With all due respect, Cuban leaders in Cuba and Miami have been sitting down to talk for decades and have made great progress.

National dialogues in Cuba

Cuba's democratic nonviolent opposition has repeatedly engaged in dialogues, including national dialogues, in order to mobilize and coordinate Cubans to reflect on our homeland’s future. 

Gustavo Arcos Bergnes and Sebastian Arcos Bergnes called for dialogue in 1990.

In 1990, against the protests of many Cuban exiles, Gustavo Arcos issued a statement to Castro asking him to convene a "National Dialogue," which would include all segments of Cuban society, on the island and in exile. During his address to the Worker's Congress on January 28, 1990, Castro issued his response noting that "the Cuban people" will take care of those activists. On March 5, 1990, government sponsored mobs attacked Sebastian Arcos's home. On March 8, another mob, led by future Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina, attacked Gustavo's home.

Oswaldo Payá throughout his life called for unity and dialogue between all Cubans, in and outside the country. His National Dialogue program and All Cubans Forum in 2005- 2006, involved over 15,000 thousand Cubans both inside and outside of Cuba in discussions on a proposal for a nonviolent change towards democracy. I proudly participated in this dialogue that sought a transition from the existing laws of the dictatorship to the rule of law in a restored democratic order. Payá near the end of his life called for a referendum on basic human rights. He was murdered, together with his movement's youth leader, on July 22, 2012.

Oswaldo Payá shows tentative program for a national dialogue in Havana on Feb 17, 2005.

In November 2020, the San Isidro Movement, a movement of artists founded in 2018 to protest Decree 349 that increased censorship in the arts in Cuba, engaged in a series of escalating nonviolent protests, demanding the release of their colleague Denis Solís González unjustly jailed on November 9, 2020, and in response to increasing regime repression against them for protesting for his release. On November  26, 2020 the San Isidro Movement's headquarters was raided and artists protesting inside taken by the secret police.

Activists under siege at the Isidro Movement headquarters in Havana, Cuba

The Castro regime ended up with a much larger problem than 14 protesters in a small space in the San Isidro neighborhood in Havana. Young people, mostly artists and academics, began gathering throughout the day of November 27, 2020 outside the Ministry of Culture. 

Young Cubans gathered outside the Ministry of Culture on November 27, 2020

Their numbers continued growing into the evening demanding the Minister meet with protesters to negotiate terms for a dialogue.  Thirty representatives, elected by the hundreds gathered, went in and met with officials. 

They emerged with a commitment to dialogue and to consider the points raised by the protesters. Meanwhile the dictatorship sent truckloads of plainclothes security to surround the demonstrators, and to intimidate them. They also closed off the path to the Ministry of Culture, and began using tear gas and physical force to prevent others from continuing to join the protesters. Instead of following through with a dialogue to resolve the differences that had generated the protests the regime launched a media assault against the San Isidro Movement against the protesters.

Today, San Isidro Movement leaders Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez are prisoners of conscience serving five and nine year prison sentences in Cuba. Other members of the San Isidro Movement, such as Anamely Ramos González and Omara Ruiz Urquiola, were exiled by the Castro dictatorship and are not allowed to return home.

The Center for a Free Cuba in April 2021 hosted a conversation titled "The San Isidro Movement: Nonviolent Resistance, Power and Dialogue" with Professor Jorge Sanguinetty and Cuban artists Kizzy Macias and Eligio Perez Merino. It is available on YouTube in Spanish. It was moderated by Sebastian Arcos Cazabon.

Do not confuse the dictatorship with the Cuban people

On March 22, 2016, President Obama did the wave with dictator Raul Castro

The United States Institute of Peace published a Peace Brief on October 23, 2015 by Susan Stigant; and Elizabeth Murray titled "National Dialogues: A Tool for Conflict Transformation?" that highlights both the opportunities and risks in adopting this tool.

"National dialogue is an increasingly popular tool for conflict resolution and political transformation. It can broaden debate regarding a country’s trajectory beyond the usual elite decision makers; however, it can also be misused and manipulated by leaders to consolidate their power."

The Cuban dictatorship's Miguel Díaz-Canel claims that they "want to strengthen [their] relationships with the United States, regardless of ideological differences,” but this is not the main problem. The main problem is the abusive relationship between the Cuban dictatorship, and the Cuban people.

