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Diplomacy during Cuban Missile Crisis The world will never be the same after the events of October of 1962, now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The events of those times will remain in the world history as an example of successful diplomacy and crisis management. This paper will analyze the Missile Crisis and identify the key aspects of foreign relations of those times, with their underlying strategies of decision-making. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 provides a case study of how John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev almost blundered into a nuclear war through the crisis management approaches of their advisory systems, but then managed to extricate themselves using personal diplomacy and old-fashioned political horse-trading. They did so without revealing to the world how they had defused the crisis, a decision to maintain confidentiality with far reaching consequences for subsequent presidential crisis decision-making.
According to the conventional accounts, the Soviets backed down because Kennedy understood their psychology, and his national security advisers had correctly understood how to handle the Soviets. The experts wanted Kennedy to hang tough and make few if any concessions. Kennedy had given the Soviets room to retreat, had not rubbed salt in their wounds, and had allowed them to back away from confrontation. According to this version of events, Khrushchev had been emotional and frightened, while Kennedy had been cool and collected. The Soviets had not understood Kennedy at all, thinking him weak and irresolute; but Kennedy had understood the Soviets and knew how to manipulate them in the desired direction. U.
S. local and strategic military superiority was a decisive factor in ending the crisis without accepting Soviet terms, especially not the proposed trade of missiles, according to subsequent Department of Defense (DOD) analysts. The DOD opinion was shared by the first published studies of the crisis: The President had no intention of destroying the alliance by backing down, Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen wrote. When thinking a bit more about the following thought may appear: an adequate understanding of the resolution of the crisis must begin with the fact that for the U. S. side it was not primarily a question of the military balance between the two superpowers.
In large measure, Kennedys response was shaped by domestic and international politics. Kennedy did not manufacture the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he certainly did not attempt to gain partisan political advantage from it during the tense days of the standoff. Put another way, the crisis was as much about presidential power stakes, prestige, and reputation as it was about a balance of nuclear terror. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara spoke about the political significance of the missiles in the Ex Comm meetings: I dont think there is a military problem here [in Cuba], this is a domestic, political problem... Its primarily a...
domestic political problem. One of the things that provoked president Kennedy to immediately act was the fact that Kennedy had drawn a line publicly about Soviet promise to keep their foreign policy open, but the Soviets had stepped over it in a deceptive and disrespectful manner. Where the law was drawn in terms of a nuclear balance of power had been less important than the fact that a line had been drawn in the Western Hemisphere, and the Soviets had pretended to respect it and then had deceived the president, leaving him politically vulnerable. Had the Soviets publicly announced that they were placing forty missiles in Cuba, according to Sorensen, the United States likely would have accepted the deployment, then minimized the military importance of that number, and said with great fanfare that we would absolutely not tolerate the presence of more than 100 missiles in Cuba. Kennedy thought the secret deployment indicated that Khrushchev had no respect for him. In Ex Comm meetings Kennedy was clear on this point: it was time for a showdown, time to get Khrushchev to pull back, to end his constant probing of U.
S. positions, his constant escalation of demands. Kennedy thought Khrushchev had miscalculated his resolve and strength. But Kennedy had gotten it all wrong: he failed to understand the Soviet motives for putting missiles in Cuba. Consider the decision to deploy from Khrushchev's point of view.
He deployed, not because he thought Kennedy was weak or irresolute, but because he knew that the United States had strategic nuclear superiority and was beginning to act accordingly. The United States had just begun its satellite reconnaissance of the USSR in the summer of 1961, and with its new Corona satellites it had learned that it had four times the number of land based ICBMs as the Soviets. Consequently it revised down the numbers on the Russian side from 140 - 200 to a more realistic 10 - 25. In October 1961, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric in a public speech indicated that the United States now knew that the missile gap existed in the American favor. The Soviet missile sites were soft and vulnerable to an American first strike. Once the United States knew that it had the numerical advantage and that the Soviets were vulnerable, the Soviets were at a strategic disadvantage.
In their analysis, Gilpatric's speech involved a U. S. move to exploit Soviet vulnerability by making the claim of nuclear superiority. Presumably the United States would soon act to exploit its proclaimed advantage. Sending missiles to Cuba was a temporary stop-gap measure to counter this perceived American threat.
In conclusion President Kennedys crisis diplomacy was the main factor that prevented the Cuban missile crisis ending in war. Kennedy surrounded himself with enough advisors enabling him to make the best and most informed decisions at each stage of the crisis. The crisis clearly started when the Russians decided to build missile bases in Cuba in an attempt to shift the balance of power and force one-sided negotiations between the two nations. Kennedy resolved the crisis diplomatically, not by using military force and the U. S. remained one great super power.
Russia attempted to shift the balance of power by means of extended deterrence. Huths theory of extended deterrence and Blaineys theory that war is prevented by balance of power between two nations is in contrast to Kennedys diplomatic outcome of the missile crisis. The United States has been the dominant super power since the Cuban missile crisis and so far this has prevented the world from nuclear war. Nowadays, when the world is again close to the nuclear war (this time the threat comes not from the superpower state but from a small island, which just wants to show its powers) it is very important for the administration of George Bush to develop a strategy, which would avoid military action in any way. Back in the days of Cuban Missile Crisis both, the United States and Soviet Union, had a lot to lose, therefore both of the countries acted wisely; now we are being threatened by fanatics, who will not use common sense and stop. The military actions similar to those, which took place in Iraq, should be avoided at all costs.
Bibliography: Huth, P. K. , 1988, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War, Yale University Press, London. NARA U. S. National Archives and Records Administration [online] Available: web [ 2002, September 04 ] Sorensen, Theodore. Kennedy.
New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Some Lessons from Cuba, Department of Defense, 15 November 1992, in Lawrence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds. The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (New York: The New Press, 1992), 308 - 318.
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Research essay sample on Diplomacy During Cuban Missile Crisis
