RIGHT ON THE MONEY AS FAR AS THE BAD OBAMA USA-CUBA DEAL! FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE: Can Obama’s One-Sided Cuba Deal Be Salvaged? - By Will Inboden - In its negotiations with Cuba, the Obama administration made two fundamental mistakes. First, the White House failed to realize that it holds a much stronger negotiating hand than Havana. The Castro regime is at arguably its weakest and most vulnerable point in over 50 years, as it faces the loss of its petroleum patronage from a fragile Venezuela buffeted by $60 per barrel oil prices. This is a dictatorship desperate to survive. Yet instead of capitalizing on America’s substantial leverage to gain meaningful Cuban concessions, the Obama administration made its second mistake of communicating to the Castro regime that Washington was more desperate for a deal than Havana. The savvy Cubans realized this. The result is an agreement in which the United States grants to Havana substantial political and economic advantages, while Havana concedes pretty much nothing. (This is setting aside the prisoner swap, which is a separate matter and could have been undertaken as a confidence-building measure prior to diplomatic negotiations on the overall relationship). Judging by President Obama’s comparisons to past American policy shifts towards China and Vietnam, it is also a failure to understand history. In both cases, China and Vietnam had undertaken substantial reforms in their foreign and economic policies before the United States normalized the respective bilateral relationships. It was based on these demonstrated improvements that the United States could reciprocate with diplomatic upgrades and closer economic ties. In the case of China, Nixon’s historic 1972 visit cemented China’s status as a strategic partner aligned with the U.S. in the Cold War contest against the Soviet Union. Then in 1978, Deng Xiaoping launched his historic economic reforms. The geopolitical shift in China’s external behavior, and Deng’s internal reforms, both occurred prior to America’s official normalization of the U.S.-China relationship (though the normalization negotiations were undertaken as Deng’s reforms were unfolding). Likewise with Vietnam, which launched its pivotal Doi Moi economic liberalization reforms in 1986, nearly a decade before the Clinton administration normalized the U.S.-Vietnam relationship. CLICK LINK FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE! foreignpolicy/2014/12/23/can-obamas-one-sided-cuba-deal-be-salvaged/
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 02:45:35 +0000
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