May Fidel Castro's crimes against humanity rest in his grave

I say this, by the way, as one of the few conservatives who backed the president’s call for normalizing relations with Cuba. As is always the case with the Obama administration’s foreign policy, however, the White House took a perfectly sensible idea and implemented it in the worst way possible, and I have since ended up regretting that support. Instead of requiring that Cuba take steps away from its totalitarian past, Obama decided all was forgiven, and joined Raul Castro at a baseball game. Bygones.

This romance with leftist dictators was one of many reasons prominent Democrats, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, defected to the Republicans in the 1980s. Fortunately, a more sensible Republican president in the 1980s would have nothing to do with this kind of moral equivocation. However, in the two decades after the Cold War—a time I now fear we will later call “the interwar period”—this unwillingness to criticize leftist dictatorships has strengthened an inability among Americans in general to think clearly about foreign policy.

This moral muddle-headedness, particularly among the young, has severe consequences. Liberals are appalled—as am I—that the new Trump administration seems hell-bent on correcting Obama’s foreign policy with an equally ridiculous, and perhaps even more dangerous, policy of “no enemies to the Right,” which suits Russian President Vladimir Putin just fine.

But years of liberals insisting on moral equivalence for leftist dictators in fact paved the way for Donald Trump’s utterly transactional politics. What Trump proposes is, indeed, a morally empty foreign policy. It makes no judgment about how dictators treat their own people, or whether they mean us harm.