Pay to Play Politics

There was an interesting article by Jay Solomon in the Wall Street Journal.  It concerned paying claims to Cuba for whatever kind of grievances they could dream up [ see http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-cuba-take-steps-to-expedite-claims-process-1469814705 ]. The State Department wants to speed up this claims process before anyone finds out we are engaged with another pay to play scheme in international politics.  The first one, you remember, was Iran, where we paid billions of dollars to settle mythical claims to get them to agree to a nuclear deal that the ink was barely dry on when Iran started saying we owned them money.  Cuba is trying to do the same thing, and nobody would blame them if the United States is stupid enough to pay money for a deal that Cuba doesn't really want or care about.

This is a kind of diplomacy we are unfamiliar with, though it sets an interesting precedent.  Every time we get a peace agreement between Assad and his allies, with the opposition, we could lay the groundwork for "claims" against each side which would be settled if the peace agreement held.  We could get China to pay billions for the islands they dispute in the South China Sea.  The Philippines might take a few billion to walk away from their win on claims to territory.  A novel idea.  Novel foreign policy.  Except in the Cuba and Iran cases, we are paying taxpayer dollars to people who hate us and have worked against us for years.  There is no line item in the budget to fund this kind of policy and somewhere they are going to have to dig up the money.  I want to be on the Hill the day that comes up for debate.