Russia, ISIL and the Diplomatic Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis

By James Nathan 

Khalid Bin Sultan Eminent Scholar, Professor of International Policy at Auburn University

Wednesday 22 October 2014 | http://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/russia-isil-and-the-diplomatic-lessons-of-the-cuban-missile-crisis_2038.html

We are now at the 52nd anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Khrushchev remembered it, it was a time that hung heavy with the ‘smell of burning in the air.”

Forty-five years on, at a Princeton conclave marking their wisdom, Presidential advisors Theodore Sorenson and McGeorge Bundy were still congratulating themselves for standing tough and prevailing. The Soviets capitulated, they insisted. The crisis had gone the American way by dint of the Kennedy team’s collective guts. In fact, the excavation of now-distant events has been an industry for a regiment of academics. To many, such as Harvard’s Graham Allison, President Kennedy’s paradigmatic resolve is a template for our times, applicable to managing North Korea, Iran, Russia, ISIL, you name it.

The recent release of apparently complete White House Cuban Missile Crisis tapes does indeed reveal a triumph of presidential fortitude, but not of the customary hagiographies. Instead, it’s now clear that President Kennedy alone, against his advisors, had been determined from the start to strike a deal with Nikita Khrushchev.