In perhaps his boldest foreign policy move during his presidency, Barack Obama Wednesday announced that he intends to establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba.
While the president noted that he lacked the authority to lift the 54-year-old trade embargo against Havana, he issued directives that will permit more American citizens to travel there and third-country subsidiaries of US companies to engage in commerce. Other measures include the launching a review of whether Havana should remain on the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” The president also said he looked forward to engaging Congress in “an honest and serious debate about lifting the embargo.”
“In the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” said Obama in a nationally televised announcement.
“Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.”
The announcement, which was preceded by a secret, 45-minute telephone conversation Tuesday morning between Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, drew both praise from those who have long argued that Washington’s pursuit of Cuba’s isolation has been a total failure and bitter denunciations from right-wing Republicans. Some of them vowed, among other things, to oppose any effort to lift the embargo, open the US embassy in Havana, or confirm a US ambassador to serve there. (Washington has had an Interest Section in the Cuban capital since 1977.)
“Today’s announcement initiating a dramatic change in US policy is just the latest in a long line of failed attempts by President Obama to appease rogue regimes at all costs,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of a number of fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American lawmakers and a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
“I intend to use my role as incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee to make every effort to block this dangerous and desperate attempt by the President to burnish his legacy at the Cuba people’s expense,” he said in a statement. “Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté during his final two years in office.”
The outgoing Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, also decried Obama’s announcement. “The United States has just thrown the Cuban regime an economic lifeline,” he said.
“With the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, Cuba is losing its main benefactor, but will now receive the support of the United States, the greatest democracy in the world,” said Menendez, who is also Cuban-American.
But other lawmakers hailed the announcement.
Today President Obama and President Raul Castro made history,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat and one of three lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, who escorted Alan Gross, a US Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, from Havana Wednesday morning as part of a larger prisoner and spy swap that precipitated the announcement.
“Those who cling to a failed policy (and) …may oppose the President’s actions have nothing to offer but more of the same. That would serve neither the interests of the United States and its people, nor of the Cuban people,” Leahy said. “It is time for a change.”
Other analysts also lauded Obama’s Wednesday’s developments, comparing them to historic breakthroughs with major foreign policy consequences.
“Obama has chosen to change the entire framework of the relationship, as (former President Richard) Nixon did when he travelled to China,” said William LeoGrande, a veteran Cuba scholar at American University, in an email from Havana. “Many issues remain to be resolved, but the new direction of US policy is clear.”
Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based hemispheric think tank that has long urged Washington to normalize ties with Havana, told IPS the regional implications would likely be very positive.
“Obama’s decision will be cheered and applauded throughout Latin America,” he said.
“The Cuba issue has sharply divided Washington from the rest of the hemisphere for decades, and this move, long overdue, goes a long way towards removing a key major source of irritation in US-Latin American relations,” Shifter said.
Obama also announced Wednesday that he will attend the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. Castro had also been officially invited, over the objections of both the US and Canada, at the last Summit in Cartagena in 2012, so there had been some speculation that Obama might boycott the proceedings.
Harvard international relations expert Stephen Walt said he hoped that Wednesday’s announcement portends additional bold moves by Obama on the world stage in his last two years as president despite the control of both houses of Congress by Republicans.
“One may hope that this decision will be followed by renewed efforts to restore full diplomatic relations with even more important countries, most notably Iran,” he told IPS in an email.
“Recognition does not imply endorsing a foreign government’s policies; it simply acknowledges that U.S. interests are almost always well served by regular contact with allies and adversaries alike,” he said.
Administration officials told reporters that Wednesday’s developments were made possible by 18 months of secret talks between senior official from both sides—not unlike those carried out in Oman between the US and Iran prior to their landmark November 2013 agreement with five other world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Officials credited Pope Francis, an Argentine, with a key role in prodding both parties toward an accord.
“The Holy Father wishes to express his warm congratulations for the historic decision taken by the Governments of the United States of America and Cuba to establish diplomatic relations, with the aim of overcoming, in the interest of the citizens of both countries, the difficulties which have marked their recent history,” the Vatican said in a statement Wednesday.
The Vatican’s strong endorsement could mute some of the Republican and Cuban-American criticism of normalization and make it more difficult for Rubio and his colleagues to prevent the establishment of an embassy and appointment of an ambassador, according to some Capitol Hill staff.
