Julian E. Barnes

Like, they don't have a peace deal that's lasting yet.

They're contemplating starting strikes again.

The Supreme Leader has been killed, but the government is as hardline as ever.

They are not backing down from their nuclear program demands.

And if you look at President Trump's other foreign military adventures, foreign operations, they've been much more narrowly cast with a very specific goal of

to kill a specific leader, to bomb a specific nuclear site, or in the Venezuela case, to capture Nicolas Maduro.

When he has drawn the goals narrowly, he has seen more success.

And so, if you look at Cuba...

The kind of long-term goal of many Cuban Americans of a Cuba free of communism, that's going to be harder to achieve.

But if you look for more narrow goals, reduction of the power of the military industrial state, incremental steps toward elections, those are achievable things.

You could make meaningful progress.

Why do this now?

Well, as you just said, Cuba has been a thorn in America's side for decades and decades.

This is not some adventure that came out of this administration's head, right?

There have been generation of American leaders who have tried to change the government in Cuba.

It is something that is very important to a powerful constituency in the United States.

And Trump sees himself as someone who can cut through bureaucracy, as someone who can solve problems that have bedeviled the United States for years.

He's someone who has little patience for progress or history, who believes through the force of will he can fix them or change them.

And also, we do have Iran right now, and Iran looks like a really difficult problem.

And all of a sudden, he's got Cuba, and his pressure campaign is working better than they thought.