Republican criticism of President Obama’s trip to Cuba actually reveals how incoherent and contradictory GOP foreign policy has become.

According to Republican critics, Obama’s visit and moves to normalize relations are just rewarding and propping up a repressive communist regime. The formula should be: democratization and civil liberties first, then normalization of relations.

China is as repressive as Cuba

The Castro regime is, indeed, repressive. According to Freedom House, one of the more repressive regimes in the world.

Freedom House rates countries on 10 indicia of political rights and 15 on civil liberties, based upon the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It then categorizes countries as free, partly free or not free. Cuba is firmly in the not free category.

But so is China. In fact, China has precisely the same repressive rating as Cuba.

And yet, the United States has normal relations with China. After the European Union, China is our largest trading partner. In 2015, nearly $600 billion of goods was exchanged between our two countries.

So, why a diplomatic deep freeze and trade embargo with Cuba, and normal relations and robust trade with China?

To be fair, some Republican members of Congress want to use trade with China as leverage over its human rights practices. But they aren’t advocating that the United States treat China the way they are advocating that we treat Cuba.

And Saudi Arabia is even more repressive

Then there is the Middle East. Republican members of Congress who don’t think the United States should have very close relations with Sunni autocrats, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are rare. In fact, you can pretty much begin and end the counting with Rand Paul.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt are both rated by Freedom House as not free. In fact, Saudi Arabia is rated as even more repressive than Cuba. The House of Saud is one of the most repressive regimes in the world, in the ranks of North Korea.

Yet conventional GOP foreign policy thinking is that fretting over the lack of human rights in Saudi Arabia and Egypt is dreamy-eyed sentimentality. It’s a tough world and a dangerous region. The key is stability and maintaining an alliance against terrorism and regional dominance by Iran.

Iran is also ranked not free, somewhere between Saudi Arabia and Egypt on the repression index. As are Afghanistan and Iraq, which the neoconservatives vowed to set up as examples of democratic capitalism for the region.

How we treat one country affects others

So, according to GOP critics, President Obama has gotten too close to repressive Cuba, but not close enough to repressive Sunni autocrats in the Middle East.

The fallacy in GOP foreign policy thinking is the belief that the United States is still boss of the world. We can do whatever we want wherever we want. So, we can push human rights in our relations with Cuba and pursue realpolitik in our relations with Sunni despots.

But that isn’t the world as it really is. In the real world, what the United States does in one place affects what we can do in other places.

If the United States cozies up with Sunni despots in the Middle East, that undermines our credibility in pushing human rights in Cuba. If the United States pushes human rights in Cuba, that raises questions about our reliability in pursuing realpolitik in the Middle East.

There are grounds to criticize Obama’s visit to Cuba. The real reason to normalize relations with Cuba is that Cuba isn’t important anymore. It is no longer an outpost for the Soviet Union and it is too broke to be a troublemaker in other countries.

But if Cuba is unimportant, there’s no reason for a presidential visit. The left has always had a romanticized view of Cuba. Obama’s visit is best seen as an indulgence in that romanticization. As a man of the left, it meant something to Obama to be the first president to visit Cuba since its revolution.

That’s regrettable. But not as potentially consequential as the Republican incoherent and contradictory approach to the rest of the world.

Reach Robb at

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