Interesting implications for the case of Cuba. If so, their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA. So much for arguments of respecting national autonomy.
> Interesting implications for the case of Cuba. If so, their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA. So much for arguments of respecting national autonomy.
I believe their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA, that is unfriendly to US interests, and at least once offered the USSR, a then enemy of the US, to host nuclear ICBMs on their territory so they could more easily target Americans.
It’s not like the US randomly and unilaterally decided to sanction Cuba, nor is it like thousands of Cubans fled the country by any means possible to end up seeking asylum in the US for no reason.
> I believe their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA, that is unfriendly to US interests, and at least once offered the USSR, a then enemy of the US, to host nuclear ICBMs on their territory so they could more easily target Americans.
You do understand that if this is the bar under which nations can take drastic actions (up to and including fiascos like Bay of Pigs and assassination attempts), US criticism of the adventurism of others (e.g., Ukraine) has to be much more measured. For instance, it is fine to violate the sovereignty of nations, just maybe in a more limited way, etc.
How many countries on earth, do you think, had hostile foreign arms on their soil (e.g., the US) within the past 60 years that their neighbors might find threatening?
> How many countries on earth, do you think, had hostile foreign arms on their soil (e.g., the US) within the past 60 years that their neighbors might find threatening?
A lot. And the threaten countries all abso-fucking-lutely want to do something about it.
It sounds like we basically agree. I just find it a timely discussion with respect to Ukraine and the fact that the US positions nuclear assets all over the world.
Since whataboutism is so hugely popular in threads involving Russia, let's talk about the nuclear SRBM dispenser formerly known as Kaliningrad Oblast located between Poland and Lithuania (that's in Central Europe). Kinda makes those American gravity nukes stationed in West Germany look old-fashioned.
The whataboutism is strong because the hypocrisy and double think is so pervasive.
Many people believe in moral exceptionalism when it comes to USA foreign policy when the vast majority of the time it boils down to the same self-interested realpolitik as other countries.
>It's not hypocritical to want "your" side to win, and it's not from a lack of moral standing when you're motivating this taking-sides with "well, I like and wish democracies on people more than I like and wish brutal dictatorships on people".
Yes, it's a "our side is better than theirs" but I think hard and yes, our "side" is indeed better than NK's, Russia's, Iran's, Cuba's. I could contort myself in saying that our side is only better insofar as it makes me ~believe that it's better, behind a veil of fake democracy. But then that's be contortionism, and not a down to earth, pragmatic look at it.
>All sides in this stuff will play realpolitik and use their armies and kill and what not. But at the end of the day, where do you want to live? In which of these regimes is life preferable?
I agree that this is the correct framework to think about things, discarding the chaff of what is fair, good guys, and bad guys.
However, I don't think that where I would want to live translates to my country can do no wrong.
For example, I would rather live in the US than Cuba, but I don't think that warrants an invasion and regime change in Cuba. I also don't think it warrants sanctions on Cuba.
I think life in the US is better than most countries, but I have a moral and logical framework that usually opposes foreign intervention and coercion.
That is to say, I don't think the US has an moral obligation to be the world police and initiate regime change around the globe
And here I thought that since march of this year, we're of the general impression that countries have the right to defend themselves, and to seek external allies when bullied by a bigger neighbour...
We didn't invade after the Cuban Missile Crisis; in fact, Cuba remained closely aligned with the USSR until the end of the USSR. If Russia merely sanctioned Ukraine, nobody would be discussing this. Your rebuttal is facile.
Kennedy ordered a naval "quarantine" to prevent missiles from reaching Cuba. By using the term "quarantine" rather than "blockade" (an act of war by legal definition), the United States was able to avoid the implications of a state of war.
After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement to not invade Cuba again.
When it came to Russia and Ukraine, the US refused ultimatums to stay out of Ukraine, and Russia did invade Ukraine a second time.
> the US refused ultimatums to stay out of Ukraine
Which is just a pretense. On different days, the "special military operation" has been to avoid NATO bordering Russia (which it already does in the Baltic), "remove Nazis", "fix Lenin's mistake of separating Ukraine from Russia", "free Donbass and Luhansk" and probably others that I forgot.
And anyway, US didn't do anything (this time). Ukraine has a right to join NATO if they want, without asking uncle Vladimir beforehand.
>Ukraine has a right to join NATO if they want, without asking uncle Vladimir beforehand
by this standard, Cuba has the right to have Russian nukes pointed at Washington DC. But we all know that the US would wipe Cuba off the face of the earth and kill every civilian there before that happened.
They are still under sanctions 70 years later for playing that game and assuming they have territorial autonomy.
We can only speculate why Russia was willing to fight over Ukraine and Georgia but not the baltics. One obvious difference is time. Russia had 18 more years to get in a better position to stop Ukraine joining.
The Baltic path to joining was also much faster, announced in 1999 and complete in 2004. The Ukrainian membership was announced in 2008 and had a many decade lead time because Ukraine was expected to tackle many internal issues of corruption and human rights first.
A separate factor is size, population, and location. Ukraine is larger and may have a more strategic position to take out planes and nukes heading to central Europe.
The invasion is one of the things that caused the CMC. Leaving that (as well as the CIA campaign of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba) out of the context is incredibly misleading.
If the US simply sat around on its hands and sanctioned Cuba, and left things at that, nobody would be discussing this. It went way, way, way beyond sanctions.
What point are you trying to make? The invasion of Cuba was idiotic, I agree. It has nothing to do with our foreign policy afterwards, which is not subject to rules about fairness.