Similarly, major US corporations, some of whom, particularly in the agribusiness and consumer goods sectors, have seen major market potential in Cuba, are likely to lobby their allies on the Republican side.
“We deeply believe that an open dialogue and commercial exchange between the US and Cuban private sectors will bring shared benefits, and the steps announced today will go a long way in allowing opportunities for free enterprise to flourish,” said Thomas Donohue, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in a statement. Donohue headed what he called an unprecedented “exploratory” trip to Cuba earlier this year.
“Congress now has a decision to make,” said Jake Colvin, the vice president for global trade issues at the National Foreign Trade Council, an association of many of the world’s biggest multi-national corporations. “It can either show that politics stops at the water’s edge, or insist that the walls of the Cold War still exist.”
Wednesday’s announcement came in the wake of an extraordinary series of editorials by the New York Times through this autumn in favour of normalization and the lifting of the trade embargo.
In another sign of a fundamental shift here, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill took some steps to ease the embargo during his tenure as president, disclosed in her book published last summer that she had urged Obama to “take another look at our embargo. It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”
That stance, of course, could alienate some Cuban-American opinion, especially in the critical “swing state” of Florida if Clinton runs in the 2016 election. But recent polls of Cuban-Americans have suggested an important generational change in attitudes toward Cuba and normalization within the Cuban-American community, with the younger generation favoring broader ties with their homeland.
Photo: Alan Gross talks with President Obama onboard a government plane headed back to the US, Dec. 17, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
]]>by Jim Lobe
As some readers may recall, I wrote a long essay shortly after last July’s military coup d’etat against Egypt’s democratically elected Morsi government on differing attitudes within the neoconservative movement toward the coup and democracy itself. Given the complete lack of consensus among leading neocons as to how [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
As some readers may recall, I wrote a long essay shortly after last July’s military coup d’etat against Egypt’s democratically elected Morsi government on differing attitudes within the neoconservative movement toward the coup and democracy itself. Given the complete lack of consensus among leading neocons as to how the U.S. should react to the coup — indeed, the fact that most neocons favored the coup and urged Washington to maintain its military assistance to the coupists — I concluded, contrary to conventional wisdom and the way that neocons have often sought to depict themselves, that “democracy promotion can’t possibly be considered a core principle of neoconservatism.” I followed that up a month later with a short post noting how the two “princelings” of the neoconservative movement and co-founders of both the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and its successor organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol, had themselves split on the issue, with Kristol (citing Israel’s position) expressing doubt about the wisdom of cutting military aid, and Kagan demanding that it be cut.
Kristol hasn’t had much to say about Egypt recently, but Kagan came out in yesterday’s Washington Post with a stunning denunciation (also featured on FPI’s website) not only of continuing U.S. military aid for Egypt, but also of lobbying by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Congress for continuing that assistance AND of Israel’s support for the regime. The op-ed, entitled “A Partnership That Damages the U.S.”, is particularly critical of Israel’s attitude toward both Egypt and democracy in the region, something that the ironically named (and Likudist) Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) may wish to consider. Here are the relevant paragraphs:
Many members of Congress also believe that by backing the Egyptian military they are helping Israel, which, through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has actively lobbied Congress for full restoration of military aid. Even though the Morsi government did not pull out of the Camp David Accords or take actions hostile to Israel, the mere presence of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt frightened the Israeli government.
To Israel, which has never supported democracy anywhere in the Middle East except Israel, the presence of a brutal military dictatorship bent on the extermination of Islamism is not only tolerable but desirable. Perhaps from the standpoint of a besieged state like Israel, this may be understandable. A friendly observer might point out that in the end Israel may get the worst of both worlds: a new Egyptian jihadist movement brought into existence by the military’s crackdown and a military government in Cairo that, playing to public opinion, winds up turning against Israel anyway.
Israel has to be the judge of its own best interests. But so does the United States. In Egypt, U.S. interests and Israel’s perceptions of its own interests sharply diverge. If one believes that any hope for moderation in the Arab world requires finding moderate voices not only among secularists but also among Islamists, America’s current strategy in Egypt is producing the opposite result. If one believes, as President Obama once claimed to, that it is important to seek better understanding between the United States and the Muslim world and to avoid or at least temper any clash of civilizations, then again this policy is producing the opposite result. [Emphasis added.]
