1. It's hard to overstate what callous disregard this shows for the safety of our diplomats and intelligence officers, and how much the obsession with undoing Obama's Cuba policy while currying favor with Russia and China drove Trump's policy. nytimes.com/2020/10/19/us/…
2. Many of us who worked on Cuba in the Obama Administration suspected Russian involvement from the beginning. When I conducted secret negotiations with the Cubans, I was occasionally tailed by Russians.
3. This included being followed to a Canadian hotel where I had a secret meeting with Cuban officials in 2014, and being tailed by Russians in Havana.
4. At the time that these attacks apparently occurred in Cuba, the Cuban government was trying to preserve the opening between the U.S. and Cuba and to forge diplomatic contacts with the incoming Trump Administration.
5. It never made sense that the Cubans would be simultaneously carrying out sophisticated attacks against U.S. personnel that would plainly put at risk their interest in continuing the opening with the U.S.
6. But Trump wanted to undo Obama's accomplishment and appeal to hardliners in Miami so he was happy to basically empty out the U.S. Embassy in Havana to the point that it couldn't even process visas for Cubans to see their families in the U.S.
7. Meanwhile, there were apparently similar attacks happening in Russia and China. While we heard a lot about the attacks in Cuba we heard nothing about these other attacks that harmed people serving the U.S. government
8. Trump can't find a single bad word to say about Vladimir Putin and lavished praise on Xi Jinping in futile pursuit of a trade deal, ignoring all of the other U.S. interests that were suffering vis-a-vis China.
9. So while the U.S. personnel harmed in Cuba served a domestic political interest for Trump, the U.S. personnel harmed in Russia and China were an inconvenience to Trump, something to be covered up.
10. Quite an irony for someone who railed about diplomatic security in Benghazi for years.
11. The bottom line? This is a President who sees everything - from national interests to the safety of those who serve our nation - as simply an extension of his own personal political interests. He and those who serve him care only about Trump's interests, not America's.
12. One other thing should be clear in this murky story: the idea that Cuba carried out these attacks in multiple countries around the world is absurd, but that is clearly less important to Trump than his interest in casting himself as the leader of some 21st century Bay of Pigs
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