America’s Foes Are Joining Forces

By Peter Beinart

Mr. Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

The Biden administration recently made two grim announcements: Iran is helping to manufacture drones for Russia. China operates a spy base in Cuba.

The message is clear: America’s foes are joining forces. They now constitute what Washington’s influential Center for a New American Security recently called a new “axis of authoritarians,” which threatens U.S. interests from East Asia to the Caribbean and Eastern Europe to the Persian Gulf. The phrase implies that what binds the governments of Russia, China, Iran and Cuba is their common aversion to democracy. For a Washington foreign-policy class that often depicts America’s geopolitical struggles as contests between freedom and tyranny, it’s an appealing narrative.

But there’s a problem. Only a few years ago, the governments of Cuba and Iran — which had the same authoritarian political systems back then — were pursuing closer ties to Washington. They didn’t swerve toward Russia and China because they realized they hate democracy. They swerved because the United States spurned those overtures and drove them into the arms of America’s great-power foes. Under both Donald Trump and President Biden, Washington has helped create the very anti-American partnerships it now bemoans, which is exactly what it did during the last Cold War.

Take Cuba. For most of the post-Cold War era, its government’s strategy has been fairly clear: keeping its political system closed while opening the economy to foreign investment. That required better relations with Washington, since U.S. Sanctions not only barred Cuba from its biggest potential source of tourism and trade, but also scared off European companies. William LeoGrande, a Latin America expert at American University, told me, “Every major component of Cuba’s economic strategy in the last two decades had been premised on long-term expectations that the relationship with the U.S. Would improve.”

In 2014, that bet began to pay off. The Obama administration announced an end to America’s decades-long enmity with the Cuban government, and soon everyone from Conan O’Brien to Andrew Cuomo to Steve Nash began showing up in Havana. As a University of Miami Cuba expert, Michael J. Bustamante, noted at the time, “the American flag has even become the most stylish national standard, appearing on Cubans’ T-shirts, tights and tank tops.”

Then Donald Trump entered the White House and it all fell apart. In 2019, he imposed the harshest economic sanctions in more than a half-century. A month later, Cuba began rationing soap, eggs, rice and beans. Around that same time, according to The Wall Street Journal, China’s surveillance network on the island “underwent a significant upgrade” (the Cuban and Chinese foreign ministries have denied reports of a Chinese surveillance facility in Cuba). Evan Ellis, a Latin America analyst at the U.S. Army War College, told The Journal that the deal “is basically Chinese pay-to-play,” adding that “China gives money to Cuba it desperately needs, and China gets access to the listening facility.” Last fall, China agreed to restructure Cuba’s debt and donate $100 million to the island. One reason Cuba still needs Beijing’s money is that the Biden administration has kept key Trump sanctions in place.