U.S. to Cuban diplomats in Washington: Get out

Remember the diplomatic triumph that was the decision of Barack Obama and John Kerry to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, despite the communist dictatorship agreeing to absolutely nothing in the realm of human rights improvements or more responsible international behavior? Yeah. Me neither. Because it wasn't a triumph. It was a clusterfark. But this was how Obama and Kerry approached foreign policy. They were convinced that whenever the United States was at odds with another country, it must have been pointless and for no good reason, so they took it upon themselves to restore whatever was being withheld from our adversaries, in return for basically nothing. They did it with Iran, and they did it with Cuba, because their worldview told them the dispute must have been entirely the result of American foolishness, arrogance and evil.

How is that working out? Not well. We've dealt at length about what a disaster the Iran nuclear deal has turned out to be - to the surprise of no one who was paying attention - and now we discover that American diplomats dealing with the Cubans are coming down with an awfully strange coincidence of health issues. Who in Cuba could possibly be enough of a jerk to make something like this happen? Oh. Right. President Trump hasn't yet broken off diplomatic relations, but he took a step in that direction today, with an order to 15 Cuban diplomats to get out of Washington:

The State Department told Cuba on Tuesday to withdraw more than half of its diplomats from Washington, another sign of deteriorating ties as the Trump administration tries to determine what happened to more than 20 U.S. diplomats who suffered dizziness, hearing loss and other symptoms while serving in Havana. The State Department provided Cuba’s ambassador to Washington, Jose Cabanas, with a list of 15 officials the U.S. wants to leave the U.S. and gave those officials seven days to depart, a department official said. The order came after the U.S. last week began withdrawing about half of its contingent in Havana, leaving only emergency personnel. The State Department official said the expulsion of Cuban officials was meant to ensure the Cuban embassy in Washington is similarly affected.

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“This move does not signal a change of policy or a determination of responsibility for the attacks on U.S. government personnel,” a State Department official said. “The decision on expulsions was taken due to Cuba’s inability to protect our diplomats in Havana as well as to ensure equity on the impact on our respective operations.” While Washington hasn’t blamed Cuba for what it calls “attacks” that sickened the Americans in Havana, officials said the Cuban government failed to protect the U.S. contingent and that the administration wants assurances that the attacks have been stopped. The State Department said Tuesday that 22 U.S. government officials have been affected, suffering symptoms that also have included sleeplessness and cognitive problems.

The U.S. still has 30 diplomats in Cuba, but that's down from a high of 50 earlier in the year. We seem to be heading in the direction of a break in diplomatic ties, although I'm not entirely sure why Trump doesn't just go ahead and do it. I'm sure there are State Department officials who are telling him he has to go slow or check a bunch of boxes for whatever reason, and I'm sure it's true that if Trump just went ahead and cut off diplomatic ties today he'd be criticized for jumping the gun or acting without enough real evidence that the Cuban government was responsible for what happened to the diplomats. Then again, we have a lot more evidence of that than we do of "Russian hacking of the election," but who ever said intellectual honesty played a role in any of this? The fact of the matter is that we never should have re-established diplomatic ties with Cuba in the first place. The regime is absolutely no different than it was when Castro's dead brother Fidel threatened us with nuclear weapons in the early 1960s, or when it tried to kill Rob's father-in-law. The only thing that changed over the past 10 years is that America foolishly elected a leftist president who thought people like the Castros were really just misunderstood, and were unfairly judged by imperalist Americans who were no better. I'm glad we told these Cuban diplomats to hit the road, but if that's all we do it will come to nothing. We need to tell Cuba to close its embassy and get the hell out of our country, and don't try to come back until it renounces communism and embraces free elections, free markets and free people. Until then, there's no point having diplomatic relations with them, because we have nothing to talk about.