It’s really a remarkable column that deserves to be read in full because of its very trenchant critique of Obama’s policy as well. If only it represented a preponderance of neoconservative opinion, which it unfortunately doesn’t.
Kagan is writing in the context of a whole lot of bad human-rights news coming out of Egypt in recent weeks in spite of which the Obama administration approved the delivery of 10 Apache helicopters, the transfer of which was held up by a partial suspension of military aid to the regime last fall. Since then, Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chairs the key Senate subcommittee that oversees foreign aid appropriations, has called for halting all military aid, including those items, like the helicopters, that are supposedly earmarked for “counter-terrorism.” As noted by Kagan, AIPAC is lobbying on behalf of the Netanyahu government against such a cut-off.
Indeed, for AIPAC’s (and Israel’s) talking points, you need look no further than a policy analysis entitled, “Resuming Military Aid to Egypt: A Strategic Imperative”, published this week by Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank spun off by AIPAC in the 1980s but still very much in the lobby group’s orbit. While Trager predictably deplores the abuses that have taken place, he argues, dubiously, that somehow the military is not accountable for them because of the “severely fractured …competing power centers” that supposedly characterize the Egyptian state at the moment. He goes on:
]]>…[W]ithholding aid could still jeopardize Washington’s ability to ensure Egypt’s longer-term cooperation. For one thing, Russia is trying to expand its influence in the Middle East by selling weapons to Cairo, and various Persian Gulf states — which have sent billions in aid to keep the current Egyptian government afloat — are strongly supporting Moscow’s efforts. Moreover, after years of refusing to do so, the Egyptian military has been actively fighting Sinai-based jihadists since September, so withholding aid now would send a very confusing message about Washington’s strategic priorities. The United States also stands to lose other strategic benefits if the aid is withheld, including overflight rights and preferred access to the Suez Canal.
Leahy also noted that he won’t accept the argument that the federal government can’t afford to financially assist rebuilding efforts in states that have been hit hard by the hurricane when billions have been spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Well, we don’t have all the figures in yet. It will be costly. You know, it’ll be a big burden for a state of only 660,000 people. So we will need federal disaster area. But we’re not the only ones. Every state hit from the Carolinas up are going to feel it.
Now I take it with a bit of a grain of salt, some of the debate on whether we could afford, as a nation, the money for this. We’ve spent — we’re spending several billion dollars a week in Afghanistan. We spend billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, a war we never should have been in.
Now if we can spend, well, eventually amount to several trillion dollars in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then say, well, we can’t afford to help Americans in America? No, I can’t accept that, and I can’t imagine anybody that could.
His comments are particularly piercing when considering a report released earlier this month by the International Crisis Group which says that violence is currently at its worse in Afghanistan since the 2001 war began and that
The report authors also argue that there is “no possibility” that “any amount of international assistance to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will stabilise the country” before 2014 when most foreign forces will have withdrawn “unless there are significant changes in international strategies, priorities and programs.”
]]>Leahy, a Democrat and senior member of the U.S. Senate, wants assistance withheld from the Israel Navy’s Shayetet 13 unit, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the Israel Air Force’s Shaldag unit.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a long-time friend of Leahy’s, met with him in Washington two weeks ago to try to persuade him to withdraw the initiative.
According to a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem, Leahy began promoting the legislation in recent months after he was approached by voters in his home state of Vermont.
That same day Ben Smith from Politico posted part of an email from a spokesperson for Leahy who noted that:
By way of general background about the Leahy Amendment, the law applies to U.S. aid to foreign security forces around the globe and is intended to be applied consistently across the spectrum of U.S. military aid abroad. Under the law the State Department is responsible for evaluations and enforcement decisions and over the years Senator Leahy has pressed for faithful and consistent application of the law.
Concludes Smith:
Whatever the facts behind the story and however this plays out, Leahy’s official response to the article is not surprising. But his initiative proves that there are still some congress members that are willing to resist the powerful “Israel Lobby” especially when Israel continues to defy the U.S despite it’s generous annual aid.
]]>