Would Jimmy Carter have invaded Grenada?

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
Very doubtful he would have; Carter's foreign policy, as far as I can tell, was based around 'calm and steady'. Risk of an outright shooting war that could escalate may be too much for him to accept.
 
I doubt it. While he wasn't as (as far as I can tell) as dovish as has been charged after the fact, he doesn't strike me as someone who'd invade another state over an airfield.
 
unlikely, but possible. People tend to forget that one reason Reagan went ahead with it is that Grenada had just suffered a chaotic coup, and the people who took over had almost no control over the place; basically, no one seemed to be in charge. While Reagan's stated reason of 'danger to US students there' was overblown, it wasn't non-existent either. If Carter basically let things run their course for a while, there could really be a danger to the students there if the coup doesn't come up with a real leader...
 
The KGB rated Carter as one of the most dangerous Presidents the USSR faces because of his stance on human rights and the effectively honest foundation he could advocate for, in effect he might be a dove but he had moral stature that was far more dangerous to the "Evil Empire." Frankly I do not see him authorizing military action unless it is closer to an American vital interest. Now are you talking post Iron Eagle? If so then no, the DOD dropped that ball and I must assume Carter would not easily be talked into any adventures. To his credit he stood up as Commander in Chief and took the flak for what was a badly cobbled up mission that had too many cooks at the Pentagon. But he did authorize it so don't count out the guy just because he got to be President in a shittastic time.
 

Driftless

Donor
Reagan was under pressure to "do something" in light of the Beirut Barracks Bombing disaster a few days before. The timing of the coup and the bombing were not connected, but it gave opportunity to divert some public attention from that bombing disaster to a military success. With Carter in charge would the first situation have arisen (US Marines in Lebanon)?
 
No, Carter wouldn't have invaded. But Brzezinski would have made contact with a bunch of semi-literate Maoists from across the Caribbean, and encouraged them to flood into Grenada and launch their own "anti-revisionist" Cultural Revolution on the island, burning, looting and killing at random, until the whole place collapsed into an ungovernable hellfire.

Zbig would justify it all by saying "Sure, some of those guys were a little hot-headed, but what was I supposed to do? Allow Castro to set up an offshore operation in Grenada?"
 
No, Carter wouldn't have invaded. But Brzezinski would have made contact with a bunch of semi-literate Maoists from across the Caribbean, and encouraged them to flood into Grenada and launch their own "anti-revisionist" Cultural Revolution on the island, burning, looting and killing at random, until the whole place collapsed into an ungovernable hellfire.

Zbig would justify it all by saying "Sure, some of those guys were a little hot-headed, but what was I supposed to do? Allow Castro to set up an offshore operation in Grenada?"

That's both an amusing and fair analogy about Zbig's backhanded role in the rise of the Taliban/al-Qaeda. And his absolutely total lack of remorse about it. But there are a few key questions and one parallel example that may be useful.

The questions have everything to do with how Carter got reelected. Did it involve an Iranian hostage crisis (and if he was reelected, some outcome that released the hostages while making Iran look weaker than the US, which ranges from mining Iran's harbors until they couldn't put up with the collapse of oil income to a rescue ranging from RICE BOWL/EAGLE CLAW variations to the "big option" emergency plan for just taking Mehrabad Intn'l. Airport with a brigade of the 82nd, seizing the Embassy, and sending a light-armored column out to retrieve the folks from the compound.) Any of a variety of things may have been in play and the nature of that will have a direct influence, in terms of past experience and public expectation, on the Carter administration (also on the relative influence of, say, Zbig vs. Ed Muskie who's likely still to be at State.) Also how's the economy and public perception of Carter doing? Somehow ITTL Carter has overcome the bow wave of economic crap that descended in 1980. Hopefully he's had advice on trying to mitigate unemployment while Volcker does his bloody-handed work with interest rates. In any case the central question is whether the great recession of that period is mostly over or not. The beginning of a collapse in Carter's favorables in the spring of 1980 was a motivator in his approval of trying to end the Hostage Crisis by force -- where does he stand with the public? Since Carter was to his credit generally a smarter and (unlike his dealings with Congress and with economic policy) more effective president wrt the Middle East than Reagan and not just at Camp David he's probably not been snookered into some open-ended commitment in Lebanon by catastrophizing national-security deputies like Reagan was. So probably there's no barracks bombing or other Vietnam-lite disasters that Carter needs mitigate so there's (1) less pressure for him to rush into something and (2) no last-minute kludge of three different plans one of which has to include the Marines for PR purposes (so they can have a "win" right after the barracks disaster) that among other things throws the start clock of the invasion completely off like OTL from the middle of the night when Grenada's reasonably capable anti-aircraft gunners were asleep to first light when they were bright-eyed and bushy tailed and ready to swat down US helicopters like flies to disastrous effect. (It's a common thread in that era -- and indeed even now in famously successful ops like NEPTUNE SPEAR, the assassination of Bin Laden -- that between the Mayaguez incident, Desert One rendezvous during RICE BOWL/EAGLE CLAW, and the initial assaults in Grenada, that helicopters traipsing in and getting themselves fucked right on up was the major downside of the ops in question.) So there's all that to consider.

