Matt Yglesias

US-Cuba Warming Under Way

Back during the campaign, Barack Obama’s “naive and irresponsible” pledge to engage in constructive diplomacy with “bad guy” nations was primarily debated in terms of Iran. So far, however, it seems to be having its greatest impact in Latin America. I’ve written previously about the infamous handshake with Hugo Chavez and earlier this week the US and Cuba agreed to resume talks on migration and postal issues. Now it seems that the Organization of American States is getting ready to reinvite Cuba to join the organization, another important step toward moving beyond the Cold War in Latin America.

Obviously, a lot of substantive issues remain, including the main elements of the US-backed embargo of Cuba and the continuing Castro-run dictatorship on the island. But we seem to have gotten to a point where both sides are trying to improve the relationship, rather than looking for pretexts over which to fight. And that’s a good thing.

Change on Cuba Policy

Obama administration announced some steps today to begin moving our Cuba policy in a more sensible direction:

– Lift all restrictions on transactions related to the travel of family members to Cuba.

– Remove restrictions on remittances to family members in Cuba.

– Authorize U.S. telecommunications network providers to enter into agreements to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite telecommunications facilities linking the United States and Cuba.

– License U.S. telecommunications service providers to enter into roaming service agreements with Cuba’s telecommunications service providers.

– License U.S. satellite radio and satellite television service providers to engage in transactions necessary to provide services to customers in Cuba.

– License persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to activate and pay U.S. and third-country service providers for telecommunications, satellite radio and satellite television services provided to individuals in Cuba.

– Authorize the donation of certain consumer telecommunication devices without a license.

– Add certain humanitarian items to the list of items eligible for export through licensing exceptions.

What they’ve done here, pretty clearly, is tightly target those measures where a clear case can be made that relaxing restrictions does much more to weaken the regime than anything else. That’s clever politics and probably a smart start. But the plain fact of the matter is that the whole embargo is based on faulty logic. Making the Cuban population as poor as possible isn’t going to bring democracy to the island, and the idea that a more prosperous Cuba could somehow become so prosperous as to pose a security threat to the United States is ridiculous. A Communist economy running without subsidies from the USSR is bound to be pretty poor no matter what, but there’s no reason for us to contribute to the situation.

Passover and Sanctions

Daniel Drezner has a nice list of things Passover can teach us about international relations including this key point:

Sanctions against an autocratic regime will rarely yield significant concessions. To get the Pharaoh to let the Jews go, God imposes an escalating series of sanctions against Egypt. These sanctions crippled Egyptian agriculture, health, sanitation and, er, sunlight, inflicting great suffering against the Egyptian people. Not until the first-born male children are killed, however, does Pharaoh relent for a sufficiently long time for the Egyptians to make their escape. Not coincidentally, that plague is the only one to truly hurt the autocrat personally, as his son was killed in the plague as well. Compellence strategies would seem to have a greater chance of success if they target autocratic elites.

This is part of the reason that Ta-Nehisi Coates is right to slam Rep Bobby Rush for getting so lovey-dovey with Fidel Castro. The sanctions policy against Cuba is horribly misguided and has taken a terrible toll on innocent Cubans. But Castro personally is a dictator and a bad guy, and insofar as it’s possible to be hard on him personally rather than inflicting collective punishment on the entire population one should do so. I think there’s a limited amount that can be accomplished in this regard, but saying things like “It was almost like listening to an old friend” is not a promising start.

Bob Menendez Holds Climate Policy Hostage to Cuba Embargo

Someone was telling me about this yesterday and I didn’t quite get what I was being told, but Senator Robert Menendez is holding up two of Barack Obama’s key climate/science appointees, John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, over an unrelated Cuba policy dispute:

The delay — which could end quickly if Menendez dropped his objection or Senate leaders pushed for a floor vote that would require 60 votes to pass — has alarmed environmentalists and scientific experts who strongly back Holdren and Lubchenco.

“Climate change damages our oceans more every day we fail to act,” said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist for the advocacy group Oceana. “We need these two supremely qualified individuals on the job yesterday.”

Kate Sheppard notes that just last year Menendez thought climate change was “incredibly important.” But apparently not as important as defending America’s insane Cuba policy status quo.

Meanwhile, I would note that even more than the filibuster, the “hold” process in the Senate is an absurd procedural bottleneck that could and should be done away with. People sometimes wonder what the hold rule is, and nobody even really knows. When I was an intern in Chuck Schumer’s office the idea of putting a hold on someone came up, and the office had to scramble to figure out what it means. Turns out that it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just an insane convention that Senate leaders agree to uphold and that Senators as a whole conspire to put in place. But it’s ridiculous. Irrespective of the details of one’s views on Holdren or Cuba it clearly does not serve the general interest to let random appointees be held up by random Senators for no real reason. All it does, ultimately, is feed the egomania and power-lust that seems to afflict every single senator. But it’s time for some members of the body to put their substantive policy commitments ahead of their wacky perks of office and start pushing for the kind of substantial procedural reforms that will make it possible for the Senate to tackle major issues in a serious way.

