Should the United States make Canada the 51st state? Take over the Panama Canal? Co-opt Greenland? Appropriate Gaza and expel over two million Gazans to make it the Riviera of the Middle East? All these ideas have been floated recently, but another one is much more feasible, with land the US already has: make Guantanamo into a global capital.

Today, Guantanamo Bay bears the scars of colonial ambition, Cold War dread, and global torture — a relic of a bygone era. But there's nothing stopping us from building a new Hong Kong, Dubai, or Singapore there, just a couple hundred miles off the coast of Miami. It could be an international capital of trade, finance, and tourism — a bright city on the bay. And in the process, we could show the Cuban population what capitalism can achieve.

This is Guantanamo Bay. Today, it’s a military base. The bay has a well-protected deep water port and two landing strips for planes.