Joe Biden is the latest in a long line of American leaders who have tried to persuade Russians and other rivals to back down from a military confrontation.
For decades, U.S. and Russian leaders have engaged in brinkmanship over territory, influence, and weapons. They’re at it again, this time in Ukraine, with stakes that could shape the balance of power, European unity, the Western alliance, and the success of Joe Biden’s Presidency. On Friday, the national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned that Vladimir Putin could invade even before the Winter Olympics end, on February 20th—and urged all Americans to leave Ukraine immediately. Yet almost frantic diplomacy—as senior French and British officials travelled to Moscow this week and the Germans are due next week—has so far failed to get Putin to blink. Diplomacy could take months to resolve the Ukraine crisis, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, conceded this week after his five hours of talks with Putin in Moscow. But a decision by the Russian leader to pull back in the weeks or months ahead does not mean he will surrender his ultimate goal. “Even if Putin doesn’t invade this time, he will still want Ukraine,” William Taylor, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told me this week, a few days after returning from Kyiv. “He will want to own or dominate or reabsorb Ukraine until he dies.”
For more than a century, U.S. Presidents have had a mixed record in staring down rivals and persuading them to peacefully retreat. The classic example is the Cuban missile crisis. In 1962, U.S. spy planes spotted construction sites for Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, leading Pentagon brass to unanimously urge President John F. Kennedy to strike the sites—and then invade. Kennedy pushed back. Instead, he ordered a naval “quarantine” and demanded that Moscow withdraw its weaponry. Washington would regard “any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union,” Kennedy warned in a televised address. The Pentagon moved to DEFCON 3, requiring the Air Force to be ready to launch in fifteen minutes. Premier Nikita Khrushchev countered angrily that the blockade was “an act of aggression” and refused to budge. The U.S. moved to DEFCON 2, signalling that war was imminent. It was, according to the State Department’s official history, “the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.”
Even as a military confrontation seemed inevitable, Kennedy opted for the long and often tortuous game of diplomacy. Several weeks into the stalemate, a Soviet agent passed a message to the White House—through the ABC correspondent John Scali—with a compromise. It was followed by a secret and emotional ramble from Khrushchev about the spectre of nuclear holocaust. “If there is no intention to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war,” he wrote Kennedy, “then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot.” The note led to unusual back-channel talks, including the first Track Two diplomacy between the superpowers through back channels that were not diplomats. It ended with Washington promising not to invade Cuba again and Moscow removing its missiles. A year later, the U.S. also quietly withdrew its missiles from Turkey. The diplomacy had enduring impact. It spawned the first “hotline” between Washington and Moscow, and negotiations for the historic Nuclear Test Ban Treaty concluded the following year.
Yet the U.S. has had epic and long-forgotten failures, too. In the late nineteen-thirties, after Japan occupied China, tensions erupted between Washington and Tokyo at a time they were jockeying for influence, resources, and trade in East Asia. To counter Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended credits to China to buy war matériel and restricted oil, steel, iron, and other goods needed for Japan’s growing industries. Joseph Grew, the U.S. Ambassador in Tokyo, was part of intense behind-the-scenes diplomacy to defuse the crisis, which was compounded when Japan joined the tripartite alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In September, 1941, Japan proposed a meeting between Roosevelt and Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro in Hawaii. Roosevelt countered that the journey would eat up twenty-one days—too long to be away—and proposed Juneau, Alaska, a trip requiring two weeks. Roosevelt insisted on preliminary talks to create a common understanding, and gave notice that he intended to first “discuss the matter fully” with China, Britain, and the Netherlands, according to the State Department. In November, the U.S. proffered a ten-point statement calling for Japan to withdraw its troops from China in exchange for the lifting of U.S. sanctions. Neither side budged.
On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor—killing more than twenty-four hundred Americans—and then attacked U.S. and British bases in the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, and several island nations. “Within days, the Japanese were masters of the Pacific,” the National World War II Museum records. The U.S. entered the Second World War. And more than a hundred thousand Americans died in the Pacific over the next four years. “We were unsuccessful in deterring a major Japanese attack in 1941,” Hal Brands, a former special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. “That was a classic failure of deterrence. It may actually have been because we put the Japanese in a place that if they didn’t use force, they would die by slow strangulation.”
