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?