A friend recently forwarded me a note from someone demanding to know how the noninterventionist Ron Paul would have handled the Cuban missile crisis. I replied:
“The interesting thing about this particular criticism is that the Cuban Missile Crisis was in fact ended by the kind of quid pro quo Ron is always talking about. Khruschev removed the missiles from Cuba but Kennedy also removed U.S. missiles from Turkey (though part of the deal was that Khruschev couldn’t reveal the quid pro quo).
“Andrew Bacevich, who is no left-liberal, discusses the Cuban Missile Crisis in his new book Washington Rules. The missiles in Cuba were sent there only after repeated pleading by Castro, which in turn came about because of the repeated U.S. government efforts to destabilize or remove him. The one followed from the other.
“Bacevich writes (in a distinctly non USA! USA! style, I warn you):
In its determination to destroy the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration heedlessly embarked upon what was, in effect, a program of state-sponsored terrorism. In substance if not in scope, the actions of the United States toward Cuba during the early 1960s bear comparison with Iranian and Syrian support for proxies engaging in terrorist activities against Israel since the 1980s. The principal difference is that, whereas Hamas and Hezbollah have achieved considerable success, at least in enhancing their political standing, the U.S. attempt to unseat Castro achieved none whatsoever. Apart from expending the lives of several dozen guileless exiles who, at the CIA’s behest, attempted to infiltrate their home island, those efforts were stillborn. From a moral and legal point of view, Operation Mongoose was indefensible….
How can we explain this? Why did an administration whose senior members fancied themselves to be pragmatic and analytical go off the deep end in its pursuit of a dictator governing a country that, in 1961, boasted a population of slightly less than six million, a per capita income one-fifth that of the United States, and negligible military power?…
The Kennedy administration’s obsessive pursuit of Castro had accomplished only one thing: It removed any doubts the Cuban dictator may have entertained about the dangers facing his regime. To defend his revolution, Castro looked to the Soviet Union, with which Cuba had already established a “fraternal” relationship. In response to his insistent entreaties, Nikita Khruschev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR — resenting Soviet strategic inferiority and keen to preserve Marxism’s sole foothold in the Western Hemisphere — now offered protection in the form of generous Soviet security assistance: more and better weapons along with more trainers. In April 1962 Castro readily accepted this offer….
For public consumption, the administration insisted — and never ceased to insist — that the surprise sprung by Cuba and the Soviet Union had come out of nowhere and was utterly without justification. Privately, however, Kennedy was willing to acknowledge the causal relationship between past U.S. actions and the problem he now confronted. Those on the other side had their own gripes, not least of all the relentless U.S. campaign to destabilize Cuba and the presence of U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles along the perimeter of the Soviet Union. Castro and Khruschev were acting in ways that Kennedy himself would have acted, had the circumstances been reversed. Negotiating a peaceful resolution of the missile crisis, therefore, required that Kennedy take their complaints into account….
In exchange for Khruschev’s promise to remove Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba, Kennedy was secretly offering the Russian leader important concessions. These included a pledge not to invade Cuba and a promise to quietly withdraw the Jupiters from Italy and Turkey.
Incidentally, Washington Rules is on sale for $10 at Amazon (down from $25), as they clear out the hardcovers in light of the paperback release.