From the concluding paragraphs of the book on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the lessons to be learned from it to be applied to today:
- Capture.JPG (24.61 KiB) Viewed 12447 times
The November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was widely perceived as representing the triumph of capitalism and freedom over the forces of oppression and discredited doctrine of communism. The Soviet Union collapsed two years later with its vast armed forces and nuclear arsenal intact. John Lewis Gaddis wrote in 1997: ‘It may be that the West prevailed during the Cold War . . . because that conflict just happened to take place at the moment in history when the conditions that had for thousands of years favoured authoritarianism suddenly ceased to do so.’
A quarter of a century on, and especially following Vladimir Putin’s murderous assault upon Ukraine, it is impossible to sustain that judgement. Lawrence Freedman wrote recently that the optimistic mood of the first post-Cold War decade appears naïve: ‘A return to great power competition is now described as a defining feature of the 2020s.’ Autocracies are widely ascendant, above all President Xi’s China. Economic failure was the fundamental cause of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Yet one of the most remarkable and dismaying achievements, not only of the USSR but also of the Russian Federation that succeeded it, has been to exercise a baleful influence upon world affairs, from a strategic position of ever-worsening weakness. In the twenty-first century, Russia’s only significant exports are oil, gas and extreme violence. Nonetheless, these have enabled President Putin to wield astonishing clout, for unflaggingly malign purposes. He exerts less trammelled personal authority than did Khrushchev in the era of the Soviet Presidium. All the while the institutions of the United States find themselves under siege from within, by forces some of which must be characterized as neo-fascist, in a fashion that America’s leaders of 1962 would find incomprehensible and terrifying. The liberal order is imperilled as much by its domestic enemies as by its foreign foes.
Although this narrative has included strictures upon US policy, especially towards Cuba, no citizen of the modern West should lose sight of a fundamental reality: in the Cold War America led forces that aspired to advance human freedoms, such as the Soviet Union ideologically opposed. In politics and international affairs good and evil are always relative. All of us who inhabit democracies have cause to be grateful that the United States prevented the communist superpowers from securing victory, even if the outcome – viewed from the distance of decades – has proved to represent something less than the comprehensive triumph for freedom which visionaries hailed in 1991.
The most important fact of the struggle is that the world survived it without a nuclear catastrophe. This reflected a collective wisdom on both sides that transcended the misjudgements of both the Kremlin and the White House: the sum of their statesmanship was greater than its parts. It has been observed that both Khrushchev and Kennedy were bad at crisis avoidance, effective at crisis management. Among some of today’s Western leaders and military commanders, a nostalgia is discernible, such as would have seemed unimaginable back in 1991, for that era’s adversarial certainties. International order and stability are banished, perhaps forever. It does not seem merely nostalgic to suggest that Khrushchev was a more rational and measured Russian leader than is Putin.
What is happening today is not, for many reasons, a replay of the old Cold War, though it may well represent the start of a new one. Territorial dominance and influence, rather than ideology, are at stake. As Rodric Braithwaite wrote recently: ‘The Soviet Union’s role as the second superpower is no longer available [to Russia] . . . being taken by China.’ This change does not, of course, make the world a safer place. There are trigger points, led by Taiwan and the entire Russian periphery, that threaten consequences as grievous for humankind as those which beckoned sixty years ago, and are highlighted by the invasion of Ukraine. In one respect, this latest crisis is a mirror reflection of the 1962 Cuba: just as the USSR found itself hopelessly strategically wrongfooted on an island ninety miles off the North American coast, so the West faces severe difficulties in securing the future of a vulnerable state that is Russia’s immediate neighbour. Understanding between the leaderships of China, Russia and the US is as remote as ever it was, and mutual sympathy seems unattainable. The scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.
During the Missile Crisis, even the Kremlin’s hawks recognized that in a nuclear showdown there could be only one winner – if such a word can be used even pejoratively – which would not be the USSR. This knowledge had a decisive impact on their decisions. Today, by contrast, many strategy gurus believe that China, exploiting the superiority of its hypersonic weapons, might well prevail in an air and naval collision with US forces off its own coast. Whereas in 1962 Khrushchev’s nation merely masqueraded as an equal of the US, sixty years on China is close to justifying a claim upon peer status, with a GDP eight times the size of Russia’s, which makes it correspondingly more dangerous.
Meanwhile Vladimir Putin’s obsessive resentment, his craving for respect and willingness to take huge risks and to initiate hideous atrocities around Russia’s borders in pursuit of a pan-Slav fantasy, is increased by his consciousness of China’s giant progress, of America’s continuing innovative technological mastery, alongside Russia’s relative stagnation. Putin’s view of history is skewed by a mingling of ignorance, amorality and nationalism, blended with his country’s long-cherished narrative of grievance and victimhood. We should be in no doubt that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an act of a far graver moral order than was Khrushchev’s deployment in Cuba. The Soviet Union in 1962 had some sort of case for its actions. Putin in 2022 has none.
