Matthew Yglesias says Obama’s easing of travel restrictions on Cuba is a reminder that U.S.-Cuban relations are a massive, decades-long case study in the limits of conservative foreign-policy:
The debate over policy toward Cuba has traditionally been tied up in the conflict between the over-the-top anti-Castro sentiments of the right and the curious affection some on the left have for the dictator. But the case against the embargo has no relationship to the merits of the regime. Consider the People’s Republic of China, another authoritarian regime, but one whose population today enjoys a standard of living far higher than it had 20 years ago. Nobody thinks that the right way to express our distaste for the conduct of that country’s rulers would be to try to deny the entire population the hard-won fruits of their current prosperity by imposing a total embargo on China. And yet that’s precisely what we’ve done with Cuba for the past 50 years — forbid the vast majority of trade and travel in order to weaken the regime by impoverishing the country.
