*Cuba’s pragmatic opening to the world is underscored by more than a historic visit by a U.S. president, formal Cuban-American diplomatic relations and U.S. visitors flying in under the People-to-People designation. It’s also about soliciting big-money pop culture that is showing signs of an incipient backlash.
It’s not all upside when the Prado boulevard is closed off for a Chanel model shoot or traffic jams result from the filming of yet another installment of Fast and Furious. And, yes, Transformers starts production in Cuba this week.
Then add those televised scenes of affluent-looking, culture-dabbling cruise passengers being welcomed with rum drinks and scantily-clad dancers sporting Cuban flag-designed bathing suits. Apparently it became an off-putting, Caribbean-stereotype for locals still focused on an “egalitarian” life and what remains of revolutionary ideals. An inevitable conclusion: Cuban hypocrisy is revolting. Backlashes happen.
* Meanwhile, President Barack Obama was in Vietnam this week. He’s the third American president (Bill Clinton, 2000 and George W. Bush, 2006) to go there since the end of the war–and the first not to be hounded by what he was doing during the draft.
He was there to reassert and reinforce trade relations: The U.S. is now the largest importer of Vietnamese goods. But, more to the point, he was there to counter an increasingly assertive China. To that end, he officially ended the Vietnamese arms embargo that had been partially lifted in 2014.
Imagine, this authoritarian, repressive, election-free, political prisoner-holding, communist country–that the U.S. went to war with and lost more than 50,000 G.I.’s over–no longer has an arms embargo with the U.S. And bilateral relations have been normalized since the Clinton Administration.
But the U.S. still has an economic embargo with Cuba. Beyond ironic, frustrating and counterproductive.
* In the last two years, no country–on a per capita basis–has contributed more jihadists to the ISIS cause than Kosovo. Not long ago, Kosovo, although war ravaged, was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world. That all changed when the government of Saudi Arabia began proselytizing efforts on behalf of Wahhabism, its notably ultra conservative form of Islam.
Seemingly, it’s no leap of faith for a number of Kosovar converts to find common cause with the Islamic State’s raison d’être.
Imagine, Saudi Arabia is an ally.
*The Russia of Vladimir (“Make Russia Great Again”) Putin is, as we well know, problematic for the U.S. and the West. Unbridled nationalism and duplicity–as evidenced in central Europe and the Middle East–are more than manifest.
But Napoleon complex and Soviet hangover notwithstanding, this neo-Cold War scenario could have been foreseen given the way the actual Cold War ended. That’s certainly the take of Michael Mandelbaum, foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.” It’s a worthwhile read.
In short, notes Mandelbaum, the geopolitical gains the U.S. made began unraveling in the Clinton Administration with the eastward expansion of NATO–to include the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe as well as former parts of the Soviet Union itself. This was after the Administration of President George H.W. Bush had “explicitly promised the Soviet leadership, during the discussions about German reunification, that the Atlantic alliance would NOT be expanded.”
The Russians, as a result, felt deceived, disrespected and excluded. And that was under Boris Yeltsin, who was no Vlad Putin. Yeltsin presciently warned in 1994 that NATO expansion would lead to a “cold peace” in Europe.
“(NATO expansion) squandered … much of the windfall that had come to the United States as a result of the way the Cold War had ended and led, eventually, to an aggressive Russian foreign policy that brought the post-Cold War era to an end,” writes Mandelbaum. “It did this in return for no gain at all, making NATO expansion one of the greatest blunders in the history of American foreign policy.”