Obama has obtained no such promises, nor has he outlined any program of pursuing them. Given all that he should have been concerned about, he has simply caved and made a unilateral gesture that will benefit Cuba, but not the U.S.
Specific measures
In fact, Obama’s opening of travel and financial relations to Cuba will actively harm the U.S. The first people on the plane to the U.S. from Cuba will be spies – and spies not just for Cuba but for Russia, China, and Iran. The difference now will be the casual ease with which they can gain access to the United States by posing as mere Cuban businessmen, tourists, and workers on visas.
Opening financial relations with Cuba will create an even bigger vulnerability. Cuba will have her feet in both worlds: the global financial network in which the U.S. and our allies set the rules, and – beyond doubt – the alternative network which Russia is currently laboring to assemble. (See more about how this fits in with Russia’s strategic intentions here, from an interview given by Russian Defense Minister Dmitry Rogozin.)
Cuba is too dependent on Russia to avoid participating in the alternative financial network, and presumably, as long as the Castroites are in power, they will want to.
Members of the “BRICS” bloc might or might not be interested in joining Russia’s network; if some do so, the U.S. and allies like Japan and the EU will be faced with a serious, high-profile security policy dilemma. When North Korea joins Russia’s network, on the other hand, we can rejoice that our banking system is not connected to Pyongyang to begin with.
But it would be easy to minimize the concern Western observers would feel about little Cuba being a nexus between the two networks. The New York Times editorial posture, for example, would no doubt dismiss the obvious concerns as “conspiracy theory,” at least until some American politician’s family member got caught with taxpayer-assisted commercial interests that were financing arms shipments to Hezbollah, ISIS, or Boko Haram through the Cuban financial-network nexus.
It’s going to be tough enough navigating a world in which Russia operates a separate international financial network, to which some nations will have an interest in belonging. Everywhere there exists a nexus between the networks – a nexus that by definition is outside the control of the Western allies – the SWIFT participants will have to worry about vulnerabilities to shenanigans and skullduggery. (Indeed, the very survivability of the Russian network is likely to depend at times on exploiting the opportunities in such a nexus.)
But we already know what the Castros’ Cuba is. We know that the vulnerabilities created by this nexus in Cuba are inevitable. Now is the dumbest possible time to fling the door open to networked financial transactions with Cuba.
What can Congress do about this? Can it rein Obama in, at least on the matter of opening the banking system to Cuba? That’s a good question. Congress might be able to pass veto-proof legislation, but forcing Obama to implement it is another matter. I don’t see the courts settling this one; foreign-policy powers are one of the least conclusive realms of constitutional law.
Obama has laid an egg, on several levels, and we’re going to see it hatch. The Pandora’s Box his policies are opening looks minor and unserious only to the complacent eye: the eye that knows no history, and thinks the halcyon summer of the last 25 years is the normal state of mankind. It’s not.