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.

Hey Mr. Tough/Don't you think we've suffered enough?

Oy, Yosef, please, just stop. The neocon from CT is back with a Wall Street Journal op-ed giving the same old "Democrats used to be cool but now they're totally lame" pitch. You've heard the argument before: Democrats such as Roosevelt and Kennedy were tough and principled and fought our enemies while Democrats today are weak and relativist and want to have afternoon tea with dictators. Personally, this type of argument leaves me with two main thoughts: 1) that scholars who describe foreign policy through a gendered perspective are on to something; and 2) pundits should have to footnote their articles in the interest of providing some nutritional value.

Let's concede that the three presidents he lists, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, were pretty "tough." FDR saw the threat of fascism and led the nation in combating the threat, Truman set up the framework that helped the U.S. maneuver through the Cold War, and Kennedy navigated us through some dire crises. However, these presidents were not guided only by a tough stance that made them "unafraid to make moral judgments." They made choices that evinced an understanding of the strengths and limits of U.S. power and, in their best moments, a realization of the complexities and ambiguities of the world.

Even as Franklin Roosevelt commanded the U.S. through its' most epic conflict, he also recognized the limits of American power and did things that belie a simplistic idea of always standing up to "evil." Roosevelt did nothing to prevent Spain's fall to fascism and until fairly late hoped the U.S. would not have to be directly involved in the war, but rather that it could support England and other nations. Then, of course, there's Yalta, where the U.S. proved unable to stop Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. While many right-wingers of yesterday and today still see Yalta as an unforgivable sign of weakness (appeasement anyone?) as Robert Dallek writes in his magisterial chronicle of Roosevelt and foreign policy, Yalta reflected a recognition of reality: "The price for Soviet defeat of Nazi armies, diplomat and historian George F. Kennan has said, was their control of Eastern Europe."

As for Truman, it is certainly true that he and Acheson took a tough line with the Soviets, up to and including the war in Korea. Yet, they also understood the world's complexities. Acheson may have warned, as Lieberman quotes, that "no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." However, a look at, for example, his handling of the Iran crises after World War II shows that such a belief did not cancel out an appreciation for diplomacy and nuance. While the British believed that military intervention was needed to prevent President Mossadeq from destabilizing the region, Acheson managed to help stave off this course, realizing that although intervention could potentially "solve" the problem of a government challenging U.S. economic and strategic interests, such a move carried a greater risk of "driv[ing] Iran to a Communist coup d'etat" and that Mossadeq was someone to be negotiated with.

As for John Kennedy, while his inaugural address was certainly "tough" it's also not the only speech he gave. In June 1963, after having been through disasters and great successes in his conduct of foreign policy, Kennedy gave a speech at American University showing a new tone in his thinking about foreign policy. While the speech contained many a "hard-headed" line about combating the Soviets, it also demonstrated a real nuance regarding our seemingly implacable foes (who, after all, had promised to "bury us.") In describing how Soviet leaders perceived the U.S. as a dangerous imperialist power bent on destroying the Soviet Union, Kennedy warned (in a statement reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's concerns over an "inordinate fear of communism," a line Lieberman makes fun of in his column) that:

[I]t is sad to read these Soviet statements, to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning, a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

Lieberman makes a number of other points of minimal historical insight, such as confusing the views of the 1960s New Left with the Democratic Party. The main point however is the one made by Kennedy above: foreign policy is not morally simplistic undertaking and leaders who history has judged kindly are usually the ones who realize that.

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?