I was thinking recently about how both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Russian invasion of Ukraine had wildly insufficient hard power put into them by the aggressors, in part because of groupthink causing the leadership to wildly underestimate their opponents and overestimate the local support for the exiles who formed part of the invasion force.

(I also wonder how much of what I think happened in the Cold War is what actually happened, and how much is just the stories my side likes to tell itself. One of the fun things I found when learning German is that it has the same word for both “history” and “story”: “Geschichte”).

I am German and I don't think I have ever really noticed this. Even though they are the same words letter by letter, they are still two completely separate words conceptually, i.e. Geschichte is not understood to generally mean story and sometimes in in a certain context to more specifically mean a story about the past, i.e. history. The origin however may be exactly this, but I don't know that.

I think it's also worth remembering it was not just the Bay of Pigs, the CIA also had also been conducting "Operation Mongoose" where it performed terrorist attacks and dropped bombs on Cuba and various other activities. This stopped a little after the crisis, so it seems to have been effective in that respect.

And that also does not justify an annexation of Cuba by the US, so we agree I believe that this Russian invasion is completely unjustified.

My point is that US security interests outweighed Cuba's sovereignty and security interests in face of a real threat. But when people talk about a NATO membership of Ukraine or other neighbors of Russia, then their sovereignty is often portrait as absolute and whatever Russia thinks can not possibly be relevant.

Or take Stuxnet and the damage it caused, that is really just a more sophisticated way of dropping a bomb onto those enrichment facilities. What does that say about Iranian sovereignty? The Russian invasion is certainly unjustified and will probably end up achieving the exact opposite if NATO expansion was a major concern for Russia - I am neither saying it was, but I tend to think so, nor that it was the sole reason.

But in a hypothetical future were Ukraine became a NATO member and NATO placed or planned to place certain assets in Ukraine while there was no good faith attempt to consider Russian concerns - and I am again not saying that there were no attempts or that Russia was not responsible that such attempts did not yield a solution - there might be a justification to at least target military assets if we apply standards consistently.

> My point is that US security interests outweighed Cuba's sovereignty and security interests in face of a real threat

You're having trouble reconciling this because because you're not viewing the USA as "the bad guy" when it comes to Cuba. There are similarities in the two situations - large country repeatedly interfering in newly independent smaller neighbour (who they insist belongs within their sphere of influence), who in turn reaches out internationally for allies to help with defence. But to acknowledge this similarity you need to willing to recognise that the USA was the aggressor in Cuba, just as Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine.

I think you understood my comment as almost the opposite of what I wanted to say. My point is that if US security concerns were a valid reason to oppose Soviet missiles in Cuba, then by the same standard Russian security concerns are - or at least can be - a valid reason to oppose an Ukrainian NATO membership or at least an unrestricted placement of NATO assets in Ukraine.

Or the other way around, you can not easily argue that the USA can decide whether or not Cuba can have missiles and at the same time argue that Russia has absolutely no say in what kind of NATO assets end up in Ukraine. And to be even more specific, I am not arguing that both can not be true at the same time, they are not identical situations and all the small differences might add up and make a difference.

But this is something one has to make a case for, Ukraine is a sovereign state and decides for itself whether or not it joins NATO doesn't cut it, at least in my opinion. Or pick the other side and argue that Cuba should have been allowed to host missiles and the USA was wrong preventing this, which probably will imply that Russia or China should be allowed to place missiles in Cuba today.