—Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.—

Ringing words, smoothly delivered: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Did that memorable line from President Barack Obama’s inaugural address on January 20 mean his administration would break with a long American tradition of paying lip service to democracy and human rights while supporting authoritarian rulers friendly to Washington? Too early to say for sure, but probably not.

Four months into his presidency, Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, lean towards pragmatism over ideology and principle, closer in foreign policy outlook to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger than to George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

On her first official visit to China, Clinton said concern over human rights must not “interfere” with cooperation on the global financial crisis, climate change and security issues such as North Korea’s nuclear arms programme.

As for those on the wrong side of history, one leader who fits Obama’s description is President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, from where the U.S. president is scheduled to make a high-profile speech to the Muslim world early in June.

A long-time U.S. ally, Mubarak has been in power since 1981. He won uncontested elections four times. The fifth and latest, in 2005, featured charges of vote-rigging and the arrest of his main opponent.

The U.S. Department of State, which issues annual reports on human rights, gives Egypt poor grades and notes “the government’s respect for freedoms of press, association and religion declined during the year (2008).” No unclenched fist here.

To boot, Mubarak has played host and acted as a sponsor to Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes in Darfur. The court issued a warrant for Bashir’s arrest in March.

At the height of the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda,” the second-term drive for “democracy promotion,” Washington publicly scolded Mubarak. Rice, during a visit to Cairo, announced a break with the past:

“For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the region. And we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of the people.”

TARNISHED IMAGE

By 2005, when Rice made her democratic aspirations speech, the U.S. image in the Arab world was so badly tarnished by the war in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and Guantanamo that few Arabs were inclined to believe anything the Bush administration said.

Her remark stood out for its bluntness and its venue but the idea was not new. Support for democracy against dictatorships has been a key theme of American foreign policy since the U.S. rose to big power status at the turn of the 20th century.

That did not keep the U.S. from overthrowing democratically-elected leaders it did not like (Chile’s Salvador Allende, Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz) and propping up dictators it did (the Shah of Iran, Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines). Saying one thing and doing another earned the U.S. an enduring reputation for hypocrisy.

The Bush administration’s enthusiasm for democracy promotion in the Middle East fizzled rapidly after the Islamist group Hamas, shunned as a terrorist group by the West, won a resounding electoral victory in Gaza in 2006. Since then, part of the American foreign policy establishment has framed the alternatives in the region as Islamists or authoritarians.

If there were free elections today in Egypt, many experts predict that the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aim is the establishment of an Islamic state, would win easily, an uncomfortable prospect for Washington.

To push an Arab peace plan Obama wants to make part of an effort to create a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel, Mubarak is clearly a better partner even though he may be on the wrong side of history. The plan offers Israel normal relations with all Arab states in return for withdrawing from territory it seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The plan was first floated by Saudi Arabia, another staunch U.S. ally far from democracy and prone to silence dissent.

How (and whether) Obama intends to persuade countries on the wrong side of history to switch to the right side should become clear in his speech to the Muslim world. It could be a turning point in America’s relations with a fifth of the world’s population, but there is a lot that could go wrong, even for a president with Obama’s charisma and outstanding political skills. Not to mention a middle name that resonates: Hussein.

The goal he set himself for the speech, spelt out before he took office, is ambitious: “Reboot America’s image” in the Muslim world. Words alone won’t do it, but they are a start.

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The U.S. case for isolating Cuba and keeping it out of international meetings such as this week’s Summit of the Americas sounds simple: the country doesn’t have democratically elected leaders, it holds political prisoners, it violates human rights and its citizens can’t travel freely. All perfectly true.

But if the logic used for isolating Cuba were applied consistently, neither China nor Saudi Arabia, for example, should have taken part in the London G20 summit. The U.S. State Department estimates China has “tens of thousands” of political prisoners and describes it as “an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party … is the paramount source of power.”

That has made little difference to the close relationship of mutual dependence between the U.S. and China, the largest creditor of the United States. During U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s February visit to China, pragmatism triumphed over human rights concerns as she urged the Chinese to keep buying U.S. treasury bonds.

In comparison to China’s “tens of thousands,” the State Department’s latest human rights report quotes a Cuban human rights group as saying the government there held at least 205 political prisoners at the end of 2008, down from 240 at the end of 2007.

The Saudi monarchy, according to the State Department report, denies its citizens the right to change the government peacefully, holds political prisoners, curbs free speech, restricts religious freedom, tolerates violence against women, and sanctions corporal punishment. The list goes on and includes lack of due process in the judicial system.

If the logic applied to Cuba were consistent, U.S. citizens should be banned from traveling to North Korea, an “absolute dictatorship” where the State Department noted extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and political prisoners. Instead, the only country to which the U.S. government restricts travel by its citizens is Cuba.

In advance of making his first appearance at a Hemispheric summit this week, U.S. President Barack Obama eased restrictions his predecessor, George W. Bush, had imposed to make it more difficult for Cuban-Americans with relatives on the island to travel and send money there. Obama also allowed U.S. telecommunications companies to bid for Cuban licenses.

These are small steps that fall far short of lifting the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, a Cold War measure that demonstrably failed in its aim to bring down the communist government of Fidel Castro, who defied 10 successive U.S. presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, before he formally handed power to his brother Raul last February due to a long illness.

HAVANA-WASHINGTON THAW?

Raul Castro, who is 77 and was Cuba’s defense minister for almost five decades, has since made several key changes in the leadership. They included firing foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque, one of a group of young officials whose dedication to Fidel Castro was so fierce they earned the nickname “tropical Taliban.” He was replaced by Bruno Rodriguez, a less doctrinaire foreign service veteran.

