US Can’t Afford To Wage Another Cold War
In announcing new sanctions on Russia last month, President Barack Obama was at pains to insist that the standoff over Ukraine doesn’t mark the beginning of a new Cold War. No doubt he’s right — but commentary on the Ukraine crisis has continued to embrace the Cold War analogy anyway. International observers have done so, too. So have some Russian commentators: “Russians Will Suffer in Putin’s New Cold War,” warns the opposition Moscow Times.
Apparently, lots of people in the United States have similar worries. As I’ve travelled this month to promote Back Channel, my novel about the Cuban missile crisis, audience members have peppered me with questions about what they see as the dawning of a new Cold War.
I’ve tried to be reassuring. The Cuban missile crisis was a unique moment in human history. By bowing to pressure from his hard-liners and sneaking intermediate-range nuclear missiles into Cuba, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev set off a chain of events that could easily have led to a war that would have annihilated both the US and the Soviet Union, along with many tens of millions elsewhere around the globe. Even given all the troubles around the world, we face nothing like that today.
Nevertheless, there are lessons from the Cold War in general, and the Cuban missile crisis in particular, that could usefully be applied to the foreign-policy challenges the US faces today — including the standoff in Ukraine. Two points, I have told my audiences, are particularly apt.
First: Keep your adversary guessing. President John Kennedy’s ability to conceal his true intentions from Khrushchev was crucial to the successful conclusion of the Cuban missile crisis. The historian Graham Allison has recently summarised the point nicely: “President John F. Kennedy’s resolution of the 1962 crisis involved a subtle mix of threat and compromise, candour and ambiguity, coercion and inducement. If Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had not accepted Kennedy’s demand that he announce the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba within 24 hours, would Kennedy have ordered the air strike he threatened? The answer will never be known, but what seems certain is that Khrushchev would not have removed the missiles without the threat of force.”
Allison is right: To this day, we don’t know for sure whether Kennedy was really willing to push the button. Despite the hours of tapes, the pages of transcripts, and the volumes of memoirs that the crisis has produced, the fact remains that we cannot get into Kennedy’s head. He successfully hid his hand.
Russian President Vladimir Putin understands this strategic tool. At the moment, for example, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and other western observers are wondering whether the massing of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine signals imminent invasion. The West is exactly where Putin wants it: Trying to guess his intentions.
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