Fifty years ago today, the Cuban Missile Crisis reached its zenith when President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation and announced a blockade of Cuba. Within a week, Soviet Premier Nikita Nikita Khrushchev had agreed to withdraw the missiles whose identification by US spy planes had precipitated the crisis. The story presented to the public was that President Kennedy had stood “eyeball-to-eyeball” with Khrushchev, demanding that the Soviets remove the missiles, and that Khrushchev had agreed in return for a US promise not to invade. The reality, which came to public light only recently, was that the two countries had secretly negotiated a trade. In return for a Soviet withdrawal, the United States would withdraw its own missiles from Turkey, within striking distance of the USSR. This unacknowledged quid pro quo would not be done until several months had gone by. Further, as recorded conversations among Kennedy and his advisors have made clear, Kennedy made this decision against the advice of all of his advisors, who advocated military intervention. We don’t know what the result of such intervention would have been, but it is clear from the magnitude of the proposed invasion that many lives would have been lost even if the conflict had not escalated into a nuclear exchange. Thus, the public perception of Kennedy as unflinching against the enemy was not correct. In fact, his toughness lay in his willingness to contradict his advisors, who were largely more experienced in foreign policy, in order to pursue a non-violent solution.
I think that President Obama should tell this story at the debate tonight in his closing remarks. Mitt Romney will undoubtedly have criticized him for not being forceful enough with China, with Iran, and so on. Obama should then wind up by saying something like, “You’ve heard Mr. Romney and I agree on a number of points, and you’ve heard us disagree on a few. But those aren’t the areas that I really worry about. What I worry about is the crisis we can’t anticipate. I worry that Mitt Romney confuses toughness with an unwillingness to compromise. I worry about the kinds of mistakes that can come of inflexibility, either due to inexperience or to a fear of contradicting conventional wisdom and even one’s one advisors. And I worry about provoking a crisis that a more dynamic approach could have avoided. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot rely only on threats and provocation. There is a time for that, but in many cases that will merely back your opponent into a corner, which can create the very danger we are trying to prevent. Making foreign policy involves thousands of individual decisions. We would not expect Mr. Romney or anyone else to get them all right. But the biggest danger is a one-size-fits-all approach that that has led to some of the biggest foreign policy blunders, costing thousands of lives, in American history. This is the kind of approach we should fear most.”
