The Republican response to President Barack Obama's historic opening toward Cuba this week has generally been awful and dispiriting to behold. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for example, was the politician most single-handedly responsible for the United States re-establishing diplomatic relations with still-communist Vietnam two decades ago, saying at the time:
"Instead of vainly trying to isolate Vietnam, the United States should test the proposition that greater exposure to Americans will render Vietnam more susceptible to the influence of our values. Vietnam's human rights record needs substantial improvement. We should make good use of better relations with the Vietnamese to help advance in that country a decent respect for the rights of man."
What does McMaverick say now, with his co-conspirator Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)?
"It is about the appeasement of autocratic dictators, thugs, and adversaries, diminishing America's influence in the world."
The gap in both the writing and sentiment in those two passages speaks volumes about how far GOP foreign-policy thinking has degenerated over time. (It also speaks to McCain's own 100% malleability on key issues—back in 2000 he said "I'm not in favor of sticking my finger in the eye of Fidel Castro. In fact, I would favor a road map towards normalization of relations such as we presented to the Vietnamese and led to a normalization of relations between our two countries.")
Two senatorial exceptions to that rule have been Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has long advocated lifting the U.S. embargo, telling Reason TV in 2011 that "If someone's going to limit my travel, it should be a communist, not my own government”; and also Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who came out in qualified support of Obama's actions yesterday.
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But Rubio and the GOP are wrong, and wildly so, about a number of their Obama-Cuba critiques. This move was not "appeasement"; increased American travel and remittances do not "only" serve "to benefit the regime," and this does not mark a retreat from fighting for the freedom of Cubans.
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But how, precisely, is this appeasement? The U.S. got one of its longtime intelligence operatives, plus an innocent-seeming human rights activist, out of Cuban prisons in exchange for three genuinely awful Cuban spies whose work was linked to the death of Americans. Now, that two-for-three swap is certainly unequal, and may indeed (as Rubio worries) incentivize bad actors to take innocent Americans hostage in the future, but as Israel for one can certainly testify, sometimes countries that genuinely value their own citizens' lives accept numerically and morally disproportionate prisoner exchanges. Frustrating, yes, but not definitionally appeasement. Should Reagan have left Nick Daniloff rot in Soviet prison just because he, too, was most likely a hostage?
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Rubio, to my knowledge, has never visited Cuba outside of the U.S.-controlled Guantanamo Bay facility. My 1998 experience of attempting to live in Havana convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that three of the most important and attainable things Cubans need, both for their basic human dignity and for their struggle against their totalitarian overlords, are 1) exposure to Americans; 2) increased access to non-governmental sources of money, and 3) increased access to information. Obama's moves help on all three fronts.
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Once upon a time, "appeasement" meant ceding the Sudetenland to an expansionist Adolf Hitler without even allowing Czechs a seat at the negotiating table. Now it somehow means a two-for-three prisoner swap, a slight easing on unconscionable restrictions against Americans, promises of 53 political prisoners being freed, the same diplomatic engagement the U.S. has had with Venezuela since 1835, and a net increase in individual Cuban latitude? Republicans not named Paul or Flake (or Amash) may want to start rethinking their hyperbole. Sadly, there's little reason to believe that they will.
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More:
http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/19/rand-paul-is-more-right-about-cuba-than
