Will Americans ever learn?

I am becoming increasingly clear that the contemporary efforts to leverage for political change will be studied as a pervasive failure of power in the coming generations.

The case of U.S. sanctions to leverage for democratic change in Cuba is perhaps one of the best examples of that failure.

Our Failed, Punitive Policy

Many strong proposals in this article. The final passage is a nice collection of these proposals:

"Dialogue on these security issues could yield direct results and also build contacts and confidence that might put the next U.S. administration in a position to more effectively advance other pressing interests. These include political, labor and human rights in Cuba, settlement of U.S. claims there, and, eventually, negotiation of trade and regulatory regimes that will put American business interests in Cuba back on an equal footing with foreign competitors.

U.S. restrictions on travel to the island have failed to tangibly weaken the Cuban government, even as they have contributed to the increased isolation of the Cuban people. Contact between our societies ought to be encouraged. At a minimum, the next president should permit the kind of people-to-people exchanges -- involving artists, musicians, academics, students, religious groups and others -- that President Ronald Reagan embraced with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Programs of this kind flourished with Cuba until 2003, allowing Cubans from all walks of life to exchange ideas and information with American counterparts.

The Bush administration's 2004 sanctions targeting visits and remittances by Cuban Americans should also be reversed. The contacts and the financial help are important lifelines to Cubans, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet.

The next U.S. administration should also consider talks on loosening the restrictions that keep U.S. and Cuban diplomats confined, for the most part, to the capitals in which they are posted. An agreement in this area would allow our diplomats to gain the insights and influence in Cuba that current policy denies them.

America's next president should harbor no illusions that modest policy adjustments will lead directly to the political and economic outcomes we seek in Cuba. But they would serve American interests and, if pragmatism eventually prevails in Cuba, help advance the interests of the Cuban people as well."

I don't know if I share the author's priorities of stopping drug runners and illegal immigration, both which seem like kind of petty priorities in the big scheme of things, and perhaps counterproductive to the larger purposes of helping to facilitate democracy, freedom, and prosperity for Americans and Cubans rather than narrower concerns about drugs and stopping illegals from crossing the American border.

But the benefits of lifting the embargo on Cuba and dialogue generated around a whole host of common concerns seem undeniable to me. Robert Kagan suggests using the embargo as leverage for democratic reform in the same Washington Post, apparently oblivious to the fact that what Cubans resent most about America, and hence our limited influence inside of Cuba as much as with its government, is its tendency to want to tell Cubans how to run their own affairs. American imperialism and all of that. Very much like the problem we're having in Iraq.

Americans will never learn.

Or will they?