The previous chapter showed that President Obama played a key role for bringing about fundamental changes in U.S.– Cuba policy. By extension, it suggested that said change was the result of individual agency and leadership. However, as the literature review in Chapter One of this volume has highlighted, the Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) scholarship on foreign policy change generally places a premium on structural factors as representing the main drivers or causes of change. In a similar vein, in his specific discussion of U.S.– Cuba policy under Obama, LeoGrande (2015b: 488) refers to a set of structural factors, and changes therein, that opened up a policy window for far- reaching changes in U.S. policy. From those vantage points, Obama was not the driver of change but was rather being driven by structural factors to usher in policy change. In the final analysis, a structural perspective would suggest that any person who held the presidency from 2009 onward would have introduced far- reaching changes since it was not agent- related but structural factors that underpinned the process of change.

Against this background, the following discussion zooms in on three structural factors located on different levels of analysis that are frequently emphasized in the FPA literature as important for bringing about policy change. Those are:

• • international pressure;

• • bureaucratic pressure; and

• • societal pressure.

The discussion explores the extent to which those factors offer similar or even better explanations of the fundamental changes in U.S.–Cuba policy during the Obama administration than the one based on the leader- centered theory of foreign policy change presented in the previous chapter.

International pressure

One explanatory factor for foreign policy change frequently mentioned in the literature concerns external pressure on a country to change course (for example, Gustavsson, 1999). More often than not, external pressure is exerted by more powerful states against less powerful ones. In such hierarchical contexts, the powerful states demand that the less powerful states redirect their policies in order to align them with their own goals and interests. Another source for changing course could be external shocks. Yet there is little evidence that U.S.– Cuba policy under Obama changed for any of those reasons.