The Castro regime has not indicated a desire to dialogue with the Cuban people, but to dialogue with the United States. This is not the first time that has happened, and it is not a game changer, but a tactic to prolong the dictatorship. It has been successfully carried out before.

Lessons for Cuba from the experience in Romania

President Richard Nixon and President Jimmy Carter met with Ceasescu 

The United States made this mistake before in Eastern Europe with their "successful" embrace of the Nicolae Ceasescu regime in Romania.

Out of all the countries of Eastern Europe, the United States had the closest diplomatic relations with Romania. This was due to the Nixon administration seeking to exploit differences between Romania and the Soviet Union. Nicolae Ceasescu denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and continued diplomatic relations with Israel maintaining an independent foreign policy from the Soviet Union.

Richard Nixon visited Romania in August of 1969. In 1972 Romania became eligible for U.S. Export-Import Bank credits and in 1975 was accorded most favored nation status. In 1978 Nicolae Ceasescu and his wife visited Washington, DC on a state visit and was hosted by President Jimmy Carter who welcomed the dictator and described him in the following glowing terms:

"I've enjoyed being with him. He's a very good adviser. He's a man who in the past has suffered greatly, imprisoned, tortured, but because of his courage and because of his belief in the future of his own country, notable achievements have been brought to the people who have confidence in him. It's a great pleasure for me again to express my welcome to him to our country, and I would like to propose a toast to a great leader, President Ceausescu, and to the brave and friendly people of Romania. Mr. President, to you and your people."

Despite having the worse human rights record in Eastern Europe it was not until 1988 that to preempt congressional action, Ceausescu renounced MFN treatment, calling Jackson-Vanik and other human rights requirements unacceptable interference in Romanian sovereignty. Secretary of State Schultz had warned Ceausescu in 1985 to improve his human rights behavior or lose favorable trade status. The Heritage Foundation argued in 1985 that the previous twenty years of U.S. engagement with the regime in Romania had coincided with deteriorating human rights standards.

Ceasescu's regime was one of the nastier dictatorships of the East block. In addition to the typical accoutrements of a Stalinist regime this "American ally" managed to reach new lows. Imagine for a moment being born and placed in a cage as a newborn washed via a hose with cold water and never experiencing human touch.

10,000 Romanian babies infected with HIV through dirty needles.

Fed like animals and contracting HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases through dirty needles used to inject the children with vitamins. This was done by Ceausescu's communist regime in Romania. The regime decided it needed to increase its population and in 2013 Scientific American explained how this crime was systematically planned out and its aftermath in the article Tragedy Leads to Study of Severe Child Neglect.

Nicolae Ceausescu decreed in 1966 that Romania would develop its “human capital” via a government-enforced mandate to increase the country's population. Ceauşescu, Romania's leader from 1965 to 1989, banned contraception and abortions and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families that had fewer than five children. State doctors—the menstrual police—conducted gynecologic examinations in the workplace of women of childbearing age to see whether they were producing sufficient offspring. The birth rate initially skyrocketed. Yet because families were too poor to keep their children, they abandoned many of them to large state-run institutions.

 Hundreds of thousands of children were subjected to this. This was the country that US taxpayers subsidized with US Export-Import Bank credits. Romania under Ceausescu inspired Margaret Atwood to write The Handmaid's Tale.

Romania, the country with the closest diplomatic and economic relationship with the United States in Eastern Europe, saw the rule of  Nicolae Ceasescu end in a violent blood bath. The dictator and his wife executed in a show trial on Christmas day and scores of innocent Romanians shot by the state security services. More than a thousand people were killed. The communists in power under Ceasescu remained in power until 1996 in a system marked by continuity until democrats were able to wrest control from them nonviolently.  

Relations between the United States and Communist Romania were "great", but the relation with the Romanian people was horrid, and that defined how things would end - not U.S. - Romanian relations. Furthermore, the good relations between the perverse regime in Romania and the United States, is a stain upon the honor of America.

Lessons from Poland

Thankfully, Ronald Reagan took a different approach in Poland, and the rest of Eastern Europe.

Ronald Reagan entered office on January 20, 1981 and on December 13, 1981 the communist regime in Poland had declared martial law and was cracking down on the Solidarity movement. 10,000 people were rounded up and about 100 died during martial law. Ronald Reagan in his Christmas Address on December 23, 1981 denounced the crackdown (beginning at 4 minutes into the above video) and outlined economic sanctions against Poland while demanding that the human rights of the Polish people be respected. He didn't call on Poles from the diaspora to represent American interests in normalizing relations with the Polish Communist regime while Polish dissidents were being rounded up and killed. The United States took a stand recognizing the sovereignty of the Polish people.