Yet we should also acknowledge a widely-held Russian belief and grievance, that for decades the Americans exploited their nuclear and conventional dominance, most conspicuously in the Missile Crisis, to frustrate Moscow’s aspirations and to sustain dominance of the vast US sphere of influence. Georgy Shakhnazarov, who served Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, addressed American Excom veterans attending a 1987 historical conference: ‘All of you believed yourselves in both a military and a moral position of superiority. You speak of deception, and so on. But, according to international law, we had no reason to inform you beforehand [of the Cuban deployment]. You did not inform us of your intention to put missiles in Turkey . . . The conflict was political, and the moral case was unclear.’ Putin is not the only modern Russian who sees hypocrisy in the West’s attempts to frustrate – for instance – the Kremlin’s hegemony over Ukraine. Shakhnazarov continued: ‘The United States did not want to recognize others’ right to equal security. It desired to keep its superiority . . . According to international law both sides have equal rights to make arrangements with third parties to protect their security.’
The passage above does not represent an assertion of the smallest enthusiasm for the modern Kremlin regime – a desire to become what Germans now contemptuously call a Putinversteher or Putin apologist. Instead, it merely seeks to explain something of how differently the world appears, as viewed from Moscow, than from Washington or London. As we age, we learn that there is no single universal truth or logic: every culture cherishes its own narrative. In the twenty-first century, as when Shakhnazarov spoke, Americans and Russians retain contrasting perspectives on the Missile Crisis, and much else.
Walter Lippmann wrote wisely that the word appeasement has often been abused since 1938, to denounce those seeking necessary international compromises: ‘You can’t decide these questions of life and death for the world by epithets like appeasement. I don’t agree with the people who think we have to go out and shed a little blood to prove we’re virile men.’ Professor Sir Michael Howard said in old age: ‘Appeasement is often a very sensible policy, when you are dealing with a leader less satanic than Adolf Hitler.’
Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to make any principled case for appeasement of Vladimir Putin, as distinct from acknowledging the practical and strategic difficulties of frustrating his ambitions. It may be impossible politically for Western troops directly to engage the Russian aggressors in Ukraine, but it is assuredly necessary to deploy NATO forces prepared to do so in the Baltic states and Poland. The dangers of a general war with Russia are real – but so also are those of passivity in the face of a grave threat to European order and security.
It has been a theme of this book that those who today dismiss the risks inherent in the Missile Crisis, because neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted nuclear war, are mistaken. In 1962, the world got lucky. Our hopes for averting future catastrophe must rely upon twenty-first-century national leaders never for a moment losing sight of the magnitude of the perils posed by the weapons at their command. The risk of nuclear conflict, which at the height of the Cold War often dominated front pages, has been for decades since scarcely discussed among ordinary citizens, far more preoccupied with the threats posed by climate change, pandemics, conventional clashes and terrorism. If any fragment of good has emerged from the terrible evil of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it has been to awaken oversleeping Westerners to the vital importance of security, which must include powerful elements of both military capability and political will. The US administration could not have achieved a tolerable outcome of the Missile Crisis without being known in Moscow to possess the weapons to unleash overwhelming force in support of its diplomacy.
In 2022 the means still exist for humankind to destroy itself. Power to initiate a nightmare is shared among a growing number of nuclear-armed nations. In the nature of technology, checks upon the use of terrible weapons by careless or deranged subordinates are imperfect. A rightful motto for every national leader is: Be Afraid. Neither John F. Kennedy nor Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was deficient in personal courage, but what distinguished them from Fidel Castro and from some military commanders on both sides of the Iron Curtain is that the two men were prudently haunted by consequences. Winston Churchill said, in his last major speech to Britain’s House of Commons on 1 March 1955: ‘It may well be that by a process of sublime irony we have reached a state in this world where safety is the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation.’
Such is the optimistic view. Yet even so dauntless a statesman as Churchill could not fail to be troubled by the rise of authoritarian adventurers whose most conspicuous characteristic is an appetite for both oppression and aggression. This is shared by President Xi, President Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un. All consider themselves shielded from consequences of their most extravagant actions by a stage-set façade of electoral legitimacy, together with possession of nuclear weapons. Yet, beyond constructively confronting climate change, our planet’s best hope of surviving the twenty-first century relies upon an imperative: that no national leader shows themself deficient in the fear which must lie at the heart of wisdom, and which was indispensable to a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.