We should not continue the Cuba embargo. It serves no public policy purpose. We should continue and enhance sanctions on North Korea, which actively works to destabilize the rest of the world, unlike Cuba. Iran is a trickier case, but on balance the world would be better off with more normalized relations with Iran, and its trajectory forward after normalization would very likely be better than it is with sanctions. The opposite is true of North Korea.
You can disagree with any or all of this, but the underlying point is: we are within our rights to coordinate sanctions on any country for a diversity of reasons.
I really appreciate you staking concrete positions on the countries. I mostly agree, but am on the fence about north Korea.
>You can disagree with any or all of this, but the underlying point is: we are within our rights to coordinate sanctions on any country for a diversity of reasons.
I think this is where we differ. Modern sanctions means we take everything that the opposition cant militarily stop us from taking. We seize bank accounts, ships, planes, loaned assets, all without respect for ownership.
In the might makes right context, yeah, we are within our rights. But this is in the realpolitik sphere where I have the right to murder every person that cant stop me.
If there was a real system of international law, I'd have more sympathy for this position. But there isn't.
Sanctions always involve balancing interests, and it's worth calling out that they have costs even when we believe we're right. But the balance of interests for all of humanity strongly favors sanctioning the DPRK.
Yes. This is true. We live in a US hegemony, enhanced globally by the fall of the USSR. This situation may change in the future, it may not. When we initially sanctioned Cuba we were primarily able to do so because Cuba geographically exists within the US sphere of influence. Now the entire globe exists within the US sphere of influence.
I don't think my earlier reply to you qualifies as "rhetoric". I was replying to the implication that the US just unilaterally decided to sanction Cuba for no good reason. The US had a good reason, it is pretty obvious what that reason was, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Cuba's actions resulted in sanctions (and could have resulted in much worse). It is also, frankly irrelevant, that it was precipitated by the US doing something stupid.
Personally, I think we should have dropped the embargo on Cuba a long time ago, probably in the 90s. But that's not the case right now. It certainly wasn't a mystery to anyone why it started though.
Sanctions on Russia and sanctions on North Korea are both not only "might makes right", but fully justified within multiple different deontological frameworks. It is absolutely true that there is realpolitik afoot here, but that does not also preclude the possibility that the outcome is justified and fair.
Honestly, I'd love to hear/read some thoughts as to why dropping sanctions on North Korea would be beneficial to /anyone/ in a real way.
>Honestly, I'd love to hear/read some thoughts as to why dropping sanctions on North Korea would be beneficial to /anyone/ in a real way.
The most obvious benefit would be to the 25 million North Korean people. Lifting of sanctions would allow economic activity alleviating poverty and malnutrition.
Cuba can have their national autonomy, but other countries have no particular obligation to trade with them.
The primary "crime" which originally led to the imposition of sanctions on Cuba was that they nationalized assets owned by US entities without paying compensation. Now you could perhaps make a case that the Cuban government had a moral right to do that, but regardless of who was right of wrong it was certainly contrary to US interests. We don't want to set a precedent for allowing countries to get away with stealing US assets.
I do not think it is relevant today, but during the Cold War their crime was being all buddy-buddy with the USSR and offering to host some of their nuclear ICBMs.
The USSR is long dead though, and nobody is asking Cuba to hold on to WMDs for safe keeping, so the continued sanctions make no real sense in 2022.
A lot of countries do international trade with Cuba. USA is not banning everyone who trades with Cuba. I can go to any licor store in my country and buy a bottle of Cuban ron, for example.
The US penalizes any country giving foreign aid to Cuba, and prevents its membership in International Financial Institutions like the IMF.
Any company in the world doing business in Cuba is also sanctioned by the US and it's employees are barred from entering the US.
You may be able to buy a bottle of Cuban rum at your liquor store, but that store can not do business in the US, use US banks, and the senior employees may be barred from traveling to the US.
Yes, however the severity of the violation is dependent on the influence of the violator. Cuba's violation would be wrong but mostly meaningless compared to the US's.
It's not. They're free to choose who they trade with, using who that country trades with as a decider violates their autonomy.
You're just framing the violation as a choice and saying it is their right to make that choice. Sure, they also have the right to make the choice to invade Canada, but actually invading is obviously violating their autonomy.
I decide that I don't want to trade with Country A because they are producing weapons that they plan on using to attack me with. Now let's say Country B is trading with Country A, and I think they are trading components being used to produce the weapons in Country A.
Is it a violation of Country B's autonomy for me to decide to not to trade with them because they are trading with country A?
If I believe that anyone who trades with Country A is supplying them resources to build weapons to attack me, and I decide to not trade with any Country who is trading with Country A, am I violating the autonomy for all of those countries?
>Is it a violation of Country B's autonomy for me to decide to not to trade with them because they are trading with country A?
Yes.
>am I violating the autonomy for all of those countries?
Yes.
The clearer example would be imagine country A attacked me, would refusing to trade with country B violate their autonomy? And the answer is still yes, but both country A and B are already violating your autonomy so it's a justifiable violation.
With your example, I wouldn't say producing weapons clearly violated your autonomy, but that's a completely different argument.
shouldn't countries be allowed to decide whom to trade with? if so, doesn't that extend to countries being allowed to make their own rules of trade, including not trading with those who trade with unfriendly nations?
> shouldn't countries be allowed to decide whom to trade with?
One have to distinguish country and its citizens. Sanctions is not just 'country decides whom to trade with' but 'country restrict freedom of its citizens to trade' and that is rather significant infringement of freedom and as such it has to be justified by its necessity.
