Turn Your Back on Their Framing

It's always worrisome when a trope on the right-wing blogs enters the mainstream and today we have a fine example with Nathan Thrall and Jesse Wilkin's op-ed in The New York Times entitled, "Kennedy Talked, Khrushchev Triumphed." The two argue that Kennedy rushed into the Vienna Summit in July 1961 too quickly and, to quote Kennedy himself, the result was that Khrushchev "just beat the hell out of me." This historical example is then analogized to Obama's current stance on negotiating with U.S. opponents, with the authors ending their piece by warning that "sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate."

Historians generally concur that the Vienna Summit was not a high point for the Kennedy administration and that he came across as weak before an assertive Nikita Khrushchev. However, a closer examination of this history reveals that Kennedy's weakness derived less from his desire to talk and more from the baggage he brought to Vienna in the form of a failed U.S. intervention two months prior.

Recent scholarship on the Kennedy administration by scholars such as Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko in their authoritative One Hell of a Gamble argue that Kennedy, upon coming into office, hoped to ratchet down Cold War tensions. Part of Kennedy's plan involved holding a summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, preparations of which went forward with the two sides agreeing on a June meeting in Vienna. However, in April of 1961 the administration (in a move that could hardly be called diplomatic) authorized the CIA, in conjunction with an army of exiles, to launch an ill-fated invasion of Cuba in hopes of overthrowing the still young Castro regime. As we know the subsequent Bay of Pigs landings proved an utter failure, mainly succeeding in tightening Castro's grip on the island.

While Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed to a meeting in Vienna before the Bay of Pigs, it was in the aftermath of this catastrophe that the Soviets pushed harder to ensure the summit would go forward. As described by historian Peter Luňák in a 2003 article for Cold War History one direct result of the Bay of Pigs intervention was that Khrushchev "must have thought that he was facing exactly what he had been striving for a year earlier in Paris - a weakened American president." At the summit itself Khrushchev hammered Kennedy on any number of issues and a number of historians trace Khrushchev's assertiveness afterwards on Berlin and even his decision to move forward with placing nuclear weapons in Cuba as linked to his perception of Kennedy's weakness.

Given all of this, it seems the lesson from Vienna is less that summits and negotiations inherently display weakness, and more that the U.S. should think through and not launch disastrous interventions in other nations which weaken our standing in the world and reveal the limits of U.S. power.

Diplomatic Weakness through Intervention

Dean Barnett over at the Weekly Standard blog has a posting attacking Obama for not understanding the history of past negotiations between U.S. presidents and enemy leaders. He cites a recent Obama statement (although the article he links to for the quote doesn't actually contain it) in which Obama noted that, "This whole notion of not talking to people . . . It didn't hold in the '60s, it didn't hold in the '70s ... When Kennedy met with (Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev, we were on the brink of nuclear war."

Barnett turns this into a specific discussion of the Vienna Summit in June 1961 between Kennedy and Khrushchev, ignoring the larger historic scope Obama was discussing. But let's run with it. Barnett states that "many historians" believe that Kennedy's weakness at the Vienna Summit made Khrushchev feel assertive enough to move nuclear weapons into Cuba. Thus, according to Barnett, Vienna represents a "cautionary tale regarding the inherent risks of diplomacy with malevolent regimes."Now, that's a point of dispute but let's accept his contention that Kennedy was in a weak position when he met Khrushchev. Why would that be?

Two months earlier the administration had conducted a disastrous attempted intervention at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. To Barnett's credit he mentions the Bay of Pigs, but his point remains that the U.S. is weaker for engaging in negotiations. Yet, this is a case where U.S. weakness on the international scene derived not from talking to the enemy, but from the failures of a poorly planned covert intervention in another nation's affairs. U.S. power is not complete and as in a game of poker, sometimes it's best not to show your full hand (ie., use military force). Does any of this sound familiar?