The Great Levine

Did Obama suddenly see the light?

It is not likely. It is more likely by far that he is as wary as any President before him of what Noam Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example.”

Why did he do it then?   He must have felt that he had no choice.

He must have realized that, thanks to America’s declining position in Latin America and the world, the time was right to reset American-Cuban relations on a realist basis.

He deserves credit for that. Even with the diplomats of many nations and the Pope at his back, it took courage.

This must have been especially hard for a man who has otherwise been distinguished only for vain attempts at placating his most retrograde and obdurate domestic opponents. Anti-Castro animosity runs deep in their quarters.

“Realism” is the name that political scientists give to the default position in diplomacy. The idea, basically, is that a country’s foreign policy does, and ought to, advance its national interests in more or less the way that economic theorists think that economic agents normally do, and ought to, maximize their own interests.

Realism seems commonsensical enough, though this impression can fade when the concept of a national interest is subjected to scrutiny.

What is its connection to the interests of the nation’s people and to the interests of its economic and political elites? If, as seems hard to deny, national interests typically coincide with ruling class interests, why should anyone outside elite circles care about advancing them?

These are interesting questions to ponder.   For now, though, it will be best just to concede that these and other similarly vexing questions can be answered — well enough to conclude that countries really do have free-standing national interests that are not just misleading names for something else; in other words, that the basic intuition realism articulates is sound.

Andrew Levine is on a roll.


TS