The Reagan Administration revoked most-favored-nation (MFN) status in response to the Polish Government's decision to ban Solidarity in 1981. The outcome in Poland was a nonviolent transition led by the Polish solidarity movement in a national dialogue between the government and the opposition that ended in free elections in 1989. 

The approach being advocated in Cuba, by some policy makers, pursues the approach pursued in Romania, and will likely have a similar, bloody outcome to the shame of those who have advocated it.

We need a real national dialogue in Cuba, and that does not mean the United States siding with the dictatorship in Cuba, downplaying its crimes against the Cuban people as Washington did in Romania under three presidencies. It means recognizing the dictatorship for what it is, and not what you'd like it to be and side with the Cuban people, not their oppressor. 

This is my first contribution to the current dialogue.

U.S. foreign policy in China for the past generation is a dangerous failure that threatens world peace.

"The cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people. The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized." - Oswaldo Paya, December 17, 2002

 Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter meet with Deng Xiaoping in 1979

Yesterday at the Dorothea Green Lecture Series event, State of the World 2018 at Florida International University yesterday on the first panel, Challenges to U.S. Foreign Policy, Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of New America made the claim that "globalization isn't a choice but a reality." Others have made that claim, but it downplays that choices were made and are being made that define this global order.

 One of those decisions was for the United States to engage and legitimize Communist China's leadership, and assist in its economic modernization and growth, despite a horrid human rights record, over the past forty six years. The rest of Western countries followed the lead of the super power. Was that a good idea?

State of the World 2018 panel at Florida International University

Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of New America responded that US assisting the economic rise of China, lifting 400 million out of poverty, was a good thing on the whole.

Realpolitik could justify engaging China in 1971, in the midst of the bloody Cultural Revolution, to exploit divisions with the Soviet Union, but once the USSR imploded in 1991 that engagement, especially economic should have ended but instead it intensified.

Richard Nixon shaking hands with China's mass murderer Mao Ze Dong

Consider that 10 years after President Jimmy Carter normalized relations with China in 1979 at least 10,000 Chinese demonstrators, who demanded democratic reforms, were butchered in Beijing's 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Western nations, including the United States during the Bush Administration, continued and intensified their economic engagement with this murderous regime. 
 
The Clinton Administration continued and intensified this relationship with China and completely de-linked it from human rights considerations. This decision had consequences for the American middle class. Corruption appears to have also played a role. Clinton confidante Webster Hubbell was forced to resign to face a criminal investigation in 1994, the former associate attorney general received more than $400,000 from about a dozen enterprises, including the organizers of a multibillion-dollar development in mainland China that received the endorsement of the Clinton administration. Jane White, the author of America, welcome to the poorhouse, have called Bill Clinton, the outsourcer in chief. What did this translate into in concrete economic terms? According to Jane White quite a lot:

"Manufacturers never emerged from the 2001 recession, which coincided with China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Between 2001 and 2009 the U.S. lost 42,400 factories and manufacturing employment dropped to 11.7 million, a loss of 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was in 1941."

Chinese nationals have been subjected to new totalitarian controls over there lives with the help of American companies such as Google and Yahoo. Google,to be able to operate in China, censored its search engines and Yahoo went further and actively tracked down dissidents who had been sending out e-mails critical of the government, leading to their imprisonment and torture. American corporations today are complicit with a murderous totalitarian regime.

Chinese Dictator Jiang Zemin and U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1997

Economically empowering Communist China also means that the regime has modernized and grown its military, projecting power regionally and flexing its economic muscle in Africa and Latin America. It also means that it could buy influence in Washington, and academia to the detriment of U.S. national interests.

The Peoples Republic of China during the 1990s was having set backs getting its rockets to launch successfully but American corporations came to the rescue with the assistance of presidential waivers signed by President Bill Clinton in exchange for substantial campaign donations.

China goes ballistic, tests nuclear-capable missiles able to reach U.S.

John Mintz in The Washington Post on January 1, 2003 reported that The State Department had charged that two of the country's largest aerospace companies, Hughes Electronics Corp. and Boeing Satellite Systems (Loral), illegally transferred sensitive U.S. space technology to China in the 1990s that could have helped Beijing's military develop intercontinental missiles. In the end the Loral Space and Communications Corporation paid out $20 million in fines to settle the Federal investigation which is relatively small potatoes when compared to $250 million telecommunications deal for Loral to launch satellites on Chinese rockets.

