Obama’s Strategic Punt

There were myriad losers in the cold war waged between the United States and Cuba, but in the end there were two winners. Washington has seized the opportunity to win back Latin America’s trust.

Wars, whether cold or hot, usually end with one winner and one loser; sometimes they end with two losers. The cold war between the U.S. and Cuba that we hope just ended produced plenty of losers, but this time there were two winners.

Cuban leaders can in any case consider themselves winners in that they weren’t forced to give in to the demands of the last 10 U.S. presidents as preconditions to any rapprochement. Havana had always said dialogue as equals with mutual respect would permit talks about anything, but Fidel and Raul Castro probably didn’t believe this day would ever come — and now it’s here.

The Castro brothers’ victory doesn’t mean, however, that Barack Obama and the other side lost anything. What did the U.S. gain with the blockade against its little neighbor to the south? The more liberal wing of Obama’s party had been pushing for a gradual normalization of relations between the two nations for a long time. Obama acknowledged in his Wednesday speech that the decades-long economic embargo against Cuba didn’t help advance American interests, and blamed the Bush administration for the failures. It was a sober description of the current state of affairs and how that must change. It is thus a work plan for a president like Obama, whose policies are more pragmatic than they are ideological.

Global Strategic Interests Are At Stake

To Obama, Cuba itself — or even the relations between the U.S. and Cuba — are at best marginal considerations. The $1.2 billion the Commerce Department figures the U.S. lost because of the blockade is a negligible sum. The one-party system to which Cuba’s communist government holds fast is viewed by the U.S. as a nuisance, but by no means a threat to America’s interests in the region, since not even the Castro brothers’ greatest admirers agree with them on this point.

If the island is seen in the cold light of day as so insignificant for the U.S., why is Obama at this late stage in his tenure willing to engage in a fight with Congress over Cuba? He just went through a fight over immigration reform that strained his powers to the utmost. Why would he want to risk a second confrontation with the neoconservative hardliners who are convinced that the Helms-Burton law authorizing the Cuban blockade was right all along?

The answer is the same as it is in the case of undocumented aliens: Because global strategic interests are at stake. Latin America, an indispensable source of raw materials as well as a consumer of U.S. goods, no longer sees itself as America’s backyard. That process, initially ignited by the 1959 Cuban revolution, has taken on new qualities since the turn of the new century.

Responsibility for that change is partly due to the Bush administration’s obsession with the war on terror, which resulted in America’s southern neighbors being ignored. Even more important than that is the rise of China. With no presence to speak of as yet in Mexico, China has nevertheless replaced the United States as the most important trade partner and — whenever necessary — the biggest source of cash for Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and other nations in the region.

The majority leftist regimes in South America, whose citizens have time and again elected them, have become immune to the financial blackmail maneuvers from Washington so common in the 1990s, and they value their newly discovered freedom. Those seeking a comparable emancipation movement will have to reach back to the decolonization movement in Africa.

If the United States seeks — even over the medium term — to regain the ground it has lost, it will first have to prove itself to again be a trustworthy partner. That’s where the Cuban immigrants and Cuba itself come into play. Governments in Latin America — and not only the left-most of them — have devised a litmus test for the United States: If Raul Castro is not invited to the America Summit next spring, the others will boycott it and cause the meeting — which is open only to representative democracies — to fail. This time it’s more than symbolism; it’s about principle.

Obama had to deliver twice, and he did so as promised. He has relieved his nation and his continent from a heavy burden. If that’s not an Obama victory, what is it?