Pat Buchanan’s Surprising Take on Lifting the Cuba Embargo

Well, I say surprising. Maybe it’s not surprising to the people who know him better.

To me, lifting the embargo is a no-brainer from a non-interventionist perspective. Buchanan has a point here:

But Obama threw in an admission that all nine presidents before him pursued a “failed policy.” Calling for recognition of the Castro regime as the legitimate government of Cuba, Obama said, “Isolation has not worked.”

“Not worked”? What is he talking about? Isolating Cuba during the last 30 years of the Cold War helped bankrupt and bring down the Soviet Empire, which had to carry Cuba on its back.

But why did the embargo need to be continued once the Soviet Union collapsed?

I agree that Obama should have laid off publicly criticizing past Presidents and policies because to do so is generally unseemly, and maybe he should have extracted an agreement from the Castro regime that they would lay off the whooping it up and declaring victory, if such a thing is possible. Maybe they could have agreed on a joint statement.

Thomas Fleming doesn’t agree, and I think his comment probably explains Buchanan’s position as well as any:

Pat has been a friend for years and we usually agree, but not always. We all have a fall-back position, and Pat’s is the Cold War, just as for others it is the War Between the States, and for still others the Persian Wars.