Foes of Chuck Hagel have found another reason to oppose his nomination for secretary of defense: he supported ending the 50-year old embargo on Cuba. Hagel also called the idea that the government in Havana constitutes a terrorist threat to the United States “goofy”, referring to Fidel Castro as a “toothless old dinosaur.” Supposedly, this proves he’s weak and won’t stand up to world dictators when vital U.S. interests are at stake. 

In reality, Hagel belongs to a growing group of conservatives who have come to realize the failure of U.S. policy towards Cuba. This group includes former senator Richard Lugar, who until recently was the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Jeff Flake, a freshman Republican from Arizona. Even Paul Ryan (R-WI), the GOP’s former VP candidate, voted against the embargo the last time it came to a vote in the House in 2005. 

You don’t need to think hard to understand why the embargo and travel ban on Cuba have failed: the Castro brothers are still in power in Havana. Five decades of economic sanctions—the most stringent Washington has imposed on any country—have failed to bring about a democratic transformation of Cuba. Moreover, the embargo has served as a scapegoat to the regime.

Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz, a leading dissident in Cuba, has aptly summed up that strategy: “[Castro] wants to continue exaggerating the image of the external enemy which has been vital for the Cuban Government during decades, an external enemy which can be blamed for the failure of the totalitarian model implanted here.” Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez has called the embargo “the regime’s excuse for all its failures” and pointed out that its existence has undermined the work of dissidents on the island. 

Proponents of the embargo (who are now opposing Hagel’s nomination) inadvertently accept this reality. Our friend Frank Calzón, at the Center for a Free Cuba, mentions in the Washington Post several instances when Havana rebutted Washington’s outreach efforts: “Each solicitation has been met with aggressive action.” Why? Perhaps because the Castro regime fears that an end to the embargo and travel ban could weaken its grip on power? 

Ironically, those who argue that national security concerns are reasons to oppose changing U.S. policy towards Cuba ignore that the embargo has also become somewhat of a U.S. security liability itself. A 2007 report by the Government Accountability Office points out that enforcing the embargo and travel ban diverts limited resources from homeland security that could be used to keep terrorists and criminals out of the United States. The GAO report warned that arrival inspections from Cuba intended to enforce the embargo are “straining Customs and Border Patrol’s capacity to inspect other travelers according to its mission of keeping terrorists, criminals, and inadmissible aliens out of the country.”     

It would be naïve to think that ending the embargo will somehow transform Cuba into a democratic society. As long as the Castros are in change, that won’t happen. But it’s equally naïve to believe that there are great benefits and no significant downsides to the current policy. Chuck Hagel doesn’t have a Cuba problem. Just the opposite. He has shown common sense in ending one of Washington’s most anachronistic foreign policies.

Readers of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and Ronald Bailey’s columns in the Reason magazine will not be surprised to hear that the rate of population growth is slowing—dramatically—throughout the world. Jeff Wise’s article in the Slate magazine, “About that Overpopulation Problem,” revisits that familiar territory and makes some interesting points. Ultimately, however, Wise fails to appreciate the real reasons for the fall in population growth rate.

First, the good news. As Wise notes, “[The] rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today. And then it will fall… the long-dreaded resource shortage may turn out not to be a problem at all.”

“For hundreds of thousands of years,” Wise’s article continues, “in order for humanity to survive things like epidemics and wars and famine, birthrates had to be very high. Eventually, thanks to technology, death rates started to fall in Europe and in North America, and the population size soared. In time, though, birthrates fell as well, and the population leveled out.”

Why might that be? “The reason,” Wise avers, “for the implacability of demographic transition can be expressed in one word: education. One of the first things that countries do when they start to develop is educate their young people, including girls. That dramatically improves the size and quality of the workforce. But it also introduces an opportunity cost for having babies.”

True enough, better education is a by-product of development, but where does development come from?

For that we have to look to Ronald Bailey. As he writes, “In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared fertility rates of over 100 countries with their index rankings for economic freedom and another index for the rule of law. ‘Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law,’ wrote Norton. ‘The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures.’”

