The conservative case for normalizing relations with Cuba

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for a values-based foreign policy. When I was advising the late Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania as a (much) younger man, I made an impassioned argument to the boss that, as a senior Republican, he should buck the first President Bush in 1990 on Most Favored Nation status for China. How could we extend that benefit to the butchers of Beijing, only a year after the Tienanmen massacre? We hadn’t given it to others, like Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and yet we were bowing to China?

I lost that argument. I had to sit through a sham hearing in a Senate committee room, my disgust rising as toy manufacturers explained how Christmas would be completely ruined for poor American kids if we tried to impose any costs on China’s dictators. I learned a hard lesson that day about what happens when money and morality collide in American foreign policy.

So if conservatives want to go down that road, they’d better be sure their own house is in order. Spoiler alert: it’s not, and it can never be, because conservatives have never been the types to start trade wars and to punish every single country that has a hateful regime. In any case, Americans are not going to forego their cheap televisions (or their iPhones, God help us) based on Chinese internal policies.

We must therefore engage the virtue of prudence, and reserve our economic punishment for more dire situations: for Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, for Russia’s destruction of Europe’s peace, for North Korea…well, being North Korea.