Kenneth M
By Kenneth M Pollack
It may seem like a stretch, but the Cold War crises that President John F Kennedy faced hold important lessons for the nuclear impasse with Iran. Newly released historical files on the confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s can help us better understand what to expect if the current negotiations with Tehran fail and we are soon confronted with a nuclear-armed Iran.
Kennedy faced an unpredictable, risk-taking and at times aggressive opponent in Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Yet he frustrated Khrushchev’s ambitions and helped the US avoid war through a combination of American nuclear superiority, firmness in defending national interests and a willingness to resist alarmist thinking.
The first observation from Kennedy’s Cold War experience is that if you assume the worst, you may get the worst. If any one lesson emerges from the documents, memoirs and research published in recent years, it is that the US and the Soviet Union wasted billions of dollars and roubles guarding against a surprise nuclear attack that neither country ever seriously contemplated launching. The obsession with this worst-case scenario made many crises far more dangerous than they needed to be — and even caused some of them.
During both the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis, however, Kennedy chose not to assume the worst regarding Soviet motives and likely behaviour. Instead, he saw the Russian leadership as driven by a range of different goals and emotions, including fear and uncertainty.
Kennedy rejected the prevailing assumption that the Soviets were only interested in amassing power and only understood the language of force. A more nuanced approach led him to opt for a blockade of Cuba rather than the airstrikes and invasion recommended by virtually all of his advisers. His strategy gave the Soviets the chance to realise they had made a mistake and back down without causing a war.
This precedent doesn’t mean we should think that Iran’s leaders are benign or well-intentioned toward us. But it would be a bigger mistake to assume that they are hellbent on destroying us, the Israelis or other US allies in the region, and that they are willing to invite their own obliteration to do so.
Although Iran is often caricatured as a nation of irrational, would-be martyrs, its behaviour has been ruthlessly rational for the most part. Even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — a far more committed ideologue than his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — agreed to end the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 when his subordinates told him that continuing the conflict would only result in further Iraqi victories and could threaten the Islamic regime itself.
Another lesson of the Cold War is that military superiority, particularly nuclear superiority, matters. During the Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower administrations, the Kremlin’s thinking was dominated by the knowledge that the US’ arsenal could obliterate the Soviet Union. In those days, the US could launch hundreds of bombers and dozens — soon hundreds — of intercontinental ballistic missiles against Russia, while the Soviets had fewer than a half-dozen unreliable missiles that might theoretically hit the US.
At most, the Russians could have done horrific damage to a few American cities. That was more than enough to deter US leaders from a first strike, but the Soviet leadership thought that the US would be willing to accept such a disproportionate exchange and so would be willing to go to war with the USSR.
As a result, when the Soviets overstepped themselves and provoked crises over Berlin and then Cuba, they panicked when the Kennedy administration showed a willingness to go to war rather than give in to their demands. In both cases, Moscow quickly sought to defuse the situation as fast as possible, even accepting humiliating conditions to avert a war they knew they would lose.
Like the Soviet Union early on in the Cold War, even a nuclear-armed Iran would be vