Session 14: Straight Out of a Movie

(My older brother and I watching the movie “X Men: First Class" in a movie theatre)

My brother: Really? (exasperated) They are going to start a nuclear war if that Soviet ship crosses that random line? What a silly plot.

Me: You know, it actually happened.

My brother: What? (Shocked)

Me: Besides the mutants, that is.

Being the sole history lover in my family, it did not surprise me that my brother had no idea about one of the biggest nuclear crisis in world history. His words stuck with me though, because the crisis does seem like a plot taken straight out of a movie, which is perhaps why I find the Cuban missile crisis an extremely fascination incident in the history of international relations. But unlike a movie, where the heroes save the day, the real world is far more complicated and rather than big action sequences, the crisis is resolved by world leaders sitting behind their desks and negotiating with words, not with punches. During the Cuban missile crisis the biggest players in the real world were American President John F Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Were they the heroes who saved the world or were they merely cleaning up the huge mess that was their own creation? It’s debatable. I lean more towards the latter more than the former, but the role the leaders played by coming to their senses is commendable.

An incident such as this shows that leaders and diplomats matter. Their ideologies matter. It also took me back to the reading we did by Graham Allison and Morton Halperin named "Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications" about states having multiple players with multiple interests. There were hard liner military sections on both sides who wanted to call the bluff of the other’s ultimatum but then the leading players matter even more, as both Kennedy and Khrushchev refused to be aggressive and acted with the much needed restraint.  

Another thing that the crisis showed was that deterrence works. That “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD: probably my favorite acronym ever!) is a scary enough scenario that it can force the world leaders to act with restraint and prevent war.

For humanity’s sake, I hope it still works in the future.