Back to 1961
Echoes of the Cold War lately haven’t been limited to Kennedy nostalgia, WILLIAM WATSON writes.
Just because it was the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination last week, did we really have to go back to the Cold War? It sure feels like we have.
The Chinese have declared a must-register-to-fly zone over waters they share with Japan. The Americans have challenged that unilateral declaration by sending military aircraft into the zone unannounced. What’s next? Chinese fighters confront American fighters? Pilots start buzzing each other and making threatening passes? Somebody locks on his radar and we escalate from there? (I realize my grasp of the technology may be excessively influenced by Reagan-era action movies like Top Gun.)
Meanwhile, a quarter turn of the globe west, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is playing hardball with Ukraine over its negotiation of a free trade deal with Europe, which he doesn’t want and which Ukraine’s government has therefore decided not to ratify — even though it negotiated it! The result has been largescale street demonstrations and a crackdown by security forces, so far only with billy clubs. To an economist, of course, nothing could be more heartening than to see big, enthusiastic crowds demonstrating in favour of free trade. In this country, the crowds usually come out against it, though the same people come out against everything. We’re always nervous about our relationship with the United States. Maybe we should spend more time being thankful our neighbour isn’t Putin.
The press gallery may not think so but in the scheme of things all this is a lot more consequential than finding out what Nigel Wright really told Stephen Harper.
In the flood of Kennedy reminiscences, including a compelling two-parter on PBS’s American Experience, the key event of the young president’s first year in office was his summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in June. It was a chastening experience. The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba had taken place just two months earlier and the older and more experienced Khruschev, sensing weakness, threatened to sign a Second World War peace treaty with East Germany and normalize relations, by which he meant closing off access to the Allied enclave of West Berlin.
Kennedy, preoccupied by the dangers of nuclear war, had gone to Vienna to get Khruschev’s support for the geopolitical status quo. Khruschev was having none of it. Newly liberated colonies of the western powers must be free to choose which ideological system they preferred, he told Kennedy. And with the technological tide apparently flowing in the communist direction — evidence Sputnik and the first manned orbit of Yuri Gagarin, as well as revolutions in Cuba and, in part, Laos — many apparently were ready to choose the Soviet model. Kennedy’s last words to Khruschev leaving the summit were that if the Soviets moved against Berlin: “There will be war. It will be a cold winter.” British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whom Kennedy visited on the way home to Washington, reported to his diary that Kennedy seemed “stunned … baffled … overwhelmed” and he wrote the Queen that “For the first time in his life Kennedy had met a man who was impervious to his charm.”
Does that remind you of anyone? A young, charismatic, selfconfident but inexperienced president, with a record of meteoric political success, runs into a tough, wily Russian leader? It’s best not to force historical parallels. If you ignore history, you may be condemned to repeat it, as the famous aphorism says. On the other hand, even if you fixate on it, you may be condemned to repeat it. But the parallels are obvious. What foreign policy signals has Barack Obama sent lately to strong men in China and Russia? He withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as decency would allow. He solemnly drew a red line around the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then erased it. And he made a deal with Iran over its development of nuclear weapons, a deal whose virtues we won’t know until Iran either fully complies or splits the powers that negotiated it by dancing round the fine print.
Jaw-jaw is better than warwar, as Winston Churchill said. There are perfectly plausible arguments for Obama’s recent actions. The U.S. may well have done all it could profitably do in Iraq and Afghanistan. Getting Bashar Assad to destroy most of his chemical weapons (he must have some hidden somewhere) may on balance be a good thing, especially if, as seems now to be the case, the West has decided that, as awful as he is, Assad is better than all the realistic alternatives. In the same way, a peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem may in the long run prove smarter than taking out the weapons and igniting a region-wide war.
So history may judge Obama to have done the right thing in each case. But it seems at least possible the net effect of his actions is, like Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, to project a lack of toughness. That perception on Khruschev’s part did not ultimately lead to a move against Berlin but it probably did tilt his decision to send missiles to Cuba, which in the end finally allowed Kennedy to demonstrate his toughness, though at great risk to everyone then alive.
Kennedy talked many times in his short presidency about the dangers of miscalculation. We thought all that was behind us. It seems to be creeping back in.