But what about the events themselves? Probably Carter has had a lighter hand with the New Jewel regime in Grenada, which may or may not have dissuaded them from building the Point Salines airstrip at all (Zbig would certainly have pressed for more active shows of US intentions, like having a naval task force "wander past" Grenada to indicate having Cubans build a big airfield = bad outcomes.) Either way, as the Carter administration handled the fall of Somoza (and indeed New Jewel's first emergence) they will take a lighter approach in an effort not to repeat the mistake of Cuba, ie driving a coalition of revolutionaries who are only part Marxist right into the hands of Moscow or, now, Havana. But the coup throws everything into chaos. It is substantial local disorder and it's a problem because, as the Carter administration is likely to note much sooner than Reagan's based on their first-hand experience of the Tehran crisis (even if the Embassy issue played out differently there were still significant threats to Americans' safety in Iran throughout the time when the dying Shah fell and was replaced, eventually by Khomeini) there are a few hundred American med school students on the island. This is not unlike the "Shaba II" invasion of Southern Zaire in May 1978, a crisis the Carter administration was involved in directly. There was localized chaos in Shaba (ex-Katanga) province, a couple thousand foreign mine operators and engineers including around a hundred Americans were directly endangered especially by the thuggish hangers-on of the FNLC rebels, and the US assessed the Mobutu regime's ability to restore order as poor which was quite correct. The State Department started a planning cell to identify and locate the endangered Americans, the 2nd Brigade of the 82d Airborne was spooled up as a just-in-case measure, one part ounce of prevention and one part to encourage the ex-colonial powers, France and Belgium, to take action directly rather than the US. But when France and Belgium did act (both sent separate, overlapping task forces, the French with orders to kill rebels and drive them out, the Belgians with orders to evacuate foreigners) the US supported them directly -- US refueling aircraft assisted them and American C-141s carried Franco-Belgian personnel, supplies, and fuel for jeeps, trucks, etc. that helped round up and evacuate the foreigners. Since the Americans were nearly all evacuated by the company that employed most of them just before the French Foreign Legion paras famously struck at Kolwezi, other American forces were taken off alert, but the US directly assisted the European powers involved to resolve the conflict and show a multilateral commitment to preventing the spread of Communist influence out of Angola via the FNLC (Front Nationale de Liberation du Congo, mostly ex-gendarmes from semi-independent Katanga in the Sixties.)

So Grenada? If it so happens that as in October 1983 IOTL there's a Marine Amphibious Unit task force and the USS Independence carrier group transiting the Caribbean it's a relatively simple matter to divert them into position within helicopter range of the Amphibious Ready Group. Perhaps 2-4 air-refuelable USAF MH-53 "Pave Low" helicopters are sent out from Florida (Hurlburt Field) to the Independence to reinforce the lifting capacity for evacuating the med students and to give the Air Force a chance to play too. Then any American involvement is concentrated on preparing a contingency to locate and secure the two med school campuses and begin lifting out the students by helicopter, like the evacuations in Southeast Asia only tinier. Beyond that, what the US under Carter would do, what the Reagan administration precisely did not do, is actively involve the Commonwealth, first through diplomatic demarches from Caribbean members of the Commonwealth, then also by the preparation of a combined Commonwealth military task force to intervene and restore order. A number of left-leaning governments that were pro-New Jewel from little Dominica to Jamaica to Trudeau's Canada, were outraged by the coup and supported some action to punish the disorganized junta that tried to take over and restore calm. At that point, with maximum effort from their C-130 fleet and their own VC-10s and Tristars doing the tanking, the British were still capable of lifting a brigade-minus of 5 Airborne Brigade (two Para battalions and some support forces, probably about 2500 personnel and kit) over distances but it will go slower because the Hercs are about half as fast as a commercial passenger jet. The Canadian Airborne Regiment (really a battlegroup of about 1100 personnel at this point) would be spooled up and probably loaded aboard American C-141s for airdrop or "combat airlanding" at Pearls Airport, the smaller existing commercial airport on the north side of the island. And a significant number of American transport aircraft ranging from Hercs to a C-5 or two bringing equipment would help ferry the rest of a force: a couple of "light-role" British infantry battalions on rotation for rapid deployment, probably a battalion each of infantry from Jamaica and Trinida & Tobago, and a company each from Barbados and Dominica. That's enough force to overtake the island as well as American units could (possibly American MC-130 special ops aircraft would lead the way dropping in British SAS teams to secure Governor-General Scoon and locate the coup plotters.) And you have the MAU on alert as a just-in-case to protect the med students, who IOTL didn't come under any direct danger before the US planners remembered "oh right --we should probably get some maps that show us where those campuses are and secure those kids, they're sorta a principal PR reason for being here."

That strikes me as the likeliest option. The US prepares plans specifically designed to secure and evacuate the med students, and otherwise backs first diplomatic and then military action by the Commonwealth. Very much in keeping with what the Carter White House did in Zaire, and part of what was generally a more patient and focused approach to crises like these than the Reagan White House (although Cap Weinberger and John Vesey while he was CJCS were reliably adults in the room) or anything to do with Henry Kissinger in it :cool:
 
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