DF-31A mobile missile

Bill Gertz in The Washington Times reported on October 2, 2014 that "China’s military has conducted the first flight test of a new variant of one of its road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles in a sign that Beijing is increasing its strategic strike capability against the United States. The test of a new DF-31B missile was conducted Sept. 25 from a missile test range in central China."

Disagree with Anne-Marie Slaughter because the disengagement from human rights in China while pushing economic engagement with the same regime that killed 45 million of its own people was and is a terrible idea. It is part of the reason for freedom's decline globally over the past 12 years and the rising threat to peace in the world.

#UPDATE US Defense Secretary Mattis says America facing 'growing threats' from China and Russia, warns military's competitive edge 'eroded' in recent years https://t.co/pmNR8V5TzN

— AFP news agency (@AFP) January 19, 2018

History has demonstrated that appeasing tyrants, rather than confront them early on, has terrible and bloody consequences. This isn't a choice but a historical reality. Paying lip service to human rights, while abandoning them in practice, shaped the process of globalization that is leading to an emerging world order that is the stuff of dystopian nightmares.

Looking back at détente: Immoral policy that endangered US national interests

"I think detente had manifestly failed, and that the pursuit of it was encouraging Soviet expansion and rendering the world more dangerous, and especially rendering the Western world in greater peril." - Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick 

Détente: Mao with Nixon, Breshnev with Nixon, Breshnev with Ford

 Since President Barack Obama announced his new Cuba policy on December 17, 2014 there have been over 108 articles that mention both Cuba and détente with the vast majority viewing it as a positive.

However, if one is to revisit the policy of détente enacted by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger then carried forward into the Ford Administration. The word détente means an easing of tensions or relaxation and was a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that lasted between 1971 and 1980. According to Professor Branislav L. Slantchev the Soviets used détente "to evolve from a great regional power into a formidable truly global superpower." It was also the worse period of great defeats internationally for the United States. At the same time the United States morally debased itself into a moral equivalency with the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Gerald Ford was so wedded to détente that he refused to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for fear of offending the Soviets. This led Jimmy Carter  on October 6, 1976 in a presidential debate to charge President Ford with being weak:

"He's also shown a weakness in yielding to pressure. The Soviet Union, for instance, put pressure on Mr. Ford, and he refused to see a symbol of human freedom recognized around the world -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn." 

This low point led to a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party at the time that led to a plank in the party platform that repudiated Ford's weakness titled "morality in foreign policy":

We recognize and commend that great beacon of human courage and morality, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for his compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny. Ours will be a foreign policy that keeps this ever in mind…. Agreements that are negotiated, such as the one signed in Helsinki, must not take from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day gaining it.

Despite not wanting to do so circumstances forced President Carter to scrap it as a matter of policy in 1980 in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan  and his Administration's focus on human rights. President Ronald Reagan had long repudiated this policy as immoral and completely departed from it upon taking office with regards to the Soviet Union. On January 29, 1981 in a news conference responding to a question from Sam Donaldson of ABC news whether detente was possible with the Soviet Union; President Reagan answered as follows:

"Well, so far detente's been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims. I don't have to think of an answer as to what I think their intentions are; they have repeated it. I know of no leader of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership, that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their determination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use.
Now, as long as they do that and as long as they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards, I think when you do business with them, even at a detente, you keep that in mind."

Reagan understood the nature of communist ideology something many have forgotten today in dealing with the communist regime in Cuba under the Castro brothers. At the same time it is also important to remember the role that American corporations played throughout the history of the Soviet Union in propping up and aiding that monstrous totalitarian regime. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on June 30, 1975 addressing the AFL-CIO labor union first thanked workers for their solidarity and then spoke of the alliance between Soviet communists and American capitalists:

But just as we feel ourselves your allies here, there also exists another alliance - at first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well-grounded and easy to understand this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.
      This alliance is not new. The very famous Armand Hammer, who is flourishing here today, laid the basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip into Russia, still in Lenin's time, in the very first years of the Revolution. He was extremely successful in this intelligence mission and since that time for all these 50 years, we observe continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West of the Soviet Communist leaders.
      Their clumsy and awkward economy, which could never overcome its own difficulties by itself, is continually getting material and technological assistance. The major construction projects in the initial five-year plan were built exclusively with American technology and materials. Even Stalin recognized that two-thirds of what was needed was obtained from the West. And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military and police forces - in a country which is by contemporary standards poor - they are used to crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union - and we have western capital to thank for this also.

