Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Comparing “Game Changers”: Syria/Crimea and Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis

COMPARING THE 2014 CRIMEAN CRISIS TO THE 1962 CUBAN MISSILE crisis is most pertinent in terms of their shared gravity at their respective moments, the short-term domestic political considerations at play in each, and the implications for future confrontations. Like Putin fifty years later, in 1962 the Soviet premier and general secretary of the Communist Party at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev, had signals from then US president John Kennedy that he was reluctant to enforce his government’s declared interests in the global arena. When Kennedy became president, he inherited a plot designed during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro.14 The idea was for Cuban expatriates to invade Cuba with American air cover in the hope of fomenting a popular uprising and the fall of Castro’s two-year-old, increasingly anti-American, government. The Bay of Pigs invasion went forward on April 17–20, 1961, but at the last minute President Kennedy decided against providing air cover. The result was the defeat of the invasion, with the death, execution, or imprisonment of the invading Cuban expatriates. The message heard by Khrushchev and his core supporters was, “Kennedy is a guy we can push around.” This message was strongly reinforced when JFK went to a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna on June 4, 1961. Following his inaugural address’s declaration that he would never fear to negotiate, he went inadequately prepared and left the Soviet leadership with the impression that he was reluctant to be tough. As Kennedy himself said of Khrushchev after the meeting, “He beat the hell out of me,” telling the New York Times , “He savaged me.”15

Run the clock forward to between September and October 14, 1962, at which time the Soviet Union’s emplacement of nuclear-armed missiles on Cuba was confirmed by American U-2 spy planes, and we have Kennedy drawing a line in the sand, just as Obama attempted to. JFK had indicated earlier in public that he had no problem with defensive Soviet weapons on Cuba, but that he would not tolerate any offensive (read: nuclear) Soviet weapons on the island. He did this after having been repeatedly assured by the Soviet leadership both publicly and privately that the USSR had no need to place offensive weapons on Cuba. As he reported to the American people from the Oval Office on October 22, 1962:

The size of this undertaking makes clear that it has been planned for some months. Yet, only last month, after I had made clear the distinction between any introduction of ground-to-ground missiles and the existence of defensive antiaircraft missiles, the Soviet Government publicly stated on September 11 that, and I quote, “the armaments and military equipment sent to Cuba are designed exclusively for defensive purposes,” that there is, and I quote the Soviet Government, “there is no need for the Soviet Government to shift its weapons for a retaliatory blow to any other country, for instance Cuba,” and that, and I quote their government, “the Soviet Union has so powerful rockets to carry these nuclear warheads that there is no need to search for sites for them beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union.” That statement was false.16

It is useful to recognize that the Soviet leadership did not deny that such assurances had been given. In Sergei Khrushchev’s 2001 account of his father’s life and times as leader of the Soviet Union, for instance, he reports on a meeting on September 5, 1962, between then US attorney general Robert Kennedy and Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States. “Robert Kennedy voiced his concern with the growing Soviet military activity in Cuba. . . . Dobrynin relayed to Robert Kennedy Father’s assurances that no offensive weapons, in particular surface-to-surface missiles, were based in Cuba.”17 Having believed these assurances, President Kennedy seems to have thought it was a freebie to take a tough public stance. He could talk tough, he thought, whether he carried a big stick or not. And then, having taken a firm public stance against Soviet offensive weapons on Cuba, he learned, as we saw, that the promises he received were false; the Soviet Union was placing offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba and also the surface-to-surface missiles needed to deliver them to targets.

Whereas half a century later Obama spoke vaguely of a “game changer,” Kennedy spoke explicitly about how the game would change. Speaking to the nation and to the Soviet leadership—the essential set of ears in the dispute—JFK made several bold, undiplomatic statements that conveyed the consequences to follow if the missiles and nuclear weapons were not withdrawn. As we have already seen, he quoted the Soviet assurances he was given and then stated flatly that these assurances were false. He went on to make clear that what happened in Cuba and how his government responded mattered well beyond the confines of any threat posed by missiles on Cuba. President Kennedy stated in the same address on October 22, 1962, that “this secret, swift, and extraordinary build-up of Communist missiles—in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in violation of Soviet assurances, and in defiance of American and hemispheric policy—this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil—is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe [emphasis added].”18

In that same address he then took Cuba’s government out of the picture so that no third-party excuses could be meaningfully invoked by Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy stated, “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” There is not a shred of ambiguity in this declaration. It might have been a bluff, but the Soviet audience had no way of knowing.

Whereas Obama had signaled an unwillingness to fight, Kennedy’s signals—his threat to use nuclear weapons (“We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced”) and, most important, his concrete actions in stopping and boarding ships in international waters showed that he was prepared to risk war. Khrushchev backed down.

Was Kennedy more motivated by some concern for the national interest than Obama was fifty years later? We think not, and given that Kennedy’s first exclamation upon being informed of nuclear weapons in Cuba was, “He [Khrushchev] can’t do that to me!”, it seems JFK also perceived the crisis first in personal terms and only after that in national terms.19

John Kennedy, like Barack Obama, and, we submit, like any leader anywhere, anytime (including, of course, Putin and Khrushchev), was focused on what his core constituents at home needed to hear to continue to back their leader and their party. In Obama’s case, his essential voters were tired of fights; embarrassed by their perception of bullying behavior by the United States around the world; and keen for a more dovelike, gentler foreign policy. President Kennedy’s constituents, in contrast, were not terribly happy with his job performance prior to the Cuban missile crisis.

It might be appealing to think that the differences between Kennedy’s actions and Obama’s stemmed from the differences in the magnitude of the threats they faced. Rather than appealing to domestic political considerations, Kennedy may have believed that the Cuban missile crisis was an existential threat to the United States, prompting a tough response. Obama, in contrast, may reasonably have thought that the Syrian crisis and the Ukraine crisis, though troubling, did not rise to the same level of imminent threat as did the Cuban crisis. Yet we know that the premise that the Cuban crisis was an existential threat is not really correct and was not thought to be correct at the time. Even in President Kennedy’s speech on October 22, he noted, “American citizens have become adjusted to living daily in the bull’s-eye of Soviet missiles located inside the USSR or in submarines. In that sense, missiles in Cuba add to an already clear and present danger. . . .”20 The missiles on Cuba had not fundamentally altered the balance of power. They had shortened the time it would take for nuclear weapons to reach the United States, but given the technology of the day, that change made little defensive difference.