The invasion of Grenada is often overshadowed by the fact that a couple of years later the Cold War ended. And many historians just group it in to what Reagan did without directly looking at Grenada as its own unique thing. So in short summery most modern academic historians don’t really pay attention to Grenada.

Unless you’re like me and care about it. So Grenada was extremely important in US military history and often gets overshadowed by Vietnam and the gulf war which it falls between. The US military, as you know was just coming out of Vietnam and there was a serious moral problem in the 70s with getting spirits back up. The US military didn’t perform as good as everyone thought it should of and so time was spent trying to improve the US military’s moral.

Grenada was an extremely good opportunity to do so and for various reasons. First off, Grenada was an island which allowed the use of every single branch in the military. Secondly it was right in the US’s back yard. It was also a communist nation and US forces defeating a communist nation would obviously send a message to the American troops and the enemies, and Cuban soldiers were on it, this was very important because Cuban soldiers were not some meager enemy and instead performed extremely well in Angola and won engagements with the SADF ( South African defense force ) whom was technologically superior than them. Beating Cuban troops would be a huge moral boost as they were a tough opponent.

Now the invasion of Grenada was also done in an unique way because it had American special ops playing the most important roles. Army rangers for example played a key role and this would set the stage for future conflicts in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan where special forces would play key roles.

So post Grenada a lot of things happened. First off, the US troops won and this showed the world that the US was still a force to be reckoned with, obviously. And everyone in the military know were also impressed on how the US were able to defeat Cuban opponents in the methods they did. I also think it restores moral in the American people in the military. The military had lost prestige after Vietnam, but invading a communist nation holding American school students hostage was something that everyone could get behind. Grenada also showed the Soviets what kind of president Reagan was. He was not going to sit by and let communism grow in his own back yard and had actively stomped it out. The Soviets and the rest of the world had to now acknowledge this American military/ geo-political comeback, comeback being used loosely here because the US was still fighting in the Cold War.

So in summery, many scholars don’t talk too much about Grenada but i think they should. It showed the world that Reagan and the US were going to actively increase its actions against communism while also restoring American moral in the military and restoring Military moral in itself. I believe the operations in Grenada directly show the way fighting would be done in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is small scale special force units, which the US had plenty of and were extremely lethal. The operations in Grenada, Panama, the first gulf war and Somalia directly affected how the US forces would fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing the outcome of those wars to light, but this all started with Grenada.

The geopolitical fallout was muted by Moscow's view of Cuba as the contact point for Grenadian matters and by Castro’s coolness toward the Coard-Austin leadership and his anger at Bishop’s death.

The Soviet position effectively recognised the Cuban party as the lead body on Grenadian affairs in the wider bloc, and the USSR’s principal intermediary, Soviet aid went via Cuba, with Moscow even asking that a plane to be provided by it be piloted by Cubans to play down any Soviet participation.

From the Cuban point of view. though exchanges continued after Havana's bitter October 20 denunciation of the previous day's events, the “Revo” had been all but written off in Havana as invasion loomed, with Cuba ruling intervention unnecessary against a regional force and futile against a US-led one.

While armed defence of the island against direct US invasion may always have been a military non-starter, to Castro the events of October 19 made such action in aid of the regime politically indefensible too, as he told Cuban representatives to communicate to the new leaders on October 23:

the unfortunate developments in Grenada render the useless sacrifice entailed by the dispatching of such reinforcements in a struggle against the United States morally impossible before our people and the world.

It’s against this background that the modest Cold War repercussions need to be seen. In Cuban eyes Bishop’s death had fatally undermined the revolution: “Only a miracle of common sense, equanimity and wisdom on the part of the Grenadian revolutionaries... can still save the process”. And while less personally invested in the charismatic Bishop, Moscow took care not to diverge from the Cuban line.

Any "messaging" consequence was thus constrained by Soviet deference to Cuban perspectives and Cuban estrangement from Bishop's successors, coupled with calculation that Grenada could not be held against a US onslaught: the signalling of might through conquest by a superpower of 230 million of a developing island nation of 100,000 already written off militarily by its key ally was inevitably a limited affair.

The contemporary Cuban statements are reproduced in Institute of Caribbean Studies, Documents on the invasion of Grenada (Caribbean Monthly Bulletin supplement no.1, Oct 1983), University of Puerto Rico: the wider context is discussed in Jiri Valenta, Grenada and Soviet/Cuban policy: internal crisis and US/OECS intervention, Westview 1986.