Conservative Recommendations to Congress

Ana Quintana at the Heritage Foundation has an op-ed essentially telling Congress to stop being reasonable and bring back a security obsession. Therefore Congress should sabotage Cuba negotiations and also tell Juan Manuel Santos that he needs to change his negotiating strategy. Further, since mano dura policies have worked so well to reduce human rights abuses in Central America, we need to double down on them and get rid of all the social stuff. Oddly enough, the Venezuela recommendations were only to consult more with the OAS, not acknowledging that the Obama administration has already been slapping down sanctions.

This is an extreme view but you see bits of this sort of thing in the U.S. presidential campaign. Given how poorly security-first policies have fared in achieving U.S. policy goals (e.g. regime change in Cuba, reduced narcotics flow, reduced human rights abuses, etc.) it is discouraging to see their persistence.