Extra! Extra! Obama Caught Being Curteous!

There seems to be a great hue and cry by my fellow Republicans—President Obama was seen shaking hands with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela at a summit in Trinadad! Oh! The horror! Oh! Pish Tosh, The handshake didn’t hurt us. We still have our shorts on.
What on earth do American legislators and officials imagine we are going to gain by pretending someone isn’t there? Or by keeping our hands germ free by refusing to shake?
Phooey. When my boys played soccer, sometimes they played against some nasty teams. I would advise them to be the first to offer a fallen opponent a hand up. “You’ll look like decent fellows, and you may even fool the referee into thinking you would never kick or trip.”
Obama looked gracious. That hurt us? Did he give away Manhattan Island or one of our aircraft carriers? As Obama pointed out, Venezuela’s tiny military is no threat and it has lots and lots of oil that has traditionally come to us.
It’s not a strategic (or public relations) disaster to be seen being nice to a man who could help effect our gas prices. (We do it to Saudi’s and Kuwait’s all the time.) You lose nothing, and you just might gain something valuable.
What in the name of sanity is the point of pushing Chavez into the arms of a renascent Russian military? They’re already visiting Venezuela with their warships. Do we really want them signing formal treaties and gaining permanent bases there? We tried icing Castro and nearly got ourselves blown up trying to get Russian nukes back out of Cuba. That should be a lesson.
I’m not a Jefferson fan, but I liked one aspect of his foreign policy. He felt that if a foreign government had effective control over its territory and was not actively attacking us—we should recognize it, talk to it and be done with pointless political moralizing.
Anybody who worked the South Side of Chicago (and survived) is smart enough to know that actions ultimately matter more than friendly words. Obama seems also to be bright enough to recognize that sometimes the symbolism of a friendly gesture matters a great deal. (Oil, remember? The possibility of Russian naval and air bases?)
Obama made the accurate point that our Cuban policy hasn’t worked all that well over the past 50 years. In fact, I’ll challenge anyone to show me one large scale embargo has benefited the people who staged the embargo—against anybody, anywhere.
Let’s review the successes embargoes have enjoyed over the past century. First, the British navel embargo against Germany during the months after Germany quit in 1918. Got the Germans to sign a brutal treaty—which they repudiated as soon as they dared, and it left them hungry and desperate enough to vote for Hitler. That was a winner.
The US refused to recognize or sell to the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1933. Certainly stopped Communism, didn’t it? Made the Russians so paranoid of the West that they chose to make a treaty with Hitler. The French, British and Poles certainly did well without Russian help early in the war.
France and Britain embargoed Italy in the 1930s after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Mussolini stayed there until a British army drove him out—and he almost immediately signed an alliance with Hitler after opposing him at the side of France and England for years.
We embargoed the living daylights out of Japan from the mid-thirties until war broke out. This one was effective; unlike most other embargoes, there were almost no leaks. The Japanese could obtain no iron, no steel, no copper—or a list of industrially necessary commodities that is a small-print, two column page long. I was stunned when it was declassified in the 1960s.
You cannot maintain a modern society without the materials we blocked Japan from buying. To be certain that they would strangle to death we froze all their money in US banks. Nor could they get their hands on a drop of oil or gasoline. We had them down to an eighteen month’s supply of fuel before going dark and cold.
We expected them to capitulate. They fooled us. First they bombed the fleet that was enforcing the embargo from Pearl Harbor—then they went for oil and other necessaries. In the end, that embargo didn’t really work all that well either.
We refused to acknowledge the existence of China (only a third of the world’s population) from 1949 until 1972. Effect? It kept China snuggled up to the Soviet Union throughout the embargo. That changed immediately upon Nixon’s trip to China—and they even allowed us to bring in electronic listening posts along the Soviet frontier.
We’ve embargoed Curba since 1959. Somehow they’ve still got those 1958 Fords and Pontiacs running. Everybody gets educated, has decent (free) medical care and the Castro’s are with us yet—athwart one of our most strategic sea lanes, ninety miles from Florida.
Maybe, with Chavez—and even Raul Castro—we should try a different policy. One would hope that our experiences over the last hundred years might have taught us something. (If we don’t like it coming from Obama, maybe we can hear it from Jefferson.)
A handshake is cheap. If it opens a door to needed resources and prevents us from having another really hostile enemy nearby, it is certainly worth the effort.
The wounded pride we display isn’t making us a bit more secure or obtaining an ounce of extra oil. Yes, it IS pride. Both Cuba and Venezuela were once nearly colonies of ours, and we lost them. They chose INDEPENDENCE over American tutelage in democracy. We get angry when people do that.
Quite time for us to get over our hurt feelings. (The British seem to have forgiven us for 1776.) Kudus on this one, Mr. Obama.