Friends from Former Enemies

Our Marshall Plan restored two bitter enemies, Japan and Germany, who had decimated, blown up, shot, and killed millions of our allies and their and our soldiers in WWII. Concentration camps anyone? Today, both those nations are our staunch allies, modern democratic societies who have distanced themselves from that sordid past. We began normalizing relations in the 1940s, immediately after we won the war.

When Republican President Richard Nixon opened the door in 1972 to direct talks between us and our sworn mega-communist enemy, Mao’s People’s Republic of China, conservatives gasped. After all, in that bloody, brainwashing-infested Korean War, American soldiers had been slaughtered and tortured by this giant Red Menace. Under Chairman Mao himself. But, after all, Nixon was a conservative, so soon his GOP comrades fell in line to congratulate the effort. That the regime that did everything in its power to defeat us was essentially the same dictatorial leaders under the exact same system of government did not seem to matter. We normalized relations with China is less than 20 years after the Korean War ceased hostilities. Think of how expensive life would be without Chinese imports.

North Vietnam – famous for its devilish attacks and tactics, punji-sticks covered in human excrement in covered traps designed to infect and kill our soldiers, and abusive torturous treatment of the American soldiers they took prisoner (remember John McCain and the “Hanoi Hilton” – see above photo) – fought the United States and its South Vietnamese allies until the South finally fell. Same regime (next generation) rules Vietnam today, but you can take a pretty safe vacation in what some call the culinary capital of the region today. Vietnam has made friends with the United States as it looks for allies against potential annexation of its island waters by China. We began the normalization of diplomatic ties with Vietnam in just over 20 years from the end of that war.

And then there’s Cuba, closer to the US but never actually engaged in a shooting war with us (not even the Bay of Pigs counts on that one). Their brush with the USSR’s attempt to use Cuba as a nuclear missile platform in 1962 was as close as we came to war with this island nation, but they and the Russians backed off and withdrew the missiles.

We have a lot of émigrés from Cuba, heavily populated in South Florida who harbor deep and abiding malice against the Castro brothers and their cronies, leading a brutal torturing regime against their citizens for virtually the entirety of their reign since 1959. Not remotely as malignant as Chairman Mao may have been to his people, but nasty nonetheless. It’s been over half a century since that last “conflict” (the Cuban Missile Crisis), but our economic sanctions against Cuba are only just lifting. The codgers want to keep the sanctions in place… because they have been so effective in effective a regime change in Cuba? Doubtful the Castros could have stayed in power without having those sanctions as a rallying/blame point. Thanks, America!

So let’s list ‘em: Japan, Italy and Germany (the Axis Powers of WWII). The People’s Republic of China. Vietnam. Hmmmm… And militarily weak, isolated Cuba, poor but educated, led by some of the oldest leaders on earth (health impaired to be polite). What is fascinating is that each and every nation on the above list that we normalized diplomatic relations with has grown into a modern economic power. Even in China and Vietnam, the satisfaction rate among the locals has never been higher, and while they might not enjoy the freedom of speech we have, they are hardly the police states of nations where we have not normalized relations… like North Korea and to a much lesser extent, Cuba. Appears that free commerce has an accelerating effect on diluting dictatorial power.

Yup, normalizing diplomatic relations and opening trade doors have liberalized each and every former enemy nation from its pre-normalization status. But because there are a lot of older émigrés from Cuba living in South Florida (note that younger Cuban-Americans think enough is enough and we should normalize)… and more probably because conservatives seem to be opposed to anything presented by the President… relations with a very innocuous and harmless Cuba is still an unacceptable foreign policy for most Republican politicians. OK, GOP Libertarian Rand Paul doesn’t understand this either, some other GOP-stalwarts see some strong trade advantage to ending our sanctions, and the Republican-dominant US Chamber of Commerce is tired of letting other countries’ citizens have the first whack at Cuba’s nascent economic potential. But Florida Republican Marco Rubio has pledged to shut down this diplomatic effort dead in its tracks.

“Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and the leading critic of President Obama’s move to normalize ties with Cuba, will get his first chance to press the administration on its plan [and has convened] a Senate hearing on the ramifications of improved relations with Havana.

“The White House declined to send two administration officials who helped negotiate the new arrangement [to this rather stacked “hearing”], but two people from the State Department’s top ranks will be present. They will no doubt be questioned on how the new stance will lead to better conditions in Cuba. Mr. Rubio has also called prominent dissidents to the hearing to discuss the status of human rights on the island.” New York Times, February 3^rd.

Rubio’s inane commitment to a failed Cuban policy, one that benefits absolutely no one anywhere as half a century of failure proves rather conclusively, should come back to bite him as he seeks the GOP presidential nod in 2016. Meanwhile, the harm he is doing to his country flies in the face of every American policy shift following conflict in recent history. Using Rubio’s logic, we should not have anything to do with England in light of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Stupidity, lock-step intransigence and reinforcing clearly failed attempts to effect change are not exactly the stuff we need to see in our leaders… but too often, these are precisely the qualities that got them elected in the first place.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the end, it is our fault for electing these dufuses over and over again and thinking that proven failure is a good policy for future success.