The Havana Note talks a lot about the need for a new policy towards Cuba. Fifty years of failure is a shameful, bi-partisan indictment of how policy is made in Washington. Luckily, as we have been and will continue to show, more people recognize that change is on the way. But change for change's sake is foolish, and could easily backfire on the United States.
Fortunately, the emerging consensus on changing Cuba policy happens to coincide with another consensus, here in Washington, that America needs a major overhaul of all our relations with Latin America -- and with the rising influence of Hispanic voters.
But both movements lack strategic coherence.
Today I want to propose some ideas on tying these two efforts together in light of the great strategic challenges facing the United States over the next 30-40 years.
Unlike the Cold War or World War II, when ideological foes bent on global aggression defined the central strategic challenges to the United States -- and when a policy of isolation against Cuba made sense -- I argue that the central challenge facing the United States today and for decades to come is the need to create the economic space for the entrance of up to 4.5 billion people into the formal sector of the global economy.
This challenge is presented in stark relief by China. By 2030, 700 million Chinese will leave the countryside and move into the cities, entering the formal sector of the global economy. This alone is the largest rural-urban migration the planet has ever encountered and in the short term it will put incredible global stress on energy, resources, and transportation while requiring new approaches to land use that we have never encountered.
But that same narrative is happening all over the developing world. Rural-urban migration is the dominant migratory pattern. And that migration is the driver bringing people into the formal sector of the global economy. It only follows that the challenge of economic inclusion in the 21st Century is the challenge of sustainability, for, limiting our options in a massive way are the twin constraints of climate change and ecosystem depletion.
Stewarding global patterns of energy and resource consumption, transportation and land use are are the key elements of any new American grand strategy. To the extent that the United States takes the lead in creating the technologies, the metropoli, the products, and the lifestyles of sustainability, strategic pre-eminence will flow once again to our shores.
Our national security strategy flows from this. Abroad America's purpose will be to create the infrastructure of sustainable global growth and in so doing, create the infrastructure of inclusion, prosperity, stability, and ultimately, political liberalism. As we do so, the great strategic liability of the United States in the current global order, our dependence on oil as a transportation fuel, will be mitigated. Our current account will have the best chance at balancing, and economic emigration will be minimized.
As we engage the world, however, we will need to approach the world as a collection of regional economies. Europe, China, India, Japan and the United States are all de jure or de facto regional economies. But the Middle East, the ASEAN bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Russia/Central Asia must all focus on building regional economic engines generating domestic growth instead of exports of raw materials or manufactures.
This also goes for Latin America. As I have written earlier, Europe is pioneering a new kind of sustainability-driven relationship with its southern neighbors that I think should be a model for our own strategy. Integrating the Western Hemisphere's energy grid to support a broad portfolio of renewable sources, including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc. would be the backbone. With reliable, clean energy, the United States must support the development of sustainable urban cities, based on the example of Curitiba, Brazil, not Rio and its crime-dominated favela slums. Sometimes this will mean supporting urban infrastructure, in some cases, bringing the informal, black market into the light.
Such a vision is closely resonant with where Latin America wants to go. The topic of the 5th OAS Summit Summit of the Americas -- scheduled for April 17-19, 2009 -- is “Securing Our Citizens’ Future by Promoting Human Prosperity, Energy Security and Environmental Sustainability." The recently concluded 2008 EU-Latin America Summit in Lima, Peru had the same primary theme: Sustainability and Inclusion.
The United States can pick this up and run with it. And we must. Until we demonstrate to the nations of Latin America that the United States has opened a new chapter, created a new regional doctrine that looks at the Western Hemisphere as part of a global strategy to steer the global economy between the scylla of economic inclusion and charybdis of ecological collapse, the United States is irrelevant to the long-term needs of the region.
Our relations with Cuba preclude any of this. Cuba policy represents the worst of American foreign policy: it is driven by single interest groups, uninformed by our short, medium, or long-term interests, and animated by an irrational sense of threat and a misguided approach to human security. Changing Cuba policy signals to our Latin American neighbors that we have changed. It must also signal that we recognize that top-down, neo-liberalism has failed, that, as the Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen wrote, development is freedom but that development in the 21st century must be sustainable and inclusive.
Ending the embargo and encouraging further Cuban economic reforms so that the Cuban people become role models in this new era, is of the highest priority. While Raul Castro's reforms are encouraging, the larger economic pattern speaks to Cuba becoming a strategic rentier economy, like Yugoslavia in the Cold War. Cuba is playing Lula off Chavez, Beijing off Moscow, all while the U.S. is still its fifth largest trade partner. That is a recipe for economic neglect and an end result more like Haiti than Chile. We cannot afford a failed state of 11 million people 90 miles off our coast.
Such outcomes are unnecessary. We know the road to human security and well-being in Latin America. It is fundamentally an economic pathway steered by a robust, populist, social democracy. The United States needs to embrace this and lead it.
The scale of the economic challenge ahead of us is greater than anything the planet has faced in the past. The struggle between business as usual and sustainability will be fought by the concentrated power of sovereign wealth on one side and the more diffuse but more pervasive price signals from market economies on the other. Cuba's full integration into a regional economy shifting rapidly toward sustainability is essential.
The best opportunity to move the ball forward is for the next president to address the Summit of the Americas in 2009, announce that he will end the embargo against Cuba and decisively support the region towards a sustainable and inclusive future.