Success requires an inherently fraught blend of deterrence and engagement, Brands noted. The art of diplomacy, as the old adage advises, is telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions. There is no single formula, no algorithm to prevent conflict. Avoiding conflict can still mean diplomatic setbacks.
Four years before the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev issued an ultimatum, in 1958, demanding that the U.S., Britain, and France pull their forces out of the divided Berlin within six months. Washington refused, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted the Soviet leader at Camp David the next year to probe for compromise. Neither budged. Diplomacy soured after the Soviets shot down an American U-2 plane spying overhead. In a second U.S. attempt, in 1961, Kennedy met Khrushchev in Vienna, but later admitted that he was poorly prepared; the Soviet leader “savaged” him. Emboldened, Khrushchev again gave the U.S. six months to leave Berlin. Kennedy countered by sending troops to Europe, mobilizing a hundred and fifty thousand reservists, and increasing the defense budget to show American resolve. The Soviets, who did not want a war, responded by overseeing the building of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War raged for the next three decades, with Berlin the symbol of the ideological chasm and military tensions between East and West.
American history is replete with other cases when diplomacy failed to prevent confrontation, Brands noted. In the late nineteenth century, President William McKinley tried to compel Spain—through a mix of threats and diplomacy—to either improve the treatment of Cubans who were revolting against colonial rule or grant independence to the island. In exchange, the U.S. proposed that it would not try to annex Cuba. Diplomacy failed. In 1898, Spain declared war on the U.S., triggering the Spanish-American War.
The successes and failures of the past echo in the current U.S. crisis with Russia. Diplomacy, then and now, is always dicey. “America has a prestigious record of using diplomacy to avert war,” Douglas Brinkley, a Presidential historian at Rice University, told me. “During the Cold War era alone, we defused crises in Berlin, Cuba, the Taiwan Strait, Hungary, and elsewhere. But, boy, when we get military intervention wrong—like in Vietnam and Iraq II—it’s beyond tragic.”
In 1990, the U.S. mixed words and muscle after the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, occupied oil-rich Kuwait. For six months, the Administration of George H. W. Bush issued diplomatic démarches, mobilized a U.N.-backed coalition, and deployed troops along the border of Saudi Arabia. In a last-ditch overture, Secretary of State James Baker hand-carried a letter from Bush to a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, in Geneva. Baker later recounted that Aziz looked over the correspondence and said, “I cannot accept this letter. It’s not written in the language that is appropriate for communications between heads of state.’ ”
The U.S.-led coalition invaded Kuwait and forced an Iraqi retreat. But hostility and suspicion endured between Washington and Baghdad. In 2003, U.S. diplomacy again failed to win Saddam’s full compliance with U.N. weapons inspectors—or international support for bad U.S. intelligence that claimed Baghdad was hiding facilities to produce weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. invaded Iraq again, in what many historians view as the worst-ever mistake in U.S. foreign policy.
U.S. diplomacy has also rarely been able to multitask crises. Eisenhower pledged to roll back the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe. He was tested when students and workers launched a spontaneous uprising in Budapest in 1956. Radio Free Europe, funded at the time by the C.I.A., egged on the “unanimous, brave, and heroic strike of the workers.” After Soviet troops intervened to put down the rebellion, Eisenhower said that the uprising reflected “the intense desire for freedom long held by the Hungarian people,” which was clearly affirmed in the charter of the United Nations. But Eisenhower did little except give lip service as he focussed on a simultaneous crisis involving the Suez Canal. The U.S. prevailed in the Middle East, but Hungary remained under Communist rule for another three decades.
Six decades after the Cuban missile crisis, Biden’s challenge with Moscow differs in political geography, strategic interest, and a leader’s grasp on power. Cuba is more than five thousand miles from Russia; Ukraine constitutes Russia’s longest border with the West. The Soviet Union didn’t have an easy way to deploy more than a hundred thousand troops in Cuba, as Russia does today along its border with Ukraine. The Cuban missile crisis marked the beginning of the end for Khrushchev, Brinkley noted. The Soviet leader was ousted in 1964 after setting up a system that made him more vulnerable politically. In contrast, Putin has manipulated politics—including constitutional changes to term limits—to insure his longevity. Brinkley predicted, “Putin is not going to collapse anytime soon.”
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