Trump Appears to Move off Regime Change Approach to Cuba

Since Maga has swept the American Republican Party, it has harmed two competing foreign policy inclinations-which is muscle internationalism and new isolated sizes on intervention. He played this tension on a number of issues, and it has again appeared on how to move in the Cuba policy-whether it was a more difficult approach that would aim to overthrow the system or stabilize in a less aggressive group of punitive procedures without the risk of sanctions significantly. Starting with the policy statement issued by President Donald Trump at the end of June, he appears to stand by the pragmatists who want to keep Cuba in the back stove at the present time.

Immediately before leaving to Florida Evergels to open the “Alkatraz crocodile, its new camp for detention for illegal immigrants, Trump revealed the presidential note of the Fifth National Security (NSPM-5) in his second term-a comprehensive statement of his policy towards Cuba.

Since Maga has swept the American Republican Party, it has harmed two competing foreign policy inclinations-which is muscle internationalism and new isolated sizes on intervention. He played this tension on a number of issues, and it has again appeared on how to move in the Cuba policy-whether it was a more difficult approach that would aim to overthrow the system or stabilize in a less aggressive group of punitive procedures without the risk of sanctions significantly. Starting with the policy statement issued by President Donald Trump at the end of June, he appears to stand by the pragmatists who want to keep Cuba in the back stove at the present time.

Immediately before leaving to Florida Evergels to open the “Alkatraz crocodile, its new camp for detention for illegal immigrants, Trump revealed the presidential note of the Fifth National Security (NSPM-5) in his second term-a comprehensive statement of his policy towards Cuba.

During the first few months in his post, Trump has taken a number of partial measures that threaten its steel line. On his first day in office, he reflected steps to relax the sanctions that former President Joe Biden took a few weeks ago. Since then, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has increased diplomatic pressure to force countries to host Cuban doctors to close these programs. It stopped issuing visas for the Cubans to visit the family in the United States or participate in cultural and educational stock exchanges, and the Treasury began to deprive US groups licenses to visit Cuba on these programs.

The administration has cut off all the objective diplomatic dialogue with the Cuban government, which canceled even the semi -annual immigration talks. At the same time, it canceled the 2022 humanitarian release program in Biden, which has placed more than 100,000 Cuban to the United States legally, and put them all (and 400,000 to 500,000 who arrived not documented) at the risk of detention and deportation. Instead of talking to the Cuban government, Cost Among the American embassy in Havana, it offered a public offer to be proud to participate with and support the Cuban dissidents – a strategy that reminds us of similar measures by the George W. Bush administration in an attempt to provoke Cuban in breaking diplomatic relations.

But NSPM-5 was a surprise because it does not completely restore the “maximum pressure” policy to change the system that described the last two years from the first Trump administration. Instead, he dates back to the first two years of his first term by returning NSPM in June 2017 on Cuba with only modest changes.

Certainly, this policy was not proven. The new NSPM reaffirms again the traditional approach of the United States of hostility and coercion on the basis of economic sanctions that have been characterized by American policy since 1962. But it is less aggressive than the administration that Marco Rubio predicted as the Minister of State and National Security – and the least aggressive than some of the boss.

Some unknown sources told the press that by banning “indirect” as well as direct transactions with Cuban companies associated with the armed forces in the country, the new NSPM opens the door to “secondary penalties” on foreign companies. But NSPM calls only for adjustments to the current penalties regulations, which only apply to “American Judicial Persons” – people and entities of American presence – and therefore do not allow secondary sanctions, because this term usually understands, against foreign companies without an American presence. Administration can impose such penalties, but it is possible that additional executive orders and legal authority are different from the siege, which only allows penalties against Cuba, not third parties.

Even under NSPM, it is not clear how any companies, foreign and local, can bear the responsibility of carrying out commercial “indirectly” businesses – which means that it is supposed to be supposed through some third entity – with Cuban companies linked to the armed forces unless all these indirect channels are added to the list of entities restricted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Otherwise, how will a company do commercial business in Cuba if its Cuban party is a banned channel?

This ambiguity may be intended – to create a lot of uncertainty about the rules that companies fear to do any work with Cuba for fear of committing an unintended violation that may cost millions of fines. There is nothing more than not knowing whether your actions violate the law until it is charged. More will be revealed when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues the list of updated entities updated by the end of July 2025, as it requires NSPM.

In any case, NSPM-5 indicates that Cuba is not a priority for management at the present time. While one of the camps within the administration still argues that the catastrophic crisis facing the Cuban economy makes the country mature to change the system, the other camp seems to have the upper hand. NSPM-5 is the continuity, with no new initiatives to escalate the penalties significantly.

These different opinions repeat the conflict over whether the Chevron license will be extended to continue working in Venezuela. Richard Greenil, Trump’s presidential envoy for private missions, has argued in favor of extension in order to keep Venezuelan oil outside the hands of China. Rubio argued to keep pressure. Greenil seemed to have won the argument until three members of the Cuban Council of Americans in the House of Representatives threatened to flood a “big bill for Trump”, after which Trump canceled Chevron’s license, but they allowed her to preserve its origins in the country.

The Venezuelan conflict indicated Trump’s reluctance to return to the policies of changing his aggressive system, but the unsuccessful towards Venezuela and Cuba designed by former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – anymore to the president.

After returning to its name in the thirties of the twentieth century, the Trump “First America” ​​movement has a new isolated smear that reflects the instinctive doubts of the president in foreign tangles. On various occasions, Trump expressed doubts about the policies of regime changing and their danger to establishing failed countries and attracting the United States into “endless wars.”

In one of the first foreign policy speeches, in 2017, Trump promised that the United States would no longer go abroad to “build democracies in distant lands or create democracy in our own image. … We are not building a nation again.”

“We are more and more, we do not want to be the world’s policemen,” announced in 2018.

And “and”[r]”We don’t want to see a lot of chaos,” said last month, and he expects the regime to change in Iran.

If the aggressive escalation of the sanctions against Cuba is proposed by some Trump advisors and the Cuban Americans in Congress succeeds in the collapse of the Cuban regime, the chaos is what they will get, with severe consequences for a wide range of the interests of the United States. The pressure of immigration will increase, which risks the repetition of immigration crises 1980 and 1994. The collapse of the island’s public order will end cooperation in Counsotics, allowing drug traders the opportunity to create a beach beach in Cuba, with easy access to the United States only 90 miles.

The resulting social turmoil will attract the Cuban Americans who are desperate to protect their relatives, which sparked calls in Congress for direct intervention in the United States – as he heard in 2021 in response to only one day of national demonstrations.

Trump will face closer pressure to those facing President William McKinley in 1898, when violence in the independence war in Cuba with Spain celebrated the opinion of the United States, which led to the intervention and recovery of Washington in Cuban Cuban affairs since then – which promised the president not to repeat it. All of these risks can be limited by avoiding the escalation of penalties or following up with limited participation.

How Trump Cuba’s policy reveals over the three and a half years next year whether Greenil’s preference for leaving Cuba over the back stove or Rubio’s preference for escalation is carrying today. Rubio has the advantage of controlling the foreign policy -making device, but Greenil has the president’s ear, and his views are more in line with the instinct of the Trump gut. When Trump must choose between his intestines and the advice of foreign political bureaucracy, its intestine usually wins.