Overthrow by Pragmatism: Obama’s Cuban Strategy
March 28, 2016
Overthrow by Pragmatism: Obama’s Cuban Strategy
by Binoy Kampmark
Every president needs a doctrine. Now the sensible approach here would be to see the need for a doctrine the way an ardent feminist might see the usefulness of a man. As Irina Dunn claimed (an aphorism commonly attributed to Gloria Steinem), “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Be that as it may, President Barack Obama’s doctrine has been deemed to be “much less a coherent foreign policy ideology than a basic recognition of the world as it is: the moral dilemmas of American power in a post-Iraq world make anything as simplistic as an ideology at best silly and at worst destructive.”
Obama’s Cuban adventure may not have involved the school boy bravura of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, all patriotic gore dictated upon saddles in a quaint imperial tradition. But nor was it entirely free from ideology. There was no getting away from the fact that this play for the cameras as he touched down on Cuban soil was very much in the order of historical show. He was there to enact a ceremony of US power.
On Monday, he exclaimed on Twitter how “Michelle, the girls, and I are here in Havana on our first full day in Cuba. It’s humbling to be the first US president in nearly 90 years to visit a country and a people just 90 miles from our shores.”
The White House site, however, evinced a more serious approach, one unmistakably tactical in attempting to reform, not so much the Cuban-US relationship, as Cuba itself. (Ignore the point that Cuba has much to teach the US, notably in terms of social welfare.) It was clear that Obama was keen to “promote a democratic, prosperous and stable Cuba.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/28/overthrow-by-pragmatism-obamas-cuban-strategy/
