Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by derefr 1023 days ago
I mean, China has all the base resources to be a superpower — and has been a continent-spanning, colonizing empire many times in its past — so it's unclear what the US was expecting to happen there. (Probably something to do with short-term realpolitik "rock and a hard place" leverage.) Cuba has never and will never be a threat to the US, except insofar as they provide projection of strength for some other ally. A Cuba that sees itself as a sovereign nation would be a good thing, in the same way that ex-USSR satellites that see themselves as sovereign nations are a good thing.

Also, if you want to talk about countries that the US actually gives "special attention" to, I'd more compare/contrast to the relationship between the US and Panama.
1 comments
SkyMarshal 1023 days ago
> in the same way that ex-USSR satellites that see themselves as sovereign nations are a good thing.

Cuba would have do what those other ex-USSR satellites did and discard communism and authoritarianism in favor of democracy. Then, yes, seeing themselves as a sovereign state would be a good thing.

link
chipsa 1022 days ago
It doesn't even have to discard the communism. Look it Vietnam: we fought a war against them in living memory, and we invite their people to go through our military training schools now so they can see how we do things.
link
SkyMarshal 1022 days ago
Yeah that's an interesting comparison, though it's mainly b/c Vietnam sees China as its main adversary and threat, along with an opportunity to steal parts of the Asian manufacturing supply chain from China. The shared enemy and shared economic interests b/t US and Vietnam are pretty strongly aligned.

But I'm not sure if such an alignment could be created between the US and Cuba while Cuba remains a communist authoritarian hereditary dictatorship, since there's no shared enemy nearby and no strong shared economic incentive. Seems like the only real alignment would be Cuba becoming a democracy.

link
whimsicalism 1019 days ago
We were happily allies with Mexico which was effectively a single-party dictatorship for most of the 20th century.
link