Obama makes long overdue strides with Cuba by eschewing American domestic politics. (Image: jaumescar/Flickr)

This past week’s announcement that the United States will restore diplomatic ties with Cuba by President Obama is as historic as it is long overdue. At a time when few things seem to be going right in the world from the American perspective — from Russian aggression in Crimea, to ISIS unraveling much of Iraq and Syria, and the international community’s outraged response to the CIA terror report — this step will be one of the most important parts of Obama’s legacy. And it is a rare victory in Washington for common sense.

That the previous failed approach to relations with Cuba endured for so long is a tribute to the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy. Historically, the Cuban-American voting bloc is as well-organized as it has been politically active. In the late 1970s, among Cuban American registered to vote, 49 percent were Democrats and only 39 percent were Republicans. All it took were a few speeches in Miami by Ronald Reagan emphasizing his opposition to Communism and Castro to completely change that picture. By 1988, Republican Cuban Americans outnumbered Democrats 68 percent to 24 percent.

Initially, Reagan made several overtures toward better relations with Castro. Key Carter-era appointments — such as Wayne S. Smith, chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and Myles Frechette, director of the Cuban Affairs office in the Department of state — remained at their posts once the Reagan administration took office. (The U.S. Interests Section in Havana is and has for decades been the nation’s official diplomatic office in Cuba, though it is technically not an embassy.) The Reagan White House also invited the chief of the Cuban Interests Section — a de facto Cuban embassy hosted by the Swiss in Washington, DC — to an official diplomatic reception.

These overtures were ultimately rebuffed, and US-Cuba relations began to deteriorate in September 1981 as Fidel Castro denounced Reagan for his support of Israel and the Salvadoran government. By 1982, Reagan reimposed Cuban travel restrictions on tourists and businessmen that the Carter administration had lifted five years earlier. A 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court in Zemel v. Rusk had previously upheld the executive branch’s right to ban such travel for national security reasons as determined necessary by the administration. Cuba, apparently, remained such a threat to national security that Congress held hearings in 2002 trying to determine whether the Bush administration was devoting more effort to enforcing the ban on travel to Cuba than they were investigating the financing of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

Cuban-American loyalty to the GOP continued without much change for decades after Reagan won them over in no small part because such efforts were made periodically to energize the zealots, mostly in the form of speeches to Cuban-Americans in Miami during election seasons. To keep people faithfully voting Republican, the Bush administration would have the State Department in the each presidential and midterm election year issue a report saying how more sanctions were necessary. Since most other countries ignored America’s efforts to curtail trade with Cuba, and opted to pursue alternative trade and travel agreements with the Castro regime, the increasingly harsher sanctions continued to have little effect other than to make life more difficult for the Cuban people.

In recent years, things have shifted somewhat. One poll in 2012 had Obama winning not only Florida’s Latino vote, but the Cuban American vote as well. Other polls find that more recent immigrants were more supportive of increased contact, travel, and expanded commercial relations and business with the island — having a stronger and more immediate tie to Cuba than generationally-detached expatriates. Curiously, there is also still strong support among Cuban Americans for keeping Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism even though there has been no justification for doing so for decades.

Those who see a military solution to every diplomatic problem will oppose the expansion of the relationship. They would prefer to continue a policy that is as ineffective as it is unilateral. Since there is already an Interests Section in Havana that acts in every way like an embassy, with the exception that it does not have an ambassador heading it, legislation to block the funding of the new policy will have little effect. A lone senator can try to prevent the confirmation of an ambassador, however. Perhaps nominating a Cuban American will overcome that obstacle just as naming Pete Peterson, a former prisoner of war, was the first step in elevating diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

In a president’s first term, the top priority is getting reelected. In his (and someday, her) second term, it is all about the president’s place in history. With this long overdue diplomatic step forward, President Obama has definitely improved his.

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Dennis Jett is a former American ambassador and current professor at Penn State University’s School of International Affairs. His career in the US Foreign Service spanned twenty-eight years and three continents, and his academic expertise focuses on international relations, foreign aid administration, and American foreign policy. Jett is the author of the new book, American Ambassadors: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Diplomats. His previous books include Why American Foreign Policy Fails: Unsafe at Home and Despised Abroad and Why Peacekeeping Fails.