Monday, January 5, 2015

Obama's Secret of Dealmaking: Ask For Nothing (instant on audio)

There's an old Cold War joke — pre-pantyhose — that to defeat communism we should empty our B-52 bombers of nuclear weapons and instead drop nylons over the Soviet Union. Flood the Russians with the soft consumer culture of capitalism, seduce them with contact and commerce, love-bomb them into freedom.
We did win the Cold War, but differently. We contained, constrained, squeezed and eventually exhausted the Soviets into giving up. The dissidents inside subsequently told us how much they were sustained by our support for them and our implacable pressure on their oppressors.
The logic behind President Obama's Cuba normalization, assuming there is one, is the nylon strategy. We tried 50 years of containment and that didn't bring democracy. So let's try inundating them with American goods, visitors, culture, contact, commerce.
It's not a crazy argument. But it has its weaknesses. Normalization has not advanced democracy in China or Vietnam. Indeed, it hasn't done so in Cuba.
Except for the U.S., Cuba has had normal relations with the rest of the world for decades. Tourists, trade, investment from Canada, France, Britain, Spain, everywhere. An avalanche of nylons — and not an inch of movement in Cuba toward freedom.
In fact, one could argue this influx of Western money helped preserve the dictatorship, as just about all financial transactions go through the government, which takes for itself before any trickle-down crumbs are allowed to reach the regime-indentured masses.
My view is that police-state control of every aspect of Cuban life is so thoroughly perfected that outside influences, whether confrontational or cooperative, only minimally affect the country's domestic trajectory.
So why not just lift the embargo? After all, the unassailable strategic rationale for isolating Cuba — in the Soviets' mortal global struggle with us, Cuba enlisted as a highly committed enemy beachhead 90 miles from American shores — evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet empire. A small island with no significant independent military capacities, Cuba became geopolitically irrelevant.
That's been partially reversed in the last few years as Vladimir Putin has repositioned Russia as America's leading geopolitical adversary and the Castros signed up for that coalition too.
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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