruled only with their own consent was a universal doctrine. In no place is it natural for men to rule other men in the way that humans rule over dogs and horses. If Lincoln held back from taking up arms to fight despotisms and establish free elections in all places, he was not holding back in principle, but in prudence, because the United States did not have the means of intervening in foreign countries without exposing the republican experiment at home to grave dangers. But over a century later, George H. W. Bush gauged no such dangers when he ordered F-4 fighter jets to provide air cover over Manila and threatened to act against any forces attempting to overthrow the elected government of Corazon Aquino. A president, with orders easily sent, could now act halfway around the world to protect a government of free elections from being overthrown.
What has curiously eluded many commentators over the years is that this willingness to intervene abroad has not always been motivated by a passion to act as “the world’s policemen.” Rather, it has emerged from a principle that has permeated our laws and the common sense of ordinary folk: Does the capacity to affect the outcome confer at times a certain responsibility to act—if one can? Without danger to American lives, Bush was able to preserve a democratic government in the Philippines with a simple show of force in a timely way.
Twenty years ago, the columnist Bret Stephens offered a riveting account of “Chinook Diplomacy”: Col. Angel Lugo’s 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital moved from Angola to the northwest frontier of Pakistan after an earthquake killed 16,000 people. Lugo’s American force provided the only fully functional hospital in Azad Kashmir. American doctors performed 330 major surgeries, wrote 14,000 prescriptions, and gave almost 10,000 preventive vaccinations.
But why did it fall to us to do it? The driving reason: It was within our power and ability to deliver medical aid to distant places across the toughest terrain. And so we must ask, whenever we have the power to make a real difference: What serious cost to the lives of our own people do we risk when we rise to what is in our power to do?
