“In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country … we will certainly make use of all weapons systems available to us. This is not a bluff,” Putin said in a speech broadcast Wednesday morning. His nuclear umbrella appears to include Ukrainian territory that Russia has seized or plans to annex.
How should President Biden and other world leaders respond to this outrageous blackmail? The answer cannot be to capitulate. That would scar the global future as horribly as this war has already damaged Ukraine. As Biden said Wednesday: “Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter.”
Leaders must think now with the same combination of toughness and creativity that President John F. Kennedy showed during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Because that’s the only parallel within most of our lifetimes…
Kennedy succeeded in the Cuban missile crisis for two reasons. First, he showed that he was prepared to risk nuclear war to stop a reckless move by Moscow. Second, through a secret back channel, he found a face-saving way to avoid the ultimate catastrophe. Biden should study both lessons.
Actually, there’s a third reason that the Missile Crisis ended without a catastrophic exchange of doomsday bombs. And by far, this reason is the most important one. According to Ignatius’s own paper:
Have we avoided unwanted nuclear explosions, and nuclear war, because we have adequately managed and controlled weapons and crises … or because we have been lucky?
Luck, in this context, seems to mean the exact opposite of control. It’s all that prevented bad outcomes when things could easily have gone in a different direction, no matter what anybody wanted. The historical policymakers who have invoked “luck” have included Robert S. McNamara, who was defense secretary during the Cuban missile crisis; Dean Acheson, special envoy of President John F. Kennedy at the time; ambassador Gerard C. Smith, chief U.S. delegate to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1969; former defense secretary William Perry, former secretary of state George Shultz, former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn, and former head of Strategic Air Command and Strategic Command, Gen. George Lee Butler.
Most people know the Cuban missile crisis was considered by those involved to be “lucky” — as McNamara put it, years later, in an interview with Errol Morris: “At the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”
If you doubt how important luck was back in ’62, go ahead and read up on the Missile Crisis (Here and here are some good places to start — and btw, RFK’s 13 Days is totally unreliable; skip it). And be sure to Google the name “Vasili Arkhipov.”
Anyone feeling lucky in 2022?