Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So JFK on Cuba Should be Trump’s North Korea Model?

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Bay of Pigs, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Kim Jong Un, Michael Dobbs, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert E. Kelly, Soviet Union, The National Interest, Trump, Turkey, Vienna summit

The race for this year’s foreign policy chutzpah award couldn’t be tighter. Just when I thought political scientist Robert E. Kelly had grabbed an insurmountable lead with his new National Interest article downplaying the horror of a possible North Korean nuclear strike on the United States, along came Michael Dobbs with a jaw-dropping venture into fake history-land masquerading as an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Dobbs’ achievement? An article comparing President Trump’s performance in the North Korea crisis so far with former President John F. Kennedy’s in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that failed to mention either the April, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion: the June, 1961 U.S.-Soviet summit in Vienna: or the way in which the October, 1962 U.S.-Soviet showdown in the Caribbean actually ended.

According to Dobbs, a former Post correspondent turned historian (chiefly of the Cuban crisis), Kennedy was a model of reasonableness and restraint whose unique, “overarching sense of history” led him “to consider the interests of future generations of Americans, and ultimately all of humanity” and thus deserves much credit for preventing the showdown from turning into an apocalyptic nuclear war.

As Dobbs put it (employing terminology used in a contemporary letter from Kennedy’s wife, Jackie), the former president acted like a “big man” who knows “the needs for self-control and restraint.” Mr. Trump, however, has “indulgently” decided to “play chicken” and respond in kind to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s “explosive rhetoric” – a dangerous effort to “out-crazy” Pyongyang that reflects a “little man” outlook “moved more by fear and pride.”

But the Bay of Pigs invasion is kind of important because Kennedy’s support for this disastrously failed attempt by CIA-supported Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro persuaded Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to reach a secret deal with Havana to deploy medium-range missiles in Cuba in the first place – in part to deter another attack either by Cubans or by the United States. So the former President’s actions (which, to be sure, continued a policy of his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower) were largely responsible for creating the Soviet gambit in the first place.

Just as bad, as Kennedy admitted, his failure to order nearby American forces to come to the overwhelmed exile army’s rescue “no doubt” convinced “his superpower rival…that ‘I’m inexperienced. Probably thinks I’m stupid. Maybe most important, he thinks that I had no guts.'” The source for this passage? Dobbs’ own missile crisis history.

Has President Trump approved any similarly reckless blunders that sent such dangerous messages? No.

The Vienna conference is kind of important because this first meeting between the American and Soviet leaders reinforced Khrushchev’s impression of his Cold War counterpart as a weakling. According to one account of the summit and its aftermath:

“‘Roughest thing in my life,’ Kennedy had told James Reston of The New York Times, after it was all over. ‘He just beat the hell out of me.’ Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was contemptuous of his boss’s performance. ‘Khrushchev scared the poor little fellow dead,’ he told his cronies. British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who met with Kennedy shortly after he left Vienna, was only slightly more sympathetic. He thought that the president had been ‘completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman.'”

The source for this passage? That same Dobbs missile crisis history.

Have any of President Trump’s exercise in personal diplomacy failed so utterly? No.

Finally, the Cuban crisis’ resolution is kind of important because Kennedy had a relatively easy out: an offer to remove U.S. missiles stationed in neighboring Turkey that Moscow (understandably) viewed as too close for comfort. This central element of crisis-ending deal struck by Kennedy and Khrushchev was kept secret (at Washington’s insistence), but it’s importance is now recognized by the historical community – including Dobbs.

Does President Trump have a comparable option? Evidently not – unless you count my proposal to pull American troops out of South Korea, which would remove any remotely plausible reason for North Korea to threaten U.S. territory, and turn the problem of handling North Korea’s nuclear forces over to its powerful and wealthy neighbors. Yet no American political leaders on any point on the political spectrum have expressed any support.

Dobbs of course has every right to idolize Kennedy and slight Trump. What he has no right to do after this piece of propaganda is to present himself as anything but a hack.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why the Obama Cuba Announcement is a Nothing-Burger

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Castro, Central America, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, diplomatic relations, Monroe Doctrine, nuclear buildup, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Reagan administration, Soviet Union, Western Hemisphere

President Obama spent 12 minutes today announcing his decision to establish full U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba for the first time since 1961. My main reaction? That was about 12 minutes longer than justified by the decision’s importance. And you can imagine what I think about all of the government time, energy, and resources expended in preparation of this move.

Yet a scientific poll of the reactions they’ve generated indicates that my tweets this morning about this move’s monumental insignificance have caused widespread confusion, and even consternation. Specifically, my indifference to the Cuba news is seen as completely incomprehensible. So let me explain – in the hope that such apathy will spread!

Not that I don’t understand the symbolic milestone represented by the Obama decision. As a card-carrying baby boomer, I have vivid memories of air-raid drills as a second-grader at P.S. 20 in Queens, New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we’d be told to duck under our little wooden desks and warned, “No talking!” And of course, Cuba remained a Cold War bugaboo long after – especially from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when much of the American political class was frantic over the possibility that Cuban-advised forces would take over countries like Angola and El Salvador. (I kid you not.)

But that last sentence should start clearing up part of the mystery of my aloofness. For by that time, nothing should have been more obvious than that the East-West struggle had been reduced to little but a contest over countries lacking any intrinsic strategic or economic significance. Cuba – a charter member of their ranks – was stirring pots of no consequence.

Castro and Cuba did potentially (and for a short time actually) pose a serious threat to American national security. The island and any states brought into its orbit were always capable of hosting Soviet military forces and espionage facilities that could greatly complicate U.S. defense planning. The October, 1962 crisis itself was sparked by Moscow’s plans to base in Cuba nuclear missiles that could have struck the U.S. homeland in very short order.

But the best American response to these kinds of threats was never fighting proxy wars against communist or other radical foes in the Western Hemisphere, much less using foreign aid to innoculate its low-income countries against the ideological appeal of Moscow or Havana. It was using overwhelming U.S. strategic superiority in the hemisphere to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.

Indeed, I made this very proposal as the Reagan administration was embroiling the nation ever more deeply into Central America’s conflicts: Washington should inform those countries that their forms of government were of no intrinsic concern to the United States, but that America reserved the right to attack and destroy any concentrations of foreign forces on their territories it deemed worrisome.  (I can’t find the article on line, but it was in the October 5, 1987 issue of The New Republic.)

(It’s now highly controversial how great a role this strategic superiority played in the resolution of the missile crisis itself, since we now know that a secret agreement by President John F. Kennedy to withdraw American missiles from bases in the Soviet Union’s neighbor, Turkey, also played a major role in preventing war. At the same time, it’s been long believed that Moscow’s decision soon after the crisis to launch a huge strategic nuclear buildup reflected a determination never again to run the local or global risks of nuclear inferiority.)

Cuba – and the prospect of leftist revolutions in Central and South America – became even less important once the Soviet Union fell and Havana lost its major sponsor. So it makes perfect sense to ignore whatever policies American presidents decide to pursue with this small, weak, dirt-poor country.

So if you’re of Cuban descent, or have family and friends who are, or if you live in Florida, or if you just find Cuba interesting for whatever reason, by all means follow this story closely. Otherwise, if you’re concerned about the well-being of the United States or the world in general, stick with or shift over to higher priorities.  And for President Obama and other American leaders on both the Left and the Right, that goes double.