Washington: As President-elect Donald Trump threatened to “terminate” the detente policy with Cuba, the White House today warned that reversing historic rapprochement would have “significant” diplomatic, economic and cultural costs.
The policy is considered as one of the foreign policy legacies of outgoing President Barack Obama.
Trump yesterday threatened in a tweet to put an end to the detente policy.
“If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the US as a whole, I will terminate deal,” Trump said in a tweet.
Trump’s tweet landed just as Cuba began its week-long farewell to its former leader Fidel Castro.
The White House, however, was quick to warn that there are costs involved for cancelling such an agreement with Cuba, under which the two countries not only reestablished their diplomatic relationship after decades, but also resumed flights and lifted several sanctions.
“I don’t think I’m gonna be in a position of predicting the future. I think what I’m merely highlighting and trying to underscore here in as much detail as possible, is that it’s just not as simple as one tweet might make it seem,” the White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily news conference.
Earnest said that reversing the policy would be “a significant economic blow” to Cubans and was “not as easy as a stroke of a pen”.
“That’s just an objective fact when you consider how the American people and US businesses have implemented this deal in a way that has provided significant benefits to the American people and provided significant benefits to the Cuban people,” he said.
“All of that would be undone by the reinstitution of a policy that has failed after having been in place for more than five decades. There are significant diplomatic, economic, cultural costs that will have to be accounted for if this policy is rolled back. This is among the many significant challenges that the incoming administration will have to carefully consider,” Earnest said.
After realising that the five decades old policy was not working, Obama two years ago announced to begin normalising relations between the two countries.
AFP