Honourable Intentions Gone Astray

Since 1959, Cuba has famously posed a looming existential threat to the United States arguably in excess of the threats variously posed by Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. So grave was the danger at one point that the sainted John F Kennedy attempted an invasion, which backfired and left to subsequent administrations from both wings of the Republicrat Demoblican Party the task of punishing the island for its unsympathetic attitude towards US interests in the region.

A mere six and a half decades on, with the Trumpster and his head-tribble in China, thirty-odd members of Congress feel safe enough to petition their frères et semblables to the effect that the current escalation goes too far. Extra sanctions against the Cuban population, and threats of military intervention to remove the government, are denounced on the grounds that they constitute a potential cause of migrants; while the use of Guantánamo Bay as a beaner warehouse is "not a response to migration - it is an attempt to contain the consequences of the exact policies that are driving it." If nothing else, the assertion that one does not respond to a policy by attempting to deal with its consequences should have some appeal for native speakers of Trumpsterian English.