Notes on the State of the Union

The President’s annual State of the Union Address traditionally focuses largely on domestic issues, and this year’s was no exception. But every speech the Executive gives is carefully crafted to touch upon a wide range of issues and, to some extent, to gracefully address contentious issues that are the source of party divisions. Although Cuba was mentioned a total of zero (0) times in the State of the Union, we can still break down a few of the President’s comments and analyze their content in the Cuba context.

Our success in this new and changing world will require reform, responsibility, and innovation. It will also require us to approach that world with a new level of engagement in our foreign affairs…

Indeed: in a lot of ways over the past two years, the United States has looked inward. Cuba policy has been allowed to languish in order to focus on more urgent issues, mostly domestic, like the financial crisis. But now, President Obama tells us, we will again actively engage with the world.

Just as jobs and businesses can now race across borders, so can new threats and new challenges…

The challenges we face as a nation are often transnational in nature, and must therefore be addressed by cooperation between nations. We’ve addressed several of these in the past year as opportunities (and pressing necessities) for US-Cuba cooperation: including on ocean and environmental issues, particularly in the context of the BP oil spill; on immigration and human trafficking issues; and on drug trafficking issues.

No single wall separates East and West. No one rival superpower is aligned against us…

The Cold War is over, and the policies of that era are no longer appropriate for new circumstances in a multipolar world. Our Cuba policy was designed to respond to Cold War dangers; changing circumstances call for changing policies.

This is just a part of how we’re shaping a world that favors peace and prosperity. With our European allies, we revitalized NATO and increased our cooperation on everything from counterterrorism to missile defense. We’ve reset our relationship with Russia, strengthened Asian alliances, built new partnerships with nations like India… This March, I will travel to Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador to forge new alliances across the Americas.

This administration is set on improving the US diplomatic standing in the world after an administration that did damage to America’s image abroad. We’ve “reset” our relationship with a number of countries, including non-democracies like China, but have not done the same with Cuba. In this hemisphere, many nations consider Cuba policy to be an easy way to improve favor in Latin America; most countries have normalized relations with Cuba and frown upon the US stance toward the island. The intent to engage with the world is there; in practice in the case of Cuba, it remains imperfect.