Obama's Frenemies

Ho New / Reuters As debate erupts on the Web over Obama’s visit with Chavez—was it an embrace or a blowoff?—Matthew Yglesias says that everyone’s missing the point: The more photo ops with our “enemies,” the better.

The Summit of the Americas is a periodic meeting of heads of government of countries located in the Western Hemisphere. The United States is located in the Western Hemisphere. So is Venezuela. Barack Obama is president of the United States. And Hugo Chavez is president of Venezuela. So when the Fifth Summit of the Americas was held in Trinidad, Obama was there and Chavez was there, and when they met, Obama gave him a warm handshake and they appear to have made small talk. This is, as anyone who has attended a conference can tell you, pretty much what people do at a conference.

Fifty years' worth of embargoing Cuba have accomplished what exactly? It's hard to think of an example of foreign-policy initiative that has failed this badly.

Naturally, the right wing went bananas. Now we're being subjected to close reading of the handshake video to discern the precise degree of appeasement involved. Newt Gingrich, who in the moment of the GOP's political misery is making an improbable comeback, feigned weariness with Obama's appeasing ways. "He has made life easier for the Castro dictatorship in Cuba," Gingrich observed, "why not embrace or at least be cheerful and friendly with Hugo Chavez? I think it sends a terrible signal to all of Latin America, and a terrible signal about how the new administration regards dictators." Sen. John Ensign, a Republican from Nevada, deemed the handshake "irresponsible," saying Chavez "is a brutal dictator."

It's true, of course, that the Chavez regime has some issues. According to the State Department's latest human-rights report on Venezuela, there are even some indications of torture, which remains a bad thing no matter how much Gingrich and other conservatives deny it in other contexts. But the image of Chavez as a "brutal dictator" is absurdly overblown. It was easy to detect authoritarian aspirations in a package of constitutional reforms that were put up for vote in a referendum last December. But by the same token, surely the fact that the people of Venezuela voted "no" on the package and it therefore wasn't implemented ought to be taken as a sign that Chavez is no dictator. Indeed, the very same State Department report that details some real abuses by the Venezuelan government reached the much more restrained conclusion that the election Chavez won in 2006 was "generally free and fair" with "some irregularities."

More broadly, the mention of Cuba should be all that it takes to discredit Gingrich's point of view. The past 50 years' worth of embargoing Cuba have accomplished what exactly? It's hard to think of an example of foreign-policy initiative that has failed this badly. A policy aimed at keeping the Cuban people as poor as possible has succeeded in helping to make Cuba desperately poor (Fidel Castro's economic policies haven't helped), but does nothing to make Cuba's leadership feel a sting.

The theory that such sanctions would inspire the population to rise up and overthrow their government never made sense, and surely five decades is enough time to declare this experiment a failure. A warming in relations with Cuba might succeed in undermining the regime in Havana by increasing person-to-person ties to the Cuban population and giving Cubans more access to information. But even if it doesn't do this, it will make Cubans somewhat less poor and do nothing to prolong the inevitable end of communism in Cuba.