[locknitpicker]

> Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.

You need to take a moment and think about your "vassal states" argument. May I remind you that at the peak of the cold war the US had a hostile country plant their nukes right at the doorstop of the US in one of those neighbors who not so long before was a vassal state?

[jimbo808]

If America had not been escalating with embargo pressure, the Bay of Pigs invasion, covert regime-change operations, and forward nuclear deployments near the USSR that made Moscow eager to answer in kind, the Cuban Missile Crisis never would have happened. A more protectionist America would not have pushed Cuba so hard into Soviet dependence, and the Soviet Union would have had little reason or opportunity put nuclear missiles there in the first place.