President Obama’s outreach to Cuba is simply a product of his leftist ideology and rewards an oppressive communist regime while gaining nothing for the United States, according to former U.S. Ambassador to the United States John Bolton.
On Wednesday, as he confirmed a prisoner swap with Cuba, Obama declared that our 53-year-old policy of severed diplomatic relations and an economic and travel embargo aimed at the Castro regime was a failure and bore considerable blame for the poor relations between the two nations and for the impoverished state of the Cuban people. Obama then announced negotiations designed to resume normal diplomatic relations and called on Congress to lift economic and travel embargoes aimed at Cuba.
Bolton wholeheartedly rejects Obama’s narrative.
“It’s a very bad decision. It’s highly ideological. It comes from a leftist perspective that the president expressed in his remarks explaining the new policy. He believes that we are as much responsible for our disagreements with Cuba as the communist regime in Havana is,” said Bolton.
“It is an ideological tick and the president has given political legitimacy to the Castro regime. He’s thrown them an economic lifeline and gotten essentially nothing in return,” he added.
Bolton says Cuba will not interpret this shift as an imperative to respect the human rights of its people. Instead, he says the Castros see it as nothing more than a badly needed infusion of money.
“What they wanted was a little relief temporarily. It’s no indication they’re going to change fundamentally or that any other of these regimes will change as well. In fact, the signal that is sent internationally is that if you’re an adversary of the United States and you want something from us, you’ve got the next two years to get it,” said Bolton.
According to Bolton, Obama is actually limited in what he can do on his own. In the 1990s, Congress codified the trade and travel embargoes, meaning lawmakers would have to reverse them as well. Bolton stresses, however, that the damage extends far beyond those policies.
“The damage comes from the signal it sends to foreign governments. Basically, the embargo was an important political signal to people to say, ‘Don’t get too close to Cuba or you’re going to have consequences in your relationship with the United States.’ Now the signal from Obama is that we don’t care and I think that will benefit Cuba enormously from investment elsewhere in the hemisphere, from Europe, from China, from Russia,” said Bolton.
In addition to his time representing the United States at the UN, Bolton also served in the State Department. He says the U.S. has always employed a longstanding rule of dealing with adversaries that Obama seems to be ignoring.
“Negotiation is not an end in itself. This issue is does the outcome of the negotiation benefit the United States,” he said.
Bolton says throughout the Cold War, Republican and Democratic presidents usually engaged the Soviets only when the conditions tilted in America’s favor. He believes Obama has the wind at his back in this situation but insists on the U.S. getting the raw end of the deal.
“The Obama administration has negotiated in case after case from a position of strength and giving everything away,” said Bolton.
Other statements offered as facts in Obama’s speech on Wednesday also frustrate Bolton, who alleges they’re just not true. First, he disputes Obama’s contention that the embargo against Cuba has failed.
“I believe the embargo has been a success. It was never designed to overthrow the Castro regime. It was put in in 1959. If that were the objective, why did President Eisenhower plan and President Kennedy implement in 1961 what became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was obviously designed to overthrow Castro. If they thought the embargo was going to do that, they needn’t have planned the invasion,” said Bolton.
Another issue that rankles Bolton was Obama’s multiple mentions of Cuban animosity toward the U.S. because our history of colonizing it. He says history proves that never happened.
“He referred to American colonialism, which would be news to President McKinley and others in 1898 who fought with the Cuban people against Spain to liberate Cuba,” said Bolton.
Bolton says this effort to re-establish diplomatic ties also encourages more of the world’s bad actors, including Cuba’s Marxist friends in Venezuela and the Russians, who were already looking to revive it’s military presence on the island that played host to the greatest threat of nuclear war in the twentieth century.
“All of this signals that the administration is not going to push back on that,” he said.
While Obama paints diplomatic relations and canceled embargoes as the path to infusing Cuba with democratic ideals, Bolton says all this policy will do is increase the likelihood for repression to continue once the Castros are dead.
“I think it gives this dreary, authoritarian regime a lifeline to perpetuate itself, to become, after the Castros die, another Latin American dreary, authoritarian government. I really hoped that when they met the actuarial tables, that you’d have the possibility of a real representative government in Cuba. I think that has now been pushed way off into the future, which is why it’s not only bad from the U.S. perspective. It’s bad from the perspective of the Cuban people,” said Bolton.
