With Nothing to Lose, Obama Make Friends with Cuba

He just doesn’t care anymore.

Since his party lost control of Congress in the recent elections, it looks like President Obama has decided to reshape the nation on his own. Decisions are coming left and right – immigration, climate change policy, regulating the Internet, and relations with Iran – as he goes it alone.

He’s only got 2 years left in office, and plenty of campaign promises yet to fulfill. What’s he got to lose?

The latest eyebrow-raising action Obama has taken is his intent to lift sanctions from Cuba. On the campaign trail in 2008, he said he wanted to normalize relations with the long-estranged country if Cuba took steps toward democracy and released its political prisoners.

Nothing really happened for six years, but now he’s moving to make friends with Cuba by “establishing an embassy in Havana and relaxing trade and financial restrictions that have been in place for a half-century.” He wants to lift the embargo on the totalitarian state – but without those requirements for democracy that were so essential to the deal.

Cuba’s leaders have seen his compromise and are already capitalizing on the president’s weak stance. They’ve long refused to return fugitives in their country to the U.S., and Obama’s good-faith gesture will not change that.

Jackson Diehl at The Washington Post cites multiple examples of other dictator states that have collapsed on their own, and democracies eventually resulted from the ensuing “chaos.” U.S. engagement, diplomacy or soft convincing, has never yielded such results.

Diehl speculates that Obama’s real reason for his action could be more practical than ideological, and instead of encouraging democracy, it will prop up a regime already facing severe challenges: “Contrary to Obama’s rhetoric, it is a policy that reduces the possibility of near-term democratization in favor of economic benefits and geopolitical stability.” In the end, he calls it both patronizing and wrong.

The New York Times says Obama’s recent strategy of unilateral action both “anticipates, and largely dismisses, angry responses from his critics.”

And there have been many weighing in on the Cuban situation already. Fellow Democrat Robert Menendez, Senator for New Jersey, said Obama’s actions “vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”

In contrast, Obama casts himself as “a transformational leader,” ushering in the way of the future as opposed to conservatives whose ideas are implicitly outdated.

The president’s former senior advisor David Axelrod said the everyday duties of the President’s office previously got in the way of such sweeping reform. Why now is suddenly a good time isn’t quite clear, except that his party has lost power in the governing body that has rightful jurisdiction over making laws. Regardless, Axelrod says Obama is now determined to use his power in whatever way he can to make the nation to fit his vision of America – without regard to the people or their elected representatives.

At his last press conference of the year, Obama himself said, “I intend to continue to do what I’ve been doing. … We’ve set the stage for this American moment, and I’m going to spend every minute of my last two years making sure that we seize it.”

“My presidency is entering the fourth quarter. Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter, and I’m looking forward to it.”

Unilateral action will now define the end of Obama’s presidency. Let’s just hope it doesn’t ruin our nation in the process.