At dawn on Oct. 25, 1983, the United States began an assault on the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada. Thousands of troops would land.
The invasion was the first major military intervention President Ronald Reagan ordered, except for the more limited deployment of Marine peacekeepers to Beirut. Reagan’s motives were twofold: He sought to reverse Grenada’s absorption into the Communist bloc, and he hoped to rescue approximately 600 American medical students trapped on the island against the backdrop of political turmoil. The entire operation took four days and was wildly successful.
As important was what it did for the nation’s morale. For years, American confidence had ebbed. Operation Urgent Fury came eight years after the fall of Saigon and less than a decade after Richard Nixon’s impeachment. The Iran hostage crisis had paralyzed Jimmy Carter’s presidency. That Carter’s attempt at a military rescue ended in disaster undercut confidence further. On July 15, 1979, Carter summed up the era with his “malaise speech.” Such unease continued into the Reagan administration. Iranian-backed terrorists seized hostages in Lebanon and, just two days before the invasion of Grenada began, Iranian-backed terrorists blew up the Beirut Marine Barracks, killing 241 Americans.
The parallels today are striking. The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was a strategic disaster, compounded by more than 100 Americans left behind in what could be the worst American hostage crisis since 1979. Gasoline and food drive inflation. Trump’s impeachments are recent memory. The economy remains hampered by COVID-19. Americans are no longer sure about their place in the world. Biden’s verbal stumbles and declining energy, meanwhile, raise questions about his mental acuity.
Biden may condemn “forever wars,” but enemies have a say on whether conflicts end. Oceans no longer offer the security of isolation. Contrary to Biden’s belief, the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns showed not the futility of military solutions but rather the failure of nation-building. Even within the Western hemisphere, potential security threats loom.
Just as Ronald Reagan sought to put a hard stop to the humiliation of the Carter era, a new president may seek to turn the tide and change the subject. While it may seem inconceivable today that the U.S. military would ever again invade another nation, few in the late 1970s could have envisioned Ronald Reagan and George H.W Bush’s largely successful interventions in the decade after Carter’s election loss. If faced with a future challenge, a President Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, or Mike Pompeo could easily seek to kill two birds with one stone: Resolve the problem at hand with the overwhelming use of military force and close the door on an era of decline and humiliation that Obama, Trump, and Biden enabled or tolerated.
The thought question moving forward then becomes where and under what circumstances might a future commander in chief send troops to draw a new red line for America’s enemies? To Cuba against the backdrop of a popular anti-Communist uprising? To Guyana, to defend against Venezuelan encroachments and threats to Guyana’s oil finds? To the Panama Canal Zone to reverse the threat Chinese interests pose to freedom of navigation? To Jamaica, should organized crime threaten the country with state failure? The nightmare for any president would be the collapse of Mexico, though any intervention there would be on a scale more akin to Iraq and Afghanistan than to Grenada or Panama.
Progressives and isolationists may pillory such consideration as dangerous warmongering, but analysis is not advocacy. Snapshots of a single political moment do not reveal the patterns of history that a broader frame of reference does. There will be a new Grenada; the question to ponder is where and when.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
