- “[F]orty years ago almost to the day an important Presidential emissary was sent abroad by a beleaguered President of the United States. The United States was facing the prospect of nuclear war. These were the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Several emissaries went to our principal allies. One of them was…Dean Acheson whose mission was to brief President de Gaulle and to solicit French support in what could be a nuclear war involving not just the United States and the Soviet Union but the entire NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact. The former Secretary of State briefed the French President and then said to him at the end of the briefing, I would now like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons. The French President responded by saying, I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the President of the United States is good enough for me….Would any foreign leader today react the same way to an American emissary who would go abroad and say that country X is armed with weapons of mass destruction which threaten the United States?”
Lesson: Allied support and trust are critical in international crises. Do not shut out allies from evidence or intelligence during crisis management.
“Address to the New American Strategies Conference” (speech at “New American Strategies for Security and Peace” conference at Wardman Park Marriott Hotel, Washington, District of Columbia, October 28, 2003).
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- “Even in the one instance in which the United States acted like a great power—the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962—it failed to harvest the fruits of its effort. The United States did not exploit the success either to press the Soviet Union to withdraw from the Caribbean through an arrangement for the full neutralization of Cuba or to structure a more stable and more cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union in the area of strategic arms competition. Instead, we deluded ourselves with the comfortable belief—expressed explicitly in official statements in the mid-1960s—that the Soviet Union had accommodated itself indefinitely to strategic inferiority. In fact, the Soviet Union was already two years into what became a massive strategic buildup designed to erase the U.S. strategic advantage—the very advantage that had given our policymakers in the Cuban Missile Crisis the confidence to apply conventional pressure on Soviet forces.” (p. 13)
Lesson: (1) Take advantage of successful resolution of a crisis to push forward on national goals. (2) Nuclear superiority was a key to success of U.S. during Cuban Missile Crisis.
“Keynote Address” (speech at Center for International Affairs, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June, 19, 1983), published in In quest of national security, edited by Marin Stmecki, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988).
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- “The Soviet leaders were forced, because of the energetic response by the United States, to the conclusion that their apocalyptic power [nuclear deterrent power] was insufficient to make the Soviet Union a global power. Faced with a showdown, the Soviet Union didn’t dare to respond even in an area of its regional predominance—in Berlin….It had no military capacity to fight in Cuba, or in Vietnam, or to protect its interests in the Congo.” (p. 272-73)
Lesson: Conventional and nuclear superiority were keys to American success during Cuban Missile Crisis.
“The Implications of Change for United States Foreign Policy,” Department of State Bulletin, LVII, July 3, 1967, 19-23, as cited in James A. Nathan, “The Missile Crisis: His Finest Hour Now,” World Politics, 27:2 (January 1975).
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- “We no longer live in an age in which the president`s word is trusted internationally the way Kennedy`s was during the Cuban missile crisis. So that is a loss. The appeal of America has gone down. In more and more countries around the world, America is viewed as a menace, and in the world of Islam, as an enemy.”
Lesson: Missile crisis may have represented height of American political influence abroad; since then, US appeal abroad has declined.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview with Charlie Rose, 12/16/06.
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- “It was not until the late 1950s, and perhaps not even until the Cuban Missile Crisis, that America was jarred into recognition that modern technology had made invulnerability a thing of the past. The 1960s saw a surge in national anxiety over the ‘missile gap’ (with Soviet leaders deliberately claiming a greater capability for, and greater numbers of, their missiles they actually had), demonstrated by growing fears that nuclear deterrence was inherently unstable, by a preoccupation among strategists over the possibility of a disarming Soviet nuclear strike as well as over the growing risks of an accidental nuclear discharge, and eventually even by an effort to develop new forms of technologically advanced space-based defensive systems such as anti-ballistic missiles. The intense national debate on these issues eventually led to a consensus that a relationship of stable deterrence with the Soviet Union was attainable only through mutual restraint.” (p. 9)
Lesson: US no longer invincible from the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It must instead pursue mutual nuclear restraint in order to ensure stable nuclear order.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
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