Grinning for the Fourth Estate, the US commander in chief stepped out of his jet onto foreign soil, inevitably to be scrutinized by foreign soldiers as well as his own, and began making awkward but good-natured overtures to a Communist dictator whose ideals were at odds with America's.
Who was this president? Well, recently it was Obama, meeting Raul Castro in Cuba. In the past, however, it was Richard Nixon meeting Mao Zedong in China, and creating lasting trade relations. Then, it was Ronald Reagan; not only meeting with Soviet Premiere Mikhael Gorbachev to introduce American franchises, but even striking up a friendship. Neither of these two Republican presidents has been seen as soft on communism as a result, and in fact, they're hailed as helping to bring communism down by introducing the world to the benefits of consumer capitalsim. Yet when Obama, a black Democrat whom many still refuse to believe is an American citizen, has made similar overtures into Cuba, the usual gang of alarmists have lost their mind and are abuzz with conspiracy accusations.
Still, let's not point the finger too hard in one direction. The Obama presidency, perhaps more than any in history, has become a battleground for identity zealots of all stripes, often at a remove from the man's own nature. For Leftists in 2008, not only was his election a quick way to signal that America had moved on from centuries of racism, but the fact that he had a very Middle Eastern-sounding name felt like an apology for the more recent PR blunders George W Bush had in that region; to them, he was progressivism in the non-white flesh. The Right, in turn, seized upon this Left-wing appetite for new and non-Eurocentric things as evidence of their running accusation of the Left, present at least since Vietnam, as the perpetual betrayers of America. Both plugged their political knee-jerks into the symbol they made of Obama, and as The Political Compass correctly points out, both were absurd.
The reality is that while Obama may be many things, many of whose merits can be debated, a proletariat-worshiping socialist is not one of them. Policies such as bank and automotive bail-outs, as well as mandating that citizens purchase health plans from insurance companies, may have been in some sense Keynesian, but they still were most immediately beneficial to the preexisting economic elites, and positive effects on the lower classes were effectively as trickle-down as those that occurred when Reagan bolstered businesses by cutting taxes instead. Stocks shot up under Obama, employment rates lagged behind. He will leave the White House with capitalism very much intact.
Indeed, since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, not just America, but almost the whole world has gotten steadily more capitalist, as what has become known as neoliberalism (with no objection from the Clintons, who embraced it in the form of NAFTA) has superseded old loyalties in establishing relationships between countries. With plenty of unsavory tyrannical states left in the world, one of the few things that really distinguishes Cuba is its retention of disproved command-economics--but then, Mao was still running that sort of economy when he opened trade with Nixon, too. Given that both China and the USSR were gigantic nuclear powers, it's certain that they were far more terrifying sorts of Communist states than Cuba was, so during the Cold War, when they got diplomacy and Cuba didn't, it seems logical to assume that had more to do with the absolute losses to be had in a conflict than the possible profits a relationship might bring. Even so, now that the Cold War has ended and trade concerns have surpassed staving off Mutually Assured Destruction as a priority of foreign policy, it's actually remarkable that the US resuming relations with Cuba took this long.
Politicians, Right-wing as well as Left-wing, love to drum their supporters into ideological fervor because that makes it easier for them to think in the crass, either-or terms on which American elections rest, and for the Right, part of that ideological fervor entails a hatred for socialism. (As if there was much socialism left to hate anymore.) However, when it comes to foreign policy and the trade deals that underscore it, the inconvenient truth for ideologues about free markets is that they're differentiated from communist approaches to economics not by having a different ideology, but by having no ideology, which also means no condemnation of ideology--if there's money to made, businesses don't turn down the opportunity. As anti-communist Cuban expatriate Paquito D'Rivera described the long-parodied irony of Che Guevara's post-portem career, "Sometimes it makes me feel happy when I see somebody with those T-shirts. His success has been in the area of human activity that he hated most; marketing."
Now granted, not every ideologically-agnostic business deal is as humorous and harmless as making a buck off of self-assumed rebels who don't look too deeply into motives, and if you think it stinks that American businesses are channeling money into propping up authoritarian communist regimes who offer them cheap labor, and authoritarian Islamic regimes that offer cheap oil, well, I agree. Free trade that causes America to make-nice (often with no strings attached) with extremely un-American regimes carries all sorts of risks and moral quandaries; especially given the dangerous rogues that money could find its way to, and these days, even Republicans are starting to have second thoughts, as witness Middle American die-hards backing Donald Trump as he breaks with decades of conservative policies favoring unregulated foreign trade, and advocates such drastic measures as a "trade-war" with China. There are cases to be made against business deals with authoritarians.
Be all that as it may, though, there is absolutely no good reason to believe that Obama's new diplomacy with Cuba is going to let communism into the US (and if you do believe that, it's likely because your perception of Obama is shaped by the most ignorant blowhards on the Right, the most ignorant blowhards on the Left, or quite possibly both); quite the contrary, if China, Russia and Vietnam are any indication, it is far more likely capitalism will come to Cuba. Again, that does not mean everything is hunky-dory. Cuba will likely make market reforms, but that does not mean it will become a democracy. Cuba will likely open up to investment from Cuban expatriates, but that does not mean its government will offer them any reparations. These sorts of deals don't work like that.
So no; Obama's dealing with communist Cuba is not ideal. However, it is not a new low. In the decades-old tradition established by Republicans and maintained by Democrats, this is business as usual--literally.