     Unfortunately in 2015 once again American corporations are falling over themselves to get American taxpayers this time to subsidize the totalitarian communist dictatorship in Cuba. Communist China and Vietnam are two other examples of short term greed ignoring the best interests of their home country much less the interests of the Chinese and Vietnamese suffering under these brutal dictatorships. After this brief historical review hopefully the word détente will not be viewed as positively as it has been over the past month and a natural question should arise: Why repeat this failed policy in Cuba?

President Obama with Chavez (2009) President Obama & Raul Castro (2013)

Bill Clinton's China Policy and its impact on the USA

Clinton's legacy on China devastating for the USA

Chinese Dictator Jiang Zemin and U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1997

President Bill Clinton is back in the news advocating the end of sanctions on the Castro regime and a call for cooperation wherever possible with the dictatorship.  The current policy on Cuba, despite the din of critics, is a reasonable and effective policy that has served U.S. interests better than the constructive engagement policy practiced by Europe and Latin America. The policy that currently exists is not the result of a non-existent Cuban exile lobby but the result of the actions of the Castro dictatorship over the past 55 years. The most recent episode involves the Castro regime smuggling weapons (including rockets and MiGs) to North Korea in 2013.

Policy makers in Washington DC, who in the past shared intelligence with Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking, now want to share information with the Castro regime on drug trafficking despite a well documented history of the dictatorship's relationship with drug traffickers.

Furthermore the anti-American nature of the Castro regime could best be demonstrated by its response to the Carter Administration's human rights based foreign policy in the 1970s that cooled relations with military dictatorships in Latin America. Instead of warming relationships with the United States, despite the intentions of President Carter the Castro regime developed a close working relationship with the military junta in Argentina that before its end in 1983 would disappear 30,000 of their own citizens in that South American country.

Now the advocates of "normalizing" relations with the Castro regime point to the United States normalizing relations with the dictatorships in China and Vietnam. What these advocates fail to mention was the important role that President Clinton played in de-linking human rights concerns from trade with China. Finally, these advocate overlook the continuing dire human rights situation in both China and Vietnam. While engaging in the public debate today over U.S. Cuba policy it is also worthwhile to review what happened during the Clinton era with regards to U.S. China policy.

In October of 1992 in the midst of his campaign for president Bill Clinton  was trying to differentiate himself on foreign policy from George H.W. Bush and according to Thomas Friedman in The New York Times one area was China reporting that Clinton had said "he would support the use of selective trade sanctions against China to get that country to ease its repression of human rights." Speaking on the campaign trail at the time Mr. Clinton in Milwaukee he said: "I believe our nation has a higher purpose than to coddle dictators and stand aside from the global movement toward democracy."  Bill Clinton won the election in November and entered office on January 20, 1993. One year and four months later, Clinton went further than the Bush Administration when he de-linked human rights concerns in China's Most Favored Nation (MFN) status renewal criteria on May 26, 1994.

Apologists for de-linking human rights concerns often cite national interests and strategic concerns trumping human rights. President Clinton took this line of argument to a new level in 1998 justifying a second waiver to the Loral Corporation providing technical information to the People's Republic of China at the time saying: "I believe it was in the national interest and I can assure you it was handled in the routine course of business, consistent with the 10-year-old policy." However CNN in  1998 reported that "[a] Pentagon office concluded in a still-secret report that 'United States national security has been harmed," according to government officials.' 

Further digging done by Edward Bolton in a 2000 report to the National Defense University National War College provided an analysis that points to particular financial and corporate interests, not national interests explaining the de-linking of human rights from MFN and also provides insight into the Clinton Administration's waiver for the Loral corporation to provide sensitive information to the Peoples Republic of China:

Boeing, which donated millions to both Democratic and Republican candidates over the years, is the parent company of Loral Corporation. In 1993, Loral sought and received a waiver to launch Loral/Hughes satellites from China. Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz has personally donated over $1M to both parties. Boeing also owns McDonnell-Douglas which in 1994 made an agreement with China to open a parts factory in Beijing. Boeing, who sold nearly 70% of the airliners China purchased in the 1993 to 1995 time frame, selected former Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Perry for its board of directors shortly after he left the Pentagon. Hughes Electronics Corporation, a subsidiary of General Motors (GM) and co-developer of satellite systems with Loral, also has dealings with China and worked to maintain MFN for the PRC. Hughes Electronics Chairman Michael Smith also serves as vice Chairman of the Aerospace Industries Association, a long time supporter of MFN status for China. 

Supposedly normalizing relations with the dictatorship in China would advance U.S. economic and strategic interests while at the same time improving human rights standards in China. What is the record?

Economic / Strategic outcomes

Communist China in 2014 has overtaken the United States as the economic world power. According to Brett Arends of Market Watch "China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the USA." This has translated in military terms into a communist China that is modernizing its military capability and projecting itself both regionally and internationally as a new and important player challenging U.S. and Western interests. Brett Arends in Market Watch explained the long term significance of this change and how it will impact future generations:

Make no mistake: This is a geopolitical earthquake with a high reading on the Richter scale. Throughout history, political and military power have always depended on economic power. Britain was the workshop of the world before she ruled the waves. And it was Britain’s relative economic decline that preceded the collapse of her power. And it was a similar story with previous hegemonic powers such as France and Spain.  This will not change anything tomorrow or next week, but it will change almost everything in the longer term. We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A. For all their flaws, the two countries have been in the vanguard worldwide in terms of civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional rights.

Human Rights in China

President Carter normalized relations between Washington and Beijing on January 1, 1979. China's one child policy that systematically violates the reproductive rights of all Chinese was first applied in 1979. The conventional belief then with regards to the Soviet Union and China, as with Cuba now, was that normal relations would lead to a greater opening for human rights and a peaceful transition to democracy. The opposite has been the case. In the Soviet Union confrontation and economic isolation led to a peaceful implosion of the regime. In China the policy of trade and political engagement has led to a thriving economic system under Communist party control and modernization and expansion of both the military and police state to continue repressing the Chinese people.

Ten years after Carter succeeded in normalizing relations with the communist dictatorship in China that same regime on June 4, 1989 engaged in a massive crackdown killing thousands of Chinese students and workers who had been non-violently protesting in what became known as the Tiananmen Square massacre. One month later on July 4, 1989 George H.W. Bush sent a secret high level delegation to meet with the Chinese regime and join with them in celebrating American Independence while downplaying pro-forma criticisms made by the Administration. Candidate Bill Clinton would critique this de-linkage of human rights and commercial interests only to intensify the practice during his own presidency. This reached a symbolic low point in 1996 when the General responsible for the 1989 massacre was received at the Clinton White House with a 19 gun salute. The bipartisan consensus on China is one that all Americans should be ashamed of. It has not aided human rights in China but conspired against it.

In 2010, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese prisoner of conscience, Liu Xiaobo. Communist China, like the Nazis and the Soviets before them, created its own honor: the Confucius Peace Prize. Fidel Castro is the recipient this year.

Human Rights in the United States

In the current scandal over the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that describes episodes of torture against suspected terrorists under U.S. custody the mainstream media has failed to report that the torture tactics used were copied from the Chinese and also mentioned in the Armed Services Committee report released back in 2009 that stated: 

The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy's SERE school, it included waterboarding. 

Forty two years after Nixon began the process of normalizing relations with Communist China finds the United States economically in second place to a militarily modernizing China whose human rights record remains dismal but finds U.S. officials copying Chinese communist torture methods. 

Human Rights in decline around the world 

Internationally human rights have been in steady decline for the past eight years could an ascendant communist China have something to do with this trend? The Economist thinks so:

But perhaps the biggest reason why democracy's magnetic power has waned is the rise of China—and the belief of its would-be imitators that they too can create a dynamic economy without easing their grip on political power. In the political rhetoric of many authoritarian governments, fascination with copying China's trick can clearly be discerned.

The policy of the United States in China has not only been absurd but extremely dangerous for the future not only of the American people but of the world. Economically empowering a genocidal communist dictatorship while disengaging from human rights concerns is a recipe for disaster that unfortunately we are all going to get a taste of thanks in large part to President Bill Clinton. 

[This is the first of three essays on China and "normal" relations: the second offers details on how U.S. national security was compromised and third describes what happens when a people opt for solidarity instead of "normal relations" are available via hyperlink.]