I remember about a year ago sitting at a dinner where the featured speaker was a senior US diplomat involved in Iran policy. In response to skeptical questions about the Obama administration’s approach to Iran, he laid out the case that economic sanctions could work. The Iran measures, he said, were textbook examples of effective sanctioning — they were broadly multilateral in terms of who was imposing them, they were targeted at things the regime especially cared about, and they were limited in their aspirations.
“So what about Cuba?” I asked.
It was a bit of a jerk question. The diplomat in question simply wasn’t in a position to admit the obvious corollary. But the Cuba embargo is wholly unilateral, meaning no other country joins us in imposing it. It’s also completely untargeted, hitting essentially all sectors of the Cuban economy. And most of all, it’s utopian in its goals targeted not at specific aspects of Cuban policy but at the very existence of the Cuban regime.
In essence, America’s Cuba policy is a textbook case of an embargo that makes both the United States and the target country somewhat poorer without any realistic hope of accomplishing its goals.
Source link : https://www.vox.com/2014/12/17/7409291/obama-cuba-deal
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Publish date : 2014-12-17 03:00:00
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