Some Cuba watchers saw this change as a move to facilitate efforts to thaw relations between Havana and Washington. How far and how fast Obama will go is certain to be a topic at the summit in Trinidad and Tobago where Cuba is the only country in all the Americas not invited.

Advocates of lifting the embargo, a policy change that would finally bring the United States in line with the rest of the world, see light at the end of the long tunnel. “This is the beginning of the end of the worst, least successful foreign policy experiment in the history of the United States,” in the words of David Rothkopf, head of a consultancy who blogs at Foreign Policy magazine.

Wishful thinking? Lifting the embargo would require repealing legislation — including the controversial 1996 Helms-Burton law - that penalizes companies doing business with Cuba. In one of its more bizarre interpretations, U.S. pressure resulted in Mexico City’s Sheraton hotel expelling a 16-strong Cuban delegation attending an energy conference there a few years ago.

The beginning-of-the-end school of thought points to legislation now pending - The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act - which would allow all Americans, not only Cuban-Americans with family on the island, to visit. If that act were passed, a study for the International Monetary Fund estimates that up to 3.5 million Americans could visit annually.

Cuba is not on the official agenda of the Trinidad summit (the fifth in a series that began in Miami in 1994) but Venezuela’s left-wing, anti-American president, Hugo Chavez, is certain to bring it up, along with a demand that the 34-member Organization of American States readmit Cuba. Its membership was suspended in 1962.

The guideline that only democratically-elected leaders can take part in summit meetings dates from the 1994 gathering - and even then, the logic was flawed. The Miami meeting’s participants included then Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, a leader of dubious democratic credentials whose acts in office included dissolving Congress and closing the country’s courts.

He then won elections boycotted by the opposition. This month, a Peruvian court sentenced Fujimori to 25 years in jail for human rights abuses and involvement in two military massacres during a campaign against left-wing guerrillas.

Obama campaigned for president on a platform of “change we can believe in.” His moves on Cuba will provide a good indicator of how much of a change agent he really is.

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Why have billions of dollars and thousands of anti-narcotics agents around the world failed to throttle the global traffic in cocaine, heroin and marijuana? Blame wrong-headed policies, largely driven by the United States, and what experts call the balloon effect.

Squeezing a balloon in one place makes it expand in another. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one springs up. Take the example of Colombia and Mexico, at present a focus of U.S. attention because of large-scale violence that threatens to spill across the border.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, almost all the cocaine consumed in the United States was grown in Colombia and shipped to South Florida along a variety of sea and air routes. Colombian traffickers fighting for market share turned Miami into a city where shootouts, contract killings and kidnappings became part of daily life.

That began to change when enraged citizens appealed to the federal government for help to crack down on the “cocaine cowboys.” Then President Ronald Reagan established a special force to cut the cocaine pipelines and end the violence. “The Mexicans must rue the day the South Florida Task Force was set up,” said Peter Reuter, a scholar at the University of Maryland. “That was the beginning of the problems it faces today.”

Within weeks of its formation in 1982, the task force scored several spectacular successes. A string of seizures of large quantities of cocaine and marijuana prompted Colombian trafficking organisations to shift their smuggling routes to Mexico, where they partnered with criminal networks.

By 1988, the balloon effect had become obvious: The Mexican Defence Ministry reported it had discovered 4.8 tonnes of cocaine in a cave in Chihuahua near the U.S. border. It was then the world’s biggest seizure of the drug. Its Colombian origin was not in doubt — Mexico produced no cocaine of its own.

Now, two decades later, the U.S. State Department estimates that as much as 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States comes through Mexico, which is also a major source of heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. The State Department’s estimates speak volumes about the failure of policies that emphasised crop eradication, interdiction and punishment for drug users.

FARTHER AWAY THAN EVER

As a Latin American commission led by three former presidents (of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil) put it recently: “Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of consumption have not yielded the expected results. We are farther away than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.”

If it were possible to seal the border, there would be no reason for Mexico’s drug mafias to wage war against each other. They are fighting for access to the main gateways into the U.S. In one border city alone, Ciudad Juarez, more than 1,000 people have been killed in the first two months of the year.

There has been growing criticism of the war on drugs, and not only from advocates of legalization who argue that drugs should be sold and regulated in the same way as alcohol and tobacco is now regulated.

On a visit to Mexico this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade.” Though it was a statement of the obvious — the drug trade is driven by the laws of supply and demand — officials of previous administrations have not been nearly as blunt.

Discussing the drug problem as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama he said he believed in “shifting the paradigm, shifting the model so that we can focus more on a public health approach.”

The public health approach, know as “harm reduction” in a global dispute over drug strategies, means treating drug addicts not as criminals who participate in an illegal market but as patients who deserve care in the public health system. Most of Europe favors harm reduction over filling the prisons with drug abusers, the standard procedure in the United States.

On any give day, about half a million people are behind bars in the United States for drug offences. Obama’s choice of drug czar, Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowski, signals a new direction, at least in the drug war at home. Seattle has been on the forefront of drug reform developments, including a needle exchange program for addicts. And for Seattle police, marijuana arrests have been the lowest law enforcement priority.

The drug czar heads the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, a 130-member group which sets anti-drug policy. “The success of our efforts to reduce the flow of drugs is largely dependent on our ability to reduce demand for them,” Kerlikowske said after his nomination.

Reducing demand for illicit drugs in the United States, the world’s largest market, is an ambitious goal. Earlier attempts have failed, including Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. A program still active called DARE — Drug Abuse Resistance Education — aimed at high school students is drawing mixed reviews.

But optimists point to the success of campaigns to discourage smoking by making it socially unacceptable. It took a long time. But it worked.