Even before President Bush won the backing of the United Nations on Iraq, news stories were describing the new New World Order, which would be very different from what his father envisioned a dozen years ago. But there is a constant, as well. The Cuban government of Fidel Castro, merely by its presence, has bedeviled both Bushes and seven other presidents with an old-world-order’s tenacity.

At least that is how it often seems from the U.S. side of the standoff. But a perceptive, plain-spoken interview in the National Journal last week with Morris Morley, a scholar of U.S.-Cuban relations, provides a different view. Mr. Morely, a senior research fellow with the Council on Hemispheric Relations, suggests the United States is ignoring Cuban reforms that, coming from any other country, would lead to normalized relations.

Mr. Morley’s thesis, briefly, is this: “Washington has basically perceived the end of the Cold War – whether we’re talking about Clinton, Bush one or Bush two – as an invitation to essentially increase the pressure on the Cubans. Whereas the end of the Cold War had a very different effect on the Cubans – it really pushed them in the opposite direction. They’re having to confront these very harsh realities of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Where the Carter and Reagan administrations emphasized the need to reduce Cuba’s military threat – the size of its army, troops in Africa, support for Latin American revolutions – the Clinton administration waffled over what its policy should be. Meanwhile, Cuba reduced its military forces to 200,000 by 1994 and to 60,000 by 2000; had these sorts of cuts occurred in China, Washington would declare its policies a huge success. Instead, the G.W. Bush administration produced a new set of expectations for normal relations: free and fair National Assembly elections next year, the release of political prisoners and a free political opposition.

Clearly, compared with demands on other Communist nations – China, for instance – the U.S. policy toward Cuba is anomalous, and the annual nonbinding vote by the United Nations calling on the United States to drop the trade embargo is always lopsidedly pro-Cuba. Mr. Morley’s point is that the United States is ignoring an opportunity by refusing to look at the progress that Cuba has made and focusing on its glaring shortcomings.

The result is seen not only in the United Nations, but in the regular illegal, circuitous travel by Americans to Cuba and the many U.S. organizations that ship aid there – essentially announcing a grass-roots rejection of a major U.S. policy. It is where grand world orders, old and new, give way to the order of local action and, tangentially, the warm vacation.