The blood had barely dried on the floor of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s bedroom before calls for U.S. involvement began. The Washington Post editorial board raced out a statement calling for a “swift and muscular international intervention.” Political commentator David Frum, who helped sell the Iraq War as a speechwriter for then-U.S. President George W. Bush, quickly added his voice to the chorus, warning “what happens in Haiti does not stay in Haiti.” Within hours of the president’s assassination, the idea had solidified into a formal request by one of the battling factions of the eviscerated Haitian government for U.S. forces to be deployed.
This would be a terrible idea for many reasons. It seems, for the moment, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is not eager to comply: On Saturday, an anonymous senior administration official told the Associated Press “the U.S. has no plans to provide military assistance at this time”—although FBI and Homeland Security officials are expected to help with the investigation. White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said Monday the request remains “under review.” As it abandons one failed project in nation-building in Afghanistan, the White House is likely not eager to look like it is embarking on another project in the Caribbean.
But most of the people debating the issue are asking the wrong question. It is not a matter of whether the United States should get involved in Haiti following the first presidential assassination there in more than a century. The United States is already deeply involved. The questions are how that involvement helped, at a minimum, to set the stage for the crisis now enveloping a nation of 11.5 million people and what to do with that reality from here on out.
The first U.S. invasion of Haiti was more than a century ago—occasioned, in fact, by the last assassination of a sitting Haitian president. It came at a time when the United States was ramping up its own global ambitions. At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. forces were busy invading most of Central America and Mexico and outright annexing thousands of Pacific islands, including Hawaii and the Philippines, for the purpose of expanding trade and U.S. political influence around the world. In the 1910s, U.S. elites began setting their sights on Haiti—the second oldest independent nation in the Americas and the first to abolish slavery globally.