Is there any element of American foreign policy that has failed more abjectly than our embargo of Cuba?
So begins two-time Pulitzer winner Nicholas Kristof in
this column in today's New York Times. He responds to critics like the bipartisan pair of Cuban-American senators, Menendez and Rubio by wondering why they think a policy that has failed for half a century might conceivable look good at the end of a full century.
He then writes
We probably helped keep the Castro regime in power by giving it a scapegoat for its economic and political failures. Look around the world, and the hard-line antique regimes that have survived — Cuba and North Korea — are those that have been isolated and sanctioned. Why do we think that isolating a regime is punishing it, rather than protecting it?
This leads to an exploration, one that considers the old Soviet Union, China under the Communists, and now North Korea as well. Kristof has direct experience with the first two, visiting the USSR as a law student, and having lived in China for a number of years.
Please keep reading.
Here are a couple of pointed, brief paragraphs:
Sometimes the power of weaponry fades next to the power of mockery
Our economic embargo hurt ordinary Cubans, reducing their living standards, without damaging Cuban elites. The embargo kept alive the flames of leftism in Latin America, creating a rallying cry for anti-imperialists.
The second of those two quotes can be broadly applied elsewhere. For just one example, consider the impact of sanction upon Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It did not topple his government, and it cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. I remember Madeline Albright being asked if that cost of lives was worth it and answering in the affirmative and feeling my stomach turn.
The notion of economic sanctions is that it is supposed to cause enough pain that the nation will change its behavior in some fashion in which we the US and those allies we persuade to follow our example approve. That presumes that either the elites will suffer, or that there will be a rising up of the large mass of population. But the latter is impossible in a police state and/or military dictatorship and too often the former simply take an increasing percentage of the shrinking economic pie and blame the US for the economic troubles of their society.
Rather than isolation, more contact with more economically advance societies forces repressive societies to at least loosen economically as a price for maintaining political control. No, the people may not experience democracy as we think of it (but then against it is not clear that we are really experiencing democracy either), but at least their lives are not so barren.
Consider these two paragraphs from Kristof:
Yet these encounters are if not lethal, at least corrosive. China has become less monolithic because of its interactions with the world. There’s no political pluralism in China, but there is economic and cultural pluralism. Maoist days are forever gone.
Likewise, I’m struck how often North Korean defectors have told me that they had a change of heart simply by visiting China or Russia and seeing themselves patronized as backward.
Think what the attitude would be if they experienced the wealth of the average European or North American. Think how sanctions, including bans on travel, make that impossible.
Kristof is not saying lifting sanctions is a magical solution, or that sanctions are never warranted. nor am I.
But I point out several things.
First, we put an embargo on Japan on scrap metal and oil as a result of its already aggressive actions, and got Pearl Harbor in return. While I am a Quaker, I have to wonder as a student of history if drawing military lines and being prepared might not have been a better course.
Second, given the economic turmoil now happening in Russia, and given that it still has a rather larger military, am I the only one who worries that Putin and company might not resort to some additional military endeavor as a means of diverting his people's attention from their failing economics situation?
After all, look how long the American people were diverted from considering what was happening to them by our continuation of two extended wars, and the expansion of our use of military and intelligence power to many other nations in the name of combating terrorism.
Perhaps there is a different way to change repressive societies.
Seeing people who are different than their government portrays them undermines the myth the government seeks to perpetuate. I remember reading that when the USSR showed the film "Grapes of Wrath" to try to persuade its people how bad things were in the US, the reaction of many was to note how many Americans, even poor ones, had access to cars and trucks.
Kristof notes a similar reaction by North Koreans, who were warned about the dangers over-eating with a fable about a man who exploded from eating too much rice, and would
stare at the rare visiting foreigner, especially anyone a bit rotund, with a transparent range of emotions: jealousy, awe, and perhaps a bit of wariness in case of detonation.
Kristof thinks exposing those in repressive societies where economics are hard can be more effective in creating positive change for the people of those societies than can be sanctions, which is why he ends his column thusly:
So bravo for the new Cuba policy. Sending in gunmen to liberate the Bay of Pigs failed. Maybe we’ll do better with swarms of diplomats, tourists and investors. Preferably plump.