Relatedly, it’s annoying to read things about how it “would require 60 votes to pass” a resolution confirming these nominees. If you look through United States history, plenty of bills and plenty of nominees have been passed with more than 49 but fewer than 60 votes. Similarly, in the pre-seventies era of the 67-person cloture vote plenty of bills passed with fewer than 67 votes. Throughout the nineteenth century it required unanimity to break a filibuster, but that didn’t mean that bills all passes unanimously. It also “requires” 60 votes to pass things if we accept the premise that the filibuster should be used routinely. That has not, however, been the historical understanding of the filibuster. The speed with which Washington has accepted the idea of a routine supermajority requirement is a little bit frightening as it was just a few years ago that this started to be put into place.

Senator Richard Lugar Calls for New Approach to Cuba

Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) has long been a voice of reason on foreign policy issues. And now via Steve Clemons, I see an important new report titled “CHANGING CUBA POLICY — IN THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL INTEREST” (PDF) that his staff has prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on which he serves as ranking minority member. The opening:

Economic sanctions are a legitimate tool of U.S. foreign policy, and they have sometimes achieved their aims, as in the case of apartheid South Africa.

After 47 years, however, the unilateral embargo on Cuba has failed to achieve its stated purpose of “bringing democracy to the Cuban people,” while it may have been used as a foil by the regime to demand further sacrifices from Cuba’s impoverished population.

The current U.S. policy has many passionate defenders, and their criticism of the Castro regime is justified. Nevertheless, we must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.

This is not much more than common sense, but in political terms it’s extremely bold. I can only hope that Senator Kerry and the Obama administration will show some boldness of their own and work toward implementing the sort of approach Lugar is talking about.

We Gon’ Eschew Bacardi Like It’s the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution

Well, okay, I’m not my grandfather so I wouldn’t actually advise that people join Fidel Castro in celebrating 50 years of Communism for Cuba. But America’s policy toward Cuba is still dumb and immoral. What’s more, Neil Sinhababu points out to us that Baccardi Rum is controlled by Cuban exiles who give money to rightwing politicians to help endlessly entrench these policies:

He suggests as an alternative Flor de Caña, a Nicaraguan brand.

Clinton-Obama: The Policy Substance

Almost everything I’ve read about Hillary Clinton going to the State Department has focused on the personal reconciliation between the two people. Which is nice. And, indeed, crucially important in an effective Secretary of State. But what I’d like to hear more about is the policy agenda. All Elizabeth Bumiller’s New York Times piece says is this:

Substantively, the two were at odds over the Iraq war — Mrs. Clinton voted to authorize it and Mr. Obama said he would have opposed it had he been in the Senate then — and to a lesser extent over negotiations with Iran. But although Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Obama for being willing to sit down and talk to dictators, he has said he would have a lower-level envoy do preparatory work for a meeting with Iran’s leaders first. Mrs. Clinton has said she favors robust diplomacy with Iran and lower-level contacts as well.

This idea that a relatively small disagreement about diplomacy with Iran was their only disagreement during the primaries is widespread, but strikes me as something of a mutually convenient myth. The Iran thing really was an example of an issue where the disagreement seemed to generate more heat than light. But they had a related, and more clear-cut, disagreement about Cuba policy with Obama indicating a desire to soften the hard line that prevailed through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations while Clinton indicated a desire to stick with the status quo. Obama wholeheartedly embraced the Shultz/Perry/Kissinger/Nunn nuclear disarmament agenda while Clinton was more equivocal. Obama implicitly criticized the Clinton administration for waiting until its waning days to really buckle down on the Arab-Israeli conflict. They disagreed about whether the US should join the international treaty to ban cluster bombs.

None of it is earth-shattering stuff, but there was a consistent trajectory to these disagreements, and Obama was on the right side of them. People who supported Obama in the primary — or who voted for the Democratic candidate in November — are going to be looking for assurance that adding Clinton to his team, or having a Republican run the Pentagon, doesn’t indicate a desire to move away from the course he outlined.

Department of Outlandish Hypotheticals

I’ll admit that I’ve really slacked off in terms of reading New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz’s blog. And now that I have a chance to glance at it, I think he’s deliberately being dumb to keep me on my toes. For example, yesterday he wrote “Imagine for a moment that the United States has mounted an attack on Mexico or Cuba, truly an unimaginable act.”

Unimaginable indeed. Except the United States has invaded both Mexico and Cuba in the past, multiple times each. Indeed, at this very day the United States maintains a large military installation on Cuban soil despite the objections of the Cuban government. And that installation is the legacy of decades of colonial domination of Cuba by the United States. And when America’s preferred proxy ruler of Cuba was overthrown by a new dictator, we tried several times to overthrow his government — once sponsoring an invasion — and have subjected the country to a devastating embargo for decades in an effort to keep him out of power.

Now nothing in America’s fairly long history of shabby acts toward our “near abroad” comes close to justifying Russia’s bad actions in its near abroad. But they do provide the necessary context of fairly banal great power politics rather than terrifying and unprecedented expansionism.