Mauricio Claver-Carone hosts a satellite radio program by the name “From Washington al Mundo” covering international affairs. But don’t expect any diplomacy there. The program is merely his platform from which to insult the American foreign policy establishment. For example, in his August 6 show, Claver targeted Vali Nasr, the Dean of the School of Advanced Studies of Johns Hopkins University and a leading expert on the Middle East, calling him “a useful idiot” or an agent of Teheran for not advocating a regime change policy and promoting negotiations with Iran. Mr. Claver and his guest Shahriar Etminani agreed that the nuclear issue is mere “noise”.

In another episode, Claver denounced Washington’s engagement with Beijing. On April 17, Claver hosted Thadeus McCotter or “the smartest member of Congress” by Claver's reckoning. The host and the guest shared their belief that as long as the Communist Party is in power, China remains the same. The United States should apply a Cold War policy to China because the war has never ended. According to Claver’s logic, the 40- year Nixon-Kissinger model of “unconditional” and “nonchalant” engagement with China is a case of “myopia”. It should be replaced by a “confrontational” approach. After Tiananmen Square, the United States should have applied to China a policy similar to our fifty year failure against Cuba: the embargo.

As stunned Americans struggle to fathom the violence unleashed against the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya two nights ago – which, like anti-American protests in Egypt and Yemen, was sparked by an anti-Muslim movie trailer posted on You Tube – and which ended in the tragic deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other consulate staff, it boggles the mind that U.S. relations with our neighbor, Cuba, where the only violent extremists who threaten America are to be found at the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, can really be such a minefield afterall.

And yet they are. How else to explain the apparent backtracking of the Obama administration on a policy it, yes, this and not some other administration, rolled out more than a year and a half ago, to authorize people-to-people educational travel to the island.  If the speculation is true that the administration bowed to pressures from pro-embargo lawmakers, specifically Senator Marco Rubio, who was holding up the nomination of our top Western Hemisphere diplomat at the time, one would have thought that the beefed up guidance on the policy offered this spring by the Treasury Department – including that travelers justify how any meetings with Cuban government representatives furthers the democratic cause in Cuba – should have been sufficient. But now it seems that scores of organizations are in the lurch, waiting for license renewals that don’t come, and forced to take a loss on their ventures.

An American no one believed would be in jail in Cuba this long remains there more than 2.5 years later – whether his employers complacently assured themselves the Cubans wouldn’t bother with his breaking the law or whether we analysts presumed the Cubans merely intended to make a point about their sovereignty and the U.S. government would admit its mistake (if only to itself) and get our man out. Because Alan Gross, whom his wife now fears won’t live to complete his 15 year sentence in Cuban prison, was our man, sending reports back on his USAID subcontract about the “very risky business” he was undertaking and the "catastrophic" results of discovery by the Cuban government. (Gross traveled to Cuba on a tourist visa five times in 2009 to set up several wi-fi networks that could go undetected by the Cuban government.) And we appear to have no plan yet – or if we do, it surely won’t appear until after the November elections – to secure his release other than to make demands that we know are backed up with zero leverage. There are those who imagine we have such leverage and insist the administration is too weak-kneed to wield it. It’s a convenient hypothesis that decades of unresolved strife with Havana ought to have dispelled by now.

Meanwhile, the semiannual migration talks, cancelled in a huff by the Bush administration – whose Cuba policy candidate Obama criticized – in early 2004 and restarted by the Obama administration in 2009, have again stalled for over a year now. Apparently stemming the tide of illegal Cuban migration, or even maintaining across-the-table talks for the sake of remembering how to do it, even if we vehemently disagree, is just not that high a priority anymore. It’s the sort of diplomacy that only hurts our interests.