Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cuban Missile Crisis, it was quite clear that a Soviet base in Cuba would spell disaster for American security. The United States's hard-line policy grew even harder, faithfully perpetuated by a succession of presidents, both Democrats and Republicans. Through Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, through the Vietnam War, Woodstock, disco, and Reaganomics, Castro still ruled in Havana, a perennial thorn in the side of the United States despite the crushing weight of the trade embargo...
...people in Miami, even though a lot of them are my friends," he says. Almost all Cubans argue that the U.S. and the exiles would do better to encourage change on the island with economic incentives, as Washington has done with other communist holdouts like China and Vietnam. "All those congressional bills say, 'Unless you do what we want, we'll kick your ass,' " says Juan Antonio Blanco, director of a private think tank in Havana. "What we need is not threats but an offer of help...
...toward Cuba. Washington officials insist that the U.S. embargo is not a significant cause of Cuba's economic desperation, which stems primarily from the loss of its Soviet lifeline and Castro's subsequent refusal to make free-market reforms. While the U.S. negotiates with other repressive communist regimes like Vietnam, North Korea and China, officials say these are cases where the U.S. has important strategic interests to safeguard: nuclear nonproliferation in the case of North Korea, a booming trade with China. In contrast, says an Administration official, "we have no interest in Cuba other than the promotion of democracy...
...recent years, faith in activist government has declined precipitously. The cause is not just Vietnam and Watergate but rather the fateful turn liberal activism took with Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Not content with the great middle-class programs like Medicare, Johnson launched a War on Poverty that has since poured trillions down a vast federal sinkhole, leaving little trace -- indeed coinciding with a dramatic rise in crime, homelessness and deviancy of every sort...
...that logic ignores what the U.S. has learned about helping communist countries feel their way toward freedom -- and the booming American trade with other Marxist regimes. Washington is moving toward full trade and diplomatic ties with Vietnam, whose human-rights record is no better than Cuba's. It is holding extensive talks with North Korea, the worst troglodyte of all Stalinist regimes. And when Bill Clinton extended most-favored-nation tariff treatment to Beijing last May, he argued that "the best path for advancing freedom in China is for the United States to intensify and broaden its engagement with that...