Obama to normalize relations with Cuba

[Albany Rifles]

To this day I still find it just slightly somehow oddly sinister to see Iron Cross and the Rising Sun on F-4 Phantoms.

I remember sharing with my Dad in 1999 a headline and photo from the European edition of Stars & Stripes when the Air WAr over Kosovo occurred.

It said something like..."Luftwaffe engages in bombing sorties, first tiem since 1945".

My dad was a ww 2 vet and it made him shiver he said.

[astralis]

GVChamp,

Taking any chance to piss off the Cuban community, with that small a margin, is a huge risk when we're talking about 27 electroal votes.

but the Cuban community is not monolithic-- under-50s support normalization. moreover i doubt the hard-up pro-sanction Cuban emigre camp were going to vote Democrat anyway. limited political risk.

[Albany Rifles]

My best friend is of Cuban-Lebanese extraction. His Lebanese side is around 120 years in the US.

His Cuban side is more recent...his mother was the Cuban Consul to the US in Boston when Castro came to power. Her brother was an official in the government and her younger sister was in banking. Needless to say, things changed for all. His aunt and uncle, along with their mother, came to the US right. All were stripped of their Cuban citizenship and became US citizens. the attitudes of the three siblings were very different:

The aunt always pined for the grand old days of Cuba and wanted Castro and crew to rot in hell...don't give an inch.

The uncle didn't give a damn...he had renounced the Church years prior, came to the US and built a succesful career as an American.

My friends mother had a very interesting path. Since she was a government official at the time of the take over she felt duty bound to continue at her post. She recalled to Havanna about 5 months later where she was put to work in the Foreign Ministry. She had my friend with her....her husband, my friends dad, was on a assignment for US AID...draw your own cocnlusions. She applied for a release to return to the US with by buddy on family grounds. It took awhile but she got permission and arrived in the US to link up with the father. Here is the hitch...because she had worked for the Castro regime...for 5 months...she was refused US citizenship. So she went to work for the OAS...who granted her a special category of Citizen of the World. Until her death her passport was from the OAS and not the US. She could have gotten US citizenship later as he programs and laws changed but never bothered.

Her view? She wanted Castro and crew gone soonest...and believed the best way to do that was normalize relations ASAP. She held this belief since I knew in 1974.

My friend shares his mother's belief...always has.

I asked my friend how he was doing....he said he was very happy because we would get to do what we had promised when we were 25...we are going to do a bike tour of the Sierra Maestra Mountains and drink Cuba Libres on El Malecón. And then we are going to return teh ashes of his grandmother, mother aunt & uncle to the family crypt....along with the Cuban flag that flew over the Consualte in Boston the day the coup occurred.

[GVChamp]

GVChamp,



but the Cuban community is not monolithic-- under-50s support normalization. moreover i doubt the hard-up pro-sanction Cuban emigre camp were going to vote Democrat anyway. limited political risk.

So you're an economics guy, I'll put Hayek here:

"
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
"

If you're wrong, you lose Florida. It's a .8% margin. And if you lose Florida, you could very well lose the election.
Even "limited" risk means a hell of a lot of risk when you're talking winner-take-all with a <1% margin.

[Cactus]

ultimately it can be boiled down to a phrase: china doesn't want to fight us, it wants to BE us.

The Japanese also didn't want to fight the British, they wanted to BE British. They wore pin-striped suits and top-hats, carried umberellas, even drove on the wrong side of the road... all they wanted was "their India" (i.e. China). How did that turn out?

[Monash]

The Japanese wanted the oil embargo gone and a free hand in China. Failing that they decided to settle for taking (British) Malaysia and the rubber tin and oil reserves in that area. You Gaijin (pejorative form) Americans stood in the way. Had the US and UK acquiesced to Japan's plans for expansion into mainland Asia a shooting war the Pacific might not have even started - at least not during the course of the European conflict.

[zraver]

The Japanese wanted the oil embargo gone and a free hand in China. Failing that they decided to settle for taking (British) Malaysia and the rubber tin and oil reserves in that area. You Gaijin (pejorative form) Americans stood in the way. Had the US and UK acquiesced to Japan's plans for expansion into mainland Asia a shooting war the Pacific might not have even started - at least not during the course of the European conflict.

Nah, not with Hong Kong, Malaysia and the DEI acting like bright red flags putting lie to the co-prosperity sphere.... The Japanese didn't start developing shallow running torpedoes in 1939, mapping coasts and landing beaches, developing spy networks, naval infantry, attack carriers and long ranged air craft for nothing. The signs that Japan was gearing up for offensive war were visible. Ditto for modern China.

