The Levity of Empire

On the first day of May, before an audience at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, the President of the United States stood at a podium in Florida and announced, with the easy cadence of a man returning from lunch, that his country would be "taking over" Cuba "almost immediately." He invoked the USS Abraham Lincoln by name, suggested its homeward course from the Persian Gulf could simply detour, and added, as if confirming an appointment on his calendar, "I like to finish a job." The White House did not clarify whether he meant it. Cuban officials, less protected by the cushion of presumed irony, took him at his word.

There is something in the American character — older than the present administration, deeper than any one man's vanity — that has always wanted to believe that other countries can be acquired the way one acquires a hotel, and that the morality of such an acquisition can be settled by tone. We have done it before. We did it in 1898, when the Maine sank and a generation of editors invented a war. We did it in 1961, at a beach whose name our schoolchildren no longer learn. And each time, we paid for it — not in the immediate accounting of dollars or marines, but in the slower accounting of credibility, of moral seriousness, of what the world believes our word to be worth.

To say from a podium that one will take a sovereign nation, and then to leave the world guessing whether the saying was sincere, is not strength; it is the carelessness of strength, which is something else entirely. A republic that jokes about annexation is a republic that has begun to forget the difference between itself and the empires it once defined itself against. And a conservative — the real kind, the kind who remembers that this country was founded in revolt against an empire — ought to feel that distinction in his bones.

There are honest arguments to be had about Miguel Díaz-Canel's government, about the suffering of the Cuban people under a regime that has outlasted ten American presidents, about the sanctions Mr. Trump signed that same afternoon broadening pressure on Havana's security apparatus, its energy sector, its financial services and its mines. Those arguments can be made on their merits. But they are not the arguments the President made. He did not argue. He gestured. He waved at an island ninety miles from Florida as one might wave at a piece of property under negotiation and said, in effect, that he would deal with it when he was finished with the other one.

The other one, of course, is Iran — a war we were told would be short, would be cheap, would be confined to surgical strikes and decisive ends, and which is now in its eleventh week, with American destroyers exchanging fire in the Strait of Hormuz and a confidential CIA assessment, reported this week, concluding that Tehran can endure the blockade for at least another three to four months. The carrier he would send to Cuba is the carrier still working in the Gulf. The job he likes to finish has not been finished yet.

A people that cannot speak plainly about war will not stay long out of it. A president who jokes about taking countries will, in time, be taken at his word — by the next country, and the next, and the country after that. The dignity of the republic is not in the size of its carrier groups. It is in what its president says, from a podium, when he thinks the audience is friendly and the microphone is hot.