Engaging Cuba

World Public Opinion offers some poll data to buttress the Obama administration's decision to ease some restrictions targeted at Cuba:

One of the core arguments in Cuba policy is whether increasing all kinds of contact between the US and Cuba - travel, trade, diplomacy - will strengthen the Castro regime or will have a liberalizing effect on the system.

Americans feel, by wide margins, that increasing travel and trade between Cuba and the United States is more likely to have the effect of leading "Cuba in a more open and democratic direction" (71%) than to "strengthen the Communist regime in Cuba" (26%). Clear majorities of Democrats (80%), independents (69%) as well as Republicans (59%) share this view.

If this is indeed an accurate gauge of the public's mood, it could have policy implications beyond Cuba. You can imagine the case being made that the best way to undermine the Mullah's grip on Iran's society is to open up the country to international trade.

Still, I think the prospect of economic engagement leading to political liberalization is the wrong way to look at the benefits of engagement. As we see with China, economic liberalization hasn't made the regime significantly less authoritarian, at least to date. (Although as Leslie Gelb noted in his interview with RCW, economic change works over a long time horizon.) But it has made China prosperous, which has in turn produced a number of stakeholders vested in maintaining the peaceful status quo.

Cuba isn't a top tier threat to U.S. security, so this dynamic isn't really as important. But with a country like Iran or China, creating groups of powerful interests vested in the revenue generated from international trade can serve to put the brakes on more hostile factions. Engagement also carries serious risks too. Economic growth can help a state modernize its military. But at the end of the day, we have ample evidence that sanctions rarely topple regimes (Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe, and Castro are proof) so exploring alternative means of changing state behavior is probably the smart thing to do.

UPDATE: PostGlobal has an interesting discussion of the issue of Cuba and engagement.