[Monash]

The Japanese didn't start developing shallow running torpedoes in 1939, mapping coasts and landing beaches, developing spy networks, naval infantry, attack carriers and long ranged air craft for nothing. The signs that Japan was gearing up for offensive war were visible. Ditto for modern China.

America was doing the same thing at the same time, it was actively developing it's carrier fleet and long range aircraft (think B-17, P-38 & P-47). It had a well developed Marine Corps and was activity tracking Japanese military deployments at the time. In short it working to cement it's own strategic objectives in the Asia Pacific Region. War Plan Orange wasn't a work of speculative fiction. For that matter you had a 'War Plan' for dealing with Great Britain for Gods sake, which doesn't mean the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually had a hard on for carrying it out, just that professional military organizations plan for all hypothetical contingencies.

(P.S. I'd have to do the research but for that matter I'd wouldn't be surprised if Great Britain didn't have 'War Plans' drafted in the event of conflict with the U.S. prior to WW11.)

[Mantas]

It seems thath Americans want to be sure thath there won't be any reopened or even new military bases in Cuba established by Russia or maybe China :)

[Double Edge]

If you're wrong, you lose Florida. It's a .8% margin. And if you lose Florida, you could very well lose the election.
Even "limited" risk means a hell of a lot of risk when you're talking winner-take-all with a <1% margin.

Right, this is the std reason why US could not normalise relations with Cuba for so long.

Anyway, am glad to see there isn't too much opposition here. Cubans always struck me as unique compared to their neighbours in the region. Very proud of their culture.

[TopHatter]

For that matter you had a 'War Plan' for dealing with Great Britain for Gods sake, which doesn't mean the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually had a hard on for carrying it out, just that profession military organizations plan for all hypothetical contingencies.

Good point and the typical layman doesn't see it that way. Nor do they understand other reasons for preparing "War Plans":

1. It's excellent training and practice

2. A "invasion" plan could rather quickly be modified to become a "reinforcing an ally" plan. I would imagine mass-disaster relief would also fall in that category. After all, what is disaster relief but a non-kinetic invasion of another country?

[Albany Rifles]

We had war plans against EVERYBODY!!! And we don't throw stuff out.

United States color-coded war plans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As the article points out they are excellent staff planning tools.

[DOR]

This was bound to happen when the conditions were right:

1) Democratic President (Only Nixon had the balls to go to China)
2) Second term in office (no reason to take a risk)
3) Post mid-term election (ditto)
4) No other major foreign policy priority (Clinton wanted a summit with Kim Jung-il)
5) No crippling domestic issue ("Not now, Monica! I'm trying to normalize!")

[zraver]

America was doing the same thing at the same time,

And? I have no doubt that Japan saw the US as an enemy and block to Japanese ambitions. I didn't say enemy made them wrong and us right, only that their actions were that of an enemy.

I'd wouldn't be surprised if Great Britain didn't have 'War Plans' drafted in the event of conflict with the U.S. prior to WW11

More likely, articles of surrender... At least until the various naval treaties were signed. The US controlled UK access to credit, raw materials and food. A pissed off US without the naval treaties beats the UK in very short order.

The reason the UK wanted the London and Washington Naval treaties was to head off a brand new battleship arms race they could not win. They were exhausted by WWI and could not match US financial or production resources. By the time the Versailles treaty was signed the US had 22 Dreadnoughts. 14 of them were super-dreanoughts, and had 10 more super dreadnoughts and 6 super battle cruisers were under construction. The Royal navy had 32 dreadnoughts but only 11 were true super dreadnoughts, 11 were intermediate and none of them had transoceanic range. They had no new battleships under construction. They had 12 battlecruisers, only 1 of them a super battle cruiser and no new ones on the slips. By 1924 it would have been USN- 31/21 dreadnoughts and 6 super battle cruisers vs RN- 32/11/11 dreadnoughts and 11/1 battle cruisers.

RN superiority was doomed without another expensive ship building race the UK could not afford. Not only numbers though, most US ships could sail in excess of 10,000 miles. Few British ships could. US ships could set out and shut down the global commerce the UK depended on and the RN could not stop them. The RN depended on coaling stations that would have been both incredibly exposed to USMC raids and unable to provide the fuel oil the best British ships needed.

The naval treaties saved the UK.

[zraver]

This was bound to happen when the conditions were right:

1) Democratic President (Only Nixon had the balls to go to China)
2) Second term in office (no reason to take a risk)
3) Post mid-term election (ditto)
4) No other major foreign policy priority (Clinton wanted a summit with Kim Jung-il)
5) No crippling domestic issue ("Not now, Monica! I'm trying to normalize!")

Nixon was a Republican.... In fact Obama is the first Dem president to seekout major foreign policy changes. Normally its the GOP- Ike, Nixon, Reagan