Cuban Uprising Forecast of 2008: A Repost

 

Obama and US Foreign Polic 

Vincent J. Curtis                                                                                   10 December 2008 

            Throughout the election campaign, President-elect Obama claimed that he could make the world love America again.  All it will take is his charm, his personality, his rhetoric, his policies, and his inspirational leadership in the White House and America will be admired again by the world, unless you happen to be one of America’s partners in NAFTA.  Today, he announced that he would give a major speech in an Islamic capital in order to “reboot” America’s image in the Muslim world.

From Ahmadinejad of Iran, to Kim Jong Il of North Korea, to Chavez of Venezuela, Obama said he can soften the hard hearts of dictators, despots, and tyrants as President Bush and other conservative Republicans cannot.  To the democratically elected president of Columbia, Uribe, however, he maintains a hardened heart.

As senator, Obama gave a remarkable speech in February in which he said, in effect, that the world would be a safer place if America stopped developing and deploying new weapons and he became president.

            A tour of the north-east gate of Naval Station Guantanamo, and a little reflection, will quickly disabuse a thoughtful person of such possibilities.

            The north-east gate of Gitmo is the only land connection between the naval station and the Republic of Cuba.  It is one of the few check points remaining of the cold war.  Here you will see the watch towers, the armed guards, the wire, and the defenses.  Tension at this control point remains high.

            American forces on Gitmo pose no military threat to the Cuban regime, and the Cuban leadership is undoubtedly aware of this.   At the same time, it would be suicidal for the Cuban regime to attack Gitmo.  Yet Cuba still maintains a threatening posture at Gitmo.

            Anybody who knows the costs of military activity understands how expensive it is for the Cuban regime to keep tensions high at Gitmo.  The poor Cuban taxpayer and the straitened Cuban economy are forking over a lot of money for the regime to keep up a pretense; money that could be well spent improving the general welfare of the Cuban people.  Yet the Cuban regime persists, decade after decade, and president after president, Republican or Democrat.  Why?

            The answer is that the Castro regime needs justification to keep the Cuban people repressed.  While Fidel Castro may seem to be popular, he and his brother Raul, being tyrants, cannot trust anyone very much.  The Castro regime has to keep the Cuban people looking over their shoulders so that they won’t conspire and combine against it.  A near state of war against America provides justification for the activities of the secret police and for the sacrifices in money and freedom the Cuban people have made, apparently to defend themselves and their revolution, but really to protect Castro’s life and position as head of the Cuban state.

            But Cuba is a specific example of a general phenomenon.  The internal dynamics of tyrannies and despotisms make it necessary that a state of tension be maintained between these states and their neighbors; and between these states and the United States, since the hyperpower is the most convenient scapegoat in the world.  Maintaining a state of tension with foreign countries serves to protect the tyrant or the despot at home.  Tension abroad justifies intrusive security at home.

            Natan Sharansky, former Russian dissident and a former minister in the Israeli government, devoted his book The Case for Democracy to analysis of this phenomenon.  It was this book that encouraged President Bush to attempt to democratize Iraq after the war of 2003, and is the basis for a similiar policy in Afghanistan.

The situation at Gitmo with Cuba is but a specific example of the general case.  If the demon power wasn’t the United States, it would be Great Britain, or Israel.  Tyrants and despots need to maintain a tension at home akin to a war footing to protect their own lives, and in Cuba tension with the United States justifies the pressure at home.

            Since the tyrant and the despot fear a reduction in tension with the United States, the likelihood that the new personality in the White House will cause them to change their rhetoric or their policies against America is nil.  They fear for their own lives too much.  At best they will offer lip-service.

            The personality in the White House has little to do with whether America is liked or not by the rest of the world.  No president in recent years was more affable and more liberally forthcoming on the international arena than the Democrat centralist Bill Clinton.  Yet his liberality saw the rise of al-Qaeda, with all its acts of terrorism against America before 9/11.  His charm failed to create a Palestinian state; and his affability failed to stem the rise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.  The French regime of Jacques Chirac remained unmoved by the centrality of his politics, also for domestic reasons.

Personalities as widely different as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush cannot make the Syrians, the North Koreans, the Iranians, and radical Islamists love America, and Obama says he can.

            It is understandable that Americans want to be liked in the world, and to a certain extent they expect to be.  Yet widely, they are not.  The internal dynamics of many foreign states cannot permit their regimes to have good relations with the United States; in fact it is necessary to the survival of the regime that bad relations exist between the tyrant’s country and America.

            For that reason, Obama and his followers are likely to get a lesson from foreign policy on the limits of charm.  His winning personality in the White House is unlikely to move American relations with the rest of the world much for the better, for America is not the only country in the world with domestic interests.  A test of this thesis will come when the Castro regime falls utterly, and a new regime takes its place.

The next Cuban regime will have justify its existence by rapidly improving the economy of Cuba, as Raul Castro is already trying to do.  For that, better relations with America will be essential.  So no matter how crusty the American president happens to be, when the Castrol regime falls relations between Cuba and America will improve and tensions here will relax.

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Vincent J. Curtis is a free lance writer.  He has written on military affairs for several years, and  he toured the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January of this year.