After assuring his top diplomat, John Kerry, that Cuba has been behaving well of late, U.S. President Barack Obama scratched the island nation off the list of countries that abet terrorism.
That was foreseeable.
Obama had already announced in Panama that his government would not seek regime change in Cuba. Havana's presence on the list of sponsors of terrorism was part of a regime change strategy - a political dunce cap meant to malign its adversary on the long road to displacement.
Nevertheless, it was a fair description. For decades, the Castro regime worked hand-in-hand with the nastiest people on the planet, from Carlos the Jackal to the adipose royal dynasty in North Korea, as well as Libyan leader Moammar Ghaddafi and the Colombian narcoguerrillas. Obama's clear wish is to forget such grievances and open a new chapter.
Obama will soon return the Guantanamo base to Cuban ownership. As contemplated in the Helms-Burton Act, that exchange was to take place once Cuba was deemed free, but Obama didn't want to wait for such an uncertain milestone. He asked a friendly law firm for a legal report outlining his options to get rid of the territory, and he got it.
The next step will be to receive from the Navy a memorandum explaining that the base is expensive and of scant military usefulness. The Navy will oblige, opining that it can and should be closed.
The third step will be to relocate or release the Islamist prisoners accused of terrorism. It wouldn't be a surprise to see a final accord that includes a guarantee that, for some period of time, the territory will not be used as a military base.
Strictly speaking, little of this matters, but for one key element: It marks an abrupt turn of American will on the global stage. Washington no longer aims to topple enemy regimes and stand firmly behind friendly governments who share the United States' values and interests. This all adds up to a substantial modification of the vision and international mission of the United States.
Seventy years ago in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, Franklin Roosevelt assumed the leadership of a democratic world that believed in free enterprise. That responsibility was defined in economic terms at the outset - that's what Bretton Woods was all about - but later acquired a political dimension under Harry S. Truman after the outbreak of the Cold War.
The primary objectives of that conflict were to change enemy regimes and support friendly governments. It seemed a zero-sum game: What the West lost the Soviet Union won, and vice versa.
Within that scheme, Washington supported Greece and Turkey, reconstructed Western Europe and Japan, halted and neutralized North Korea's invasion of South Korea, kept Italy and France from being controlled by the Communists, but couldn't stop Vietnam from winning a devastating war. It contributed to stage an anti-Soviet coup in Iran, overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and, from the sidelines, helped topple Salvador Allende in Chile.
Washington lost in Cuba, and because it never reversed that defeat, it lost again in Nicaragua, Angola, and Ethiopia. Cuba was a moving machine-gun nest at the service of totalitarianism and of the adventurous instincts of Fidel Castro, a kind of Caribbean Napoleon, tireless and fecund, who even in old age proved capable of spawning Hugo Chavez, the Sao Paulo Forum, and 21st-Century Socialism.
Obama's abrogation of the U.S. will to change and sustain regimes begets two problems. The first is that almost the entire bureaucratic apparatus devoted to projecting Washington's power abroad was conceived and fitted toward the overt effort to support its friends and replace its enemies. It is not easy to stop the inertia generated by seven decades of institutions and laws dedicated toward a single purpose.
The second, and the more important, is that although Obama may unilaterally cancel his enmity - while he may personally decide that the enemies of the United States have stopped being enemies - the adversaries of democracy, pluralism, and free markets will continue to fight to change the regimes they oppose. We see this happen in the Americas with the neopopulist family called ALBA, or in the Middle East, where Iran destabilizes Yemen, conspires in the Gaza Strip, and threatens Israel with annihilation.
It is possible that Obama has decided to stop changing or supporting regimes. His enemies, delighted, have different plans.
