Last Friday, I opened The Student Life to an article celebrating U.S. intervention in Venezuela and Iran and advocating for the invasion of Cuba. The piece twisted Martin Luther King Jr.’s words into justification for the recent carpet bombings of Iran, and cited the notoriously well-trusted White House press room to claim that such an invasion was in the best interest of the Iranians on the ground.
To be fully transparent, even my own thoughts on these invasions are fluid and conflicting. In a conversation shared with my politics professor on the matter, he told me that attempting to draw a definitive conclusion is “like trying to nail Jell-O on the wall.” Such fluid circumstances are precisely why I disagree with the op-ed.
To begin, a core tenet of the interventionist argument replaces most rational risk calculus and humanitarian safeguards with the demands and emotions of American diasporic communities.
The article first generalizes that Venezuelan-Americans are “overjoyed,” then cites an article from Trump-compromised CBS with only three Floridian interviewees, who are attributed as spokespeople for the entire Venezuelan diaspora in the United States. Diasporic communities have complex relationships to their homelands, but one thing is incredibly clear — discourse within diasporic communities does not unconditionally override the voices on the ground.
Additionally, the argument’s logic reduces non-Western countries to similar anomalies of autocracy rather than treating them as independent systems with complex peoples and ideas. Venezuela’s population is near 30 million; Iran’s is over 90 million. In fact, there is very little in common between Venezuela and Iran. Their leaders may have shared a place on American watchlists, but interventionist analysis often fails to acknowledge these differences, instead placing them under the shared label: oil-rich tyranny.
Venezuela was ruled by left-populist nationalists who invoked revolutionary ideals to attack neoliberalism, but their regime quickly morphed into a corrupt patronage network reliant on oil. On the other hand, Iran has been a dual system from the outset. It has both elected and unelected officials, and senior clerics control vetting bodies and ultimate authority. Councils and experts are decentralized, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has a mosaic defense doctrine that divides defense capabilities into regional layers that make decapitation impossible.
The crisis faced by the American executive office is a direct result of the lack of acknowledgment of such differences. Decapitation in Iran was never going to work the same way as it did in Venezuela, and the operation in Tehran was not an overnight bomb-and-grab as in Caracas. The fact that the newly appointed Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — the son of the former Ayatollah — pushes a more hardlined and vengeful stance toward America proves that this initial attempt at decapitation has failed miserably.
Donald Trump’s directionless bombardment has already taken the lives of seven American soldiers. Outlets report over 1,300 dead civilians in Iran and 140 American service members wounded. With these mass casualties and fire showers as a direct result of US bombs, it is ridiculous to expect that Iranians on the ground would wholeheartedly accept that the invasion is an opportunity to take back their country.
Over those corpses, more than $750 million in taxpayer funds are expended daily, with just the first two days costing $5.6 billion in munitions alone. Since the operation’s objective clearly wasn’t to simply cut off the head of the snake and withdraw, I ask: What is the goal? That’s a question with no clear answer as of today, and the author knows that.
In the article, these operations are said to be “military and moral successes,” but on what grounds?
For me, the most convincing proof of success would be first-hand accounts indicating that locals are finding hope in American intervention. That proof, however, is literally a self-written anecdote. No hyperlinks, no evidence, just an assertion that Venezuelans and Iranians have now been given hope, that “there is more to life than misery.”
Any form of political hope and resistance is only possible when your most pressing daily worries aren’t survival. An attempt to paint pro-American operations as morally upright and relieving of misery when our bombs are killing children in primary school is disgraceful and genuinely argued in poor taste.
Even without ongoing war in Venezuela, there is no clear sign that interim president of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez has made progress in addressing the underlying issues — from deeply entrenched authoritarian structures to incredibly high inflation — that the intervention purported to fix. All of which must be done without major American guidance, as they will be fighting a war in Iran and planning another in Cuba.
There is no metric to define success, no definitive conclusion and certainly no end in sight for either of these interventionist projects. It is generally agreed that the leadership of both Nicolás Maduro and Ali Khamenei has been detrimental to their respective nations. The debate was never over whether these two were oppressive leaders; it was always about the ethics of American intervention to resolve it.
These two leaders are justifiably guilty of state mismanagement. But to use this fact as justification for the argument that we must put American boots on the ground, and in doing so, put vulnerable Venezuelan and Iranian populations at risk? That logic requires far more analysis, along with proof that American intervention would dramatically improve the status quo in these countries — proof that did not exist in the article nor federal political rhetoric.
That leads me to Cuba. Although I do not downplay the lived experiences of the author and his family in their emigration from Cuba, using Venezuela and Iran as Exhibits A and B to justify an invasion of Cuba is a false equivalence.
I take no stance on whether the invasion will happen. I’m no Polymarket, and what feat is it to accurately predict Trump’s administration anyway?
History, however, has shown that regime change is an unrealistic goal. There has been no definable success achieved across either intervention in 2026, unless success is simply defined as dethroning their corrupt leaders. Even in those instances, such dethronings allow deaths to be framed as martyrdom, and structured bureaucracies easily replace their leaders — as we’ve already seen in Iran.
In fact, here is a list of just some of the unsuccessful American interventions in the past 70 years alone: Guatemala in 1954, Syria in 1957, Laos in 1960, Iraq in 1963, Chile in 1973, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria (again) in 2011. Two common denominators underlie these events: ambitious objectives with no realistic long-term planning for the post-war order, and a deep misreading of local politics and popular legitimacy.
Some things simply don’t change. As of now, there are no coherent off-ramps presented to the Venezuelans or Iranians for regime change, and there surely isn’t a blueprint presented to Americans who pay for such military affairs.
The same goes for Cuba. Trump claimed that a Cuban invasion could be a “friendly takeover,” but that it could also not be friendly. In Trump’s words, such details “wouldn’t matter.”
But under the author’s logic, it should. He was quick to highlight polling data that indicated mediocre-at-best support for American regime change in Venezuela — unfortunately for him, Cubans on the ground feel exactly the opposite. A journalist for The Guardian spoke to Cubans daily, and a glaring majority of interviewees opposed American measures, claiming they would “resist US intrusions.”Amid US-induced blackouts and economic crises, more Cubans argue that intervention could trigger further entrenched polarization and civil warfare.
In that case, would his morals demand that Trump override local sentiment to squash the dictators, and in the process, kill vulnerable populations as collateral? That’s the most fundamental flaw in argumentation for any invasion. When should we determine that toppling a single leader of a tyranny is worth the casualties of locals on the ground? The policy opinions of Americans with immense privilege override those who will feel the implications of the intervention much more intensely.
Would I rather envision a life where “despots of the world” cease to exist? Probably. But to accuse one of “moral cowardice” for demanding that a planless United States withdraw its troops in regions where both local civilians and American citizens are dying daily is irrational name-calling.
Jun Kwon PO ’28 is an immigrant who believes patriotism is like friendship. Good friends keep it real with one another and hold each other accountable — to be patriotic is to acknowledge a friend’s wrongdoing and correct it because you love them, no matter how uncomfortable the conversation may be.
Facebook Comments