The Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis are Lost on Putin by David Ignatius

Political Crossfire The Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis are Lost on Putin

By David Ignatius

Sixty years after the Cuban missile crisis, it’s striking to contrast how two Russian leaders – Nikita Khrushchev and Vladimir Putin – have spoken about nuclear weapons. Simply put, one has shown a moral compass, and the other hasn’t.

Khrushchev spoke vividly of the “catastrophe” of nuclear war in his private messages to President John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 and sought to de-escalate the standoff. Putin, in contrast, has talked about his willingness to use “all weapon systems available to us,” adding a bit of gangster talk in his Sept. 21 mobilization announcement: “This is not a bluff.”

The two leaders’ radically different approaches to nuclear crises were highlighted Monday night at a Harvard forum commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Cuba confrontation. The discussion was hosted by Graham Allison, whose 1971 study, “Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis,” was a pathbreaking analysis of those events. Joining him were Nina Khrushchev, granddaughter of the Soviet leader, and me.

Nikita Khrushchev provoked the crisis by secretly installing nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba. But after Kennedy blockaded Cuba and demanded the missiles’ removal, Khrushchev looked for an opportunity to retreat. On Oct. 26, as the confrontation neared a flash point, he wrote an emotional letter to Kennedy, warning that “armaments bring only disasters” and urging “statesmanlike wisdom.”

A passage in that Oct. 26 letter makes for haunting reading now, against Putin’s threats of escalation in Ukraine: “Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you.”

In that letter, the Russian leader opened the door to a resolution. He wrote that if Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and called off the blockade, “then the question of armaments would disappear,” implying that he would withdraw the missiles.

Contrast this creative Russian diplomacy with Putin’s response in Ukraine. At each decision point, he has pulled the knot tighter – mobilizing the Russian military, annexing occupied Ukrainian territories, and launching Iranian drones against Ukrainian cities. As Putin tightens the knot, to use Khrushchev’s metaphor, he also threatens to cut it – by using nuclear weapons if defeat should loom.

At Harvard, Khrushchev’s granddaughter derided Putin as a small-minded KGB lieutenant colonel who had learned “zero lessons” from the Cuban history.

Studying the Cuba drama also offers some lessons about how such a crisis can be resolved – in secret. A day after his passionate letter hinting at a compromise, Khrushchev added a condition: he would remove the missiles from Cuba if Kennedy dismantled American nuclear missiles in Turkey. That upset Kennedy’s hawkish advisers, who feared that a reciprocal process would make the United States look weak.

Famously, Kennedy decided to answer the first letter and affirm its simpler deal. But Kennedy also sent his brother Robert, the attorney general, to convey a private offer to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The United States would indeed withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months – if the Soviets kept quiet about it.

When Dobrynin several days later delivered a written summary of the deal, the attorney general flung it back. “You have my word on this and that is sufficient…; if you should publish any document indicating a deal, then it is off.” The Soviets kept silent.

In the months after the crisis ebbed, Khrushchev and the president continued to exchange secret letters about deepening trust and cooperation. In May 1963, Khrushchev endorsed Kennedy’s proposal to ban nuclear tests. In June, Kennedy delivered his celebrated American University speech, affirming that “total war makes no sense” in the nuclear era and that nations should avoid forcing “a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”

Putin appears to lack the qualities of trust and empathy that animated Khrushchev. His comments about the United States have only grown more strident as the Ukraine crisis has progressed – with wild claims that the West seeks “to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country.”

Perhaps the most moving account of Khrushchev’s decency came from Jacqueline Kennedy. After her husband’s assassination, she wrote a letter thanking the Soviet leader for sending a special emissary to the funeral. “You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up,” she said.

Kennedy concluded her note with a comment that seems almost to have been written about Putin: “The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones. While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint – little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride.”

Khrushchev was a big man, in mind, body and heart. Putin, in this crisis, has been a very small man indeed.