And, “Economic freedom and the rule of law produce prosperity which dramatically lowers child mortality which, in turn, reduces the incentive to bear more children. In addition, along with increased prosperity comes more education for women, opening up more productive opportunities for them in the cash economy. This increases the opportunity costs for staying at home to rear children. Educating children to meet the productive challenges of growing economies also becomes more expensive and time consuming.”

So, education is a proximate cause of population growth slowdown. The ultimate cause, however, rests with economic freedom and resulting prosperity.

That is, Friday night at 8:00 the Showtime cable channel will broadcast the movie “The Iron Lady,” starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. When it came out a year ago, I published the tart analysis below. On cable, my recommendation is that you DVR it and then fast-forward through all the imaginative scenes of Thatcher as a doddering old lady. What you want to watch is the rise and triumph of a “conviction politician.” And again I appeal to the Weinsteins to release a version that omits all the nonsense and shows us the Margaret Thatcher of history.

The reviewers warned me – don’t see The Iron Lady, the new movie starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. Kelly Jane Torrance of the Washington Examiner mourns, “The climax of this movie about one of the most important people – not just women, but people – of the 20th century comes when Margaret Thatcher decides to throw out her dead husband’s clothes.” James Verniere of the Boston Herald asks, “Mamma mia! Why would you turn the story of Margaret Thatcher into a tale of a sweet, dotty old lady having a love affair with her beloved late husband?” Virginia Postrel excoriates the filmmakers: “These supposedly feminist filmmakers could have portrayed Thatcher as an ambitious woman who had nothing to feel guilty about. Instead they chose to inject guilt where it did not belong. They obscured Thatcher’s public accomplishments in a fog of private angst. The portrait of dementia isn’t the problem. The way the film uses old age to punish a lifetime of accomplishment is.”

Even the Washington Post, the New York Times (“You are left with the impression of an old woman who can’t quite remember who she used to be and of a movie that is not so sure either.”), and the New Yorker wonder why you would make a movie about one of the most influential and controversial political figures, the first woman to lead a Western country, the woman who arguably saved Great Britain and helped Ronald Reagan win the Cold War, and then spend half the film depicting her as a confused old lady with hallucinations.

Nevertheless, Thatcher is indeed a compelling figure, and the commercials and trailers showed Streep portraying her as a leader of conviction and strength. So I ignored the critics and bought a ticket. And the film was slightly better than I expected. It absolutely wastes about 40 percent of its time on the imagined scenes of a confused old lady. How much more rewarding it would have been to see a great actress play a pioneering political figure rising to power, leading her country, and facing opposition from both friends and enemies. Instead, we get a few vignettes of that, about half the film’s running time. So it wasn’t terrible, just a lost opportunity.

Interestingly, the marketing team at Weinstein Company seems to understand the appeal of a film on Margaret Thatcher far better than the writer and director. They know what the audience wants. Take a look at the trailer:

You’ll notice that there’s not a single shot of the old-lady part of the movie. Instead, it’s two fast minutes of Margaret Thatcher in action. Including a final scene (“Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies”) that harks back to an earlier scene of Thatcher on her way up, dramatizes her uniqueness – and is actually not in the film.

So I have a suggestion: Often the DVD of a film will include the film as released to theaters and also a “Director’s Cut” that reflects the director’s own artistic choices that the studio may have blocked. I recommend that the DVD of The Iron Lady include a “Marketer’s Cut” that omits all the old-lady scenes and just shows us Margaret Thatcher the political figure. And if there’s good material like the “join the ladies” scene left on the cutting-room floor, then the marketers could add that back in. In that case, I’d buy the DVD. In fact, someone should start a Facebook campaign: “Put a Marketer’s Cut of The Iron Lady on the DVD.”

By the way, Mitt Romney should not want Republicans to watch this movie: It will remind them of what it means to be inspired by a political leader.