- “For the president of the French Republic, the Cuban missile crisis first and foremost marked the end of the postwar era of the Cold War. Having been forced to retreat before American power, in de Gaulle’s view the Soviet Union would be unlikely and unable to risk any such confrontation again for a long time to come. Therefore, for him the crisis opened up a new period of diplomatic opportunity in Europe, the era of détente and cooperation with the Soviet Union that he had regularly sought and that he saw as the only alternative to confrontation. Moreover, for de Gaulle the crisis demonstrated the extreme risk that Europe’s fate could be abruptly determined by a superpower conflict that had nothing whatever to do with Europe itself. He had been loyal to the United States, but when it was all over, the lesson he drew was that Europe must never be put at risk in such a manner again. It therefore must find its own place and role between the superpowers, and France would take the lead with its independent foreign policy backed by its own nuclear deterrent.” (355)
Lesson: Crisis encouraged France to develop foreign policy more independently and rely more on its own nuclear deterrent than on American security guaranty.
Don Cook, Charles de Gaulle: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983).
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- “The French for centuries had lived with threats and menaces, first from the Germans and from the Russians, but he understood the US had not had a comparable experience.”
Lesson: Americans have never had to live with security threats at their borders, like Europeans have. The implication is that Khrushchev did not consider this, which is why he was surprised by the sharpness of the American reaction to the missiles in Cuba.
Cable from Ambassador Bohlen to Secretary of State, No. 1970, October 27, 1962, quoted in Barton J. Bernstein, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Turkey?” Political Science Quarterly 95, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 114.