Global Policy Forum

By Jonathan Marcus

On the Havana sea-front, on what is now little more than a large traffic-island, stands an unlikely memorial to the more than 260 US sailors who died when the USS Maine battleship blew up in Havana harbour in February 1898. Nobody knows exactly what caused the Maine to blow up. Many now believe that a spontaneous fire in a coal bunker may have ignited an ammunition store. But at the time there were few doubts that the explosion was due to sabotage. But what was the Maine doing in Havana Harbour in the first place? The warship was there to protect American nationals and interests. Riots had erupted. The Spanish Government, responding to demands by Cuban rebels for independence, had offered a measure of home rule. But this angered pro-Spanish groups in Havana who went on the rampage. The Cuban rebellion had prompted strong sympathy in the United States. The sinking of the Maine only hardened opinion and on the 23 April 1898 the US declared war on Spain. In short order the Spanish Navy was defeated and Spanish troops ejected from Cuba. So began a long period of US interference in the island's affairs.

Imperial change of guard

The year 1898 marked, if you like, a changing of the imperial guard. The United States flexing its muscles. Spain very much in decline.[1] But the implications of the Spanish-American War extended far beyond the Caribbean. Warren Zimmerman, a historian and former US diplomat who is an expert on American foreign policy of this period, says that after Cuba, one thing led to another. "Once we had taken Cuba we had to take Puerto Rico because we couldn't give the Spanish fleet another island in the Caribbean to re-fit and re-fuel and base their fleet, and the most interesting was taking the Philippines because nobody was really thinking about the Philippines except some officers in the US navy who felt that it would be very good to have a large island chain close to the Asian mainland that we could exploit to become an Asian power."

Formal American empire proved short-lived. But the overall result of this burst of imperial activity was that the United States obtained a jagged line of bases or coaling stations running from California to Hawaii to Midway in the Pacific and then to Wake Island, Samoa, Guam and the Philippines. This chain of bases enabled the extension of US political and economic influence all the way to China. This was America's first real taste of Empire and as Warren Zimmerman explains it marked a turning point in the way in which it saw the world. In 1898, he says, Americans were given a sense of confidence which they never really lost, a sense of vocation about being a power that stood for something in the world.

One remaining superpower

Through the 20th Century and now into the 21st Century, the US secured its position, first as one of a concert of great powers and then as the only remaining global superpower. Now America's foreign policy matters to all of us. That's perhaps one of the reasons why the US evokes such strong emotions.

I decided to explore one small aspect of US foreign policy to try to throw some light on the complexities of the policy-making process - the US embargo on trade and travel to Cuba. Tourism is now Cuba's biggest earner of foreign currency. Most of the visitors coming here are Europeans and Canadians. There's a fair sprinkling of Americans sipping their rum cocktails. But the Bush Administration doesn't want them to be here.

For over 40 years there has been a US embargo on trade and tourism with Cuba. Some exceptions are made but by and large if Americans want to come as ordinary tourists they have to travel via another country and make sure the Cuban authorities don't stamp their passports. It is a policy that a growing number of Americans believe is simply counter-productive. Isolation and poverty, they say, has done more to prop up Cuba's regime than communist ideology ever could. On Capitol Hill in Washington the long-standing ban on travel to Cuba is now coming under growing pressure. And it's a political battle that tells us a lot about how US foreign policy is made and who makes it.

Tightening Cuba restrictions

Last year in both the Republican-controlled Senate and the House of Representatives resolutions were passed to lift the travel ban by large margins. But a few weeks later the legislation was quietly dropped after President Bush made it clear that he actually wanted quite the opposite - even tighter restrictions on dealings with Cuba. With an election looming the cynics said that Mr Bush was simply courting the votes of Cuban expatriates in Florida - a State that could be crucial in helping to determine the Presidential outcome in November. The Cuba legislation was mixed up with other spending bills and this gave the President the leverage he needed.

Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee emphasised that this was "less a case of a foreign policy clash than the technical problems of passing legislation in a very closely divided Congress". Senators did not want their cherished spending projects to collapse and so agreed to back down once Mr Bush insisted that he didn't want any liberalisation in dealing with Cuba.

Rejecting empire

Process, political calculation or fudge, the fact remains that it is sometimes very hard for outsiders to determine just who makes foreign policy in Washington. "There's no factory that churns out American foreign policy like hot cakes or doughnuts," says Richard Haas, a former senior State Department official in the current Bush Administration and now President of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Policy-making results from the complex interplay of a huge variety of actors. Foreign policy is never made in a vacuum, people factor in what it is they think is popular, what they think is affordable what they think is sustainable politically." So much for normal times; but in war-time, the President's influence over foreign policy making grows significantly.

As professor Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies noted: "After 11 September 2001 Americans felt that once again they were involved in an open-ended conflict and that had the effect of making this President more powerful in foreign policy, at least for now, than his predecessor was."

We also tried to take soundings of American public opinion, which revealed little appetite for long-term foreign entanglements along with a sense of unease that America's role in the world was, as many people put it, so misunderstood by their friends and allies abroad. This confirmed the view of Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, that there is no appetite among the American public for "empire". He calls it "imperial under-stretch". "Domestic opinion in the US will not produce the resources or the public support for an imperial mission over the long run," Mr Nye says.

[1] The Spanish-American war in 1898 saw the US take control of three key territories: Cuba: Destruction of USS Maine in Havana provokes war with Spain. US invades Cuba, captures Havana on 20 September 1898 Philippines: Spain cedes control of the islands to the US Puerto Rico: To deny Spanish ships a base in the Caribbean, US invades the island, captures the island 12 August

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