Ticket to regime change in Cuba: End the embargo |
Ticket to regime change in Cuba: End the embargo
One of the most powerful books I have ever read is “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam,” by Barbara Tuchman. It should be required reading for every member of Congress and, especially, for any candidate for president.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and vivid storyteller, Tuchman cites four classic examples of how governments often ignore important facts, only to end up pursuing policies that backfire bigtime: the Trojan War; the role of Renaissance popes in the Protestant Revolution; Britain’s loss of the American colonies; and the War in Vietnam. Ignore these lessons of history, Tuchman warns, and you could make equally disastrous mistakes.
Tuchman’s book was published in 1984, but that’s not the end of the story. The “March of Folly” is always a work in progress. A new chapter or two is written every year. If only more American presidents had read that book, we might have been spared such disasters as the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, or the war in Iran. And if only Donald Trump would read it now, he might realize that any war against Cuba — after Venezuela and Iran, his third attempt at “regime change” this year — would be another pure folly.
But, to be fair, it didn’t start with Trump. U.S. policy toward Cuba is actually a 66 year-old folly that started in 1960 with President Eisenhower’s imposition of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, continued by........