Barack Obama is the first sitting US President to visit Cuba in almost 90 years today. His landmark three-day trip (March 20-22), during which he will be accompanied by a bipartisan delegation of around a reported 20 congressional legislators, follows the announcement last Tuesday of a suite of new measures that further erode the bilateral sanctions regime introduced during the Cold War era.
The Obama White House’s executive actions announced on Tuesday are, collectively, perhaps the most significant since the announcement of the president’s ‘opening initiative’ to Cuba in December 2014. The relaxation of travel and financial rules will allow Cubans to open US bank accounts and permit Cubans in the US homeland to earn salaries or other financial compensation; and allow US citizens to travel more easily, independently, for education, cultural and other authorised reasons without going on larger, organised trips. These measures combine with the relatively recently announced resumption of frequently scheduled air services from US airports to Cuba.
While US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has claimed that the new actions, cumulatively, “chart a new course in US-Cuba relations”, they need to be put into context given that bilateral relations cannot be fully normalised without the acquiescence of Congress. And despite the fact that a sizeable delegation of Republican and Democratic legislators will accompany Obama on his trip, many in Capitol Hill remain critical of the thawing in ties, especially on the Republican side of the aisle.
Given this opposition, attempts to roll back in Congress the decades-long measures still partially freezing US-Cuban relations, including the trade embargo, have therefore failed to secure significant traction to date, despite growing support for complete normalisation of relations. Part of the hesitation on the part of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and Senate stems from the fact that Cuba has proven relatively sluggish so far to take advantage of the range of new economic opportunities, nor to introduce meaningful political reforms.
And in an intensely polarising election year, multiple Republican presidential candidates, including Senator Ted Cruz, who is of Cuban-American heritage, and billionaire businessman Donald Trump, have also criticised the White House. Cruz, like Senator Marco Rubio, is vociferously opposed to the Cuba opening, while Trump has used his standard refrain that he would, as president, have negotiated a much better settlement with Cuba than Obama.
While transformational change on this issue is therefore unlikely in Congress in 2016, the initial overtures that Obama has made towards Cuba have already become an important part of his presidential record. And the fact that his White House legacy is increasingly being defined largely on the foreign — rather than domestic — policy front, replicates a relatively common pattern for re-elected presidents in recent decades.
Several such second-term presidents in the post-war era have, like Obama, found it difficult to acquire domestic policy momentum, in significant part, because their parties, as with the Democrats now, often hold a weaker position in Congress. Thus Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Bill Clinton in 1996 were all re-elected alongside Congresses where both the House of Representatives and Senate were controlled by their partisan opponents.
And since his 2012 re-election, Obama has achieved very little domestic policy success in the face of Republican resistance. For instance, his gun control bill was defeated and looks exceptionally unlikely to be rejuvenated despite semi-regular mass shootings across America; comprehensive immigration reform has floundered in the face of concerted opposition; and the prospect of a long-term budgetary ‘grand bargain’ with Congress has all but disappeared.
However, Obama has enjoyed more success internationally, partly because Congress generally has less latitude over foreign, compared to domestic, policy. So, with little opportunity to push domestic policy forward, the president’s focus on foreign affairs has grown steadily, especially as the uneven US economic recovery has slowly built up steam.
Amongst Obama’s key, albeit intensely controversial, foreign policy accomplishments has been the final, historic nuclear deal with Iran. The agreement between Tehran and the P5+1 (US, China, Russia, United Kingdom, France plus Germany) was a major victory for the White House that has the long-term potential not just to help forge a lasting rapprochement with Iran.
It also holds the possibility, ultimately, to help transform the wider geopolitics of the Middle East, and help consolidate Obama’s broader desire to enhance global nuclear security. Here, as well as pushing inter-state nuclear diplomacy with countries like Iran and also Russia, Obama has created the Nuclear Security Summit process to counter nuclear terrorism which he has described as the “most immediate and extreme threat to global security”.
The Obama administration has also secured agreement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between the US and 11 countries in the Americas and Asia-Pacific (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam) that collectively account for about 40 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product. And this free trade and investment treaty, which still requires US congressional ratification, is one key element of Obama’s attempt to re-orientate US international policy towards the Asia-Pacific region and other strategic high-growth markets, allowing the country to help write what US officials have called “the rules of the road” for the 21st Century world economy.
As well as Iran and TPP, Obama could yet secure other significant achievements to consolidate his presidential legacy on the international front. This includes post-9/11 security and defence policy where Washington is looking to significantly deplete Daesh’s (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) territorial foothold and capabilities in Iraq and Syria during the course of 2016, while also stabilising the new national unity government in Afghanistan, headed by President Ashraf Gani.
Taken overall, Obama has, like some other re-elected presidents in the post-war era, found it difficult to secure major domestic policy momentum. His legacy will therefore rest heavily on foreign affairs and the controversial Cuba opening will form a key part of this with the Iran nuclear deal and potentially TPP too.
Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS (the Centre for International Affairs, Diplomacy and Strategy) and at the London School of Economics.
