Cuba Derangement Syndrome (CDS), a recurring fever, accounted for the Bay of Pigs calamity, the most feckless use of U.S. power ever. After this, the Kennedys, President John and Attorney General Robert, continued to encourage harebrained attempts to destabilize Cuba and assassinate its leader.
Today, CDS afflicts those who, like Rubio, charge that U.S. diplomatic relations and economic interactions “lead to legitimizing” Cuba’s regime. U.S. doctrine about legitimacy has been clear since the Declaration of Independence: Governments derive their “just powers” from the consent of the governed. The United States has diplomatic and commercial relations with many regimes that are realities even though they flunk our legitimacy test. Twenty-three years after Cuba ceased being a Soviet satellite, there is no compelling, or even coherent, argument for why Cuba, among all the world’s repulsive regimes, should be the object of a U.S. policy whose rationale is to express the obvious — U.S. distaste.
What makes Rubio uncharacteristically shrill, saying Paul has “no idea what he’s talking about”? And what makes Paul too clever by half when saying Rubio wants to “retreat to our borders” and hence is an “isolationist”? CDS does this. As they brawl about Cuba, a geopolitical irrelevancy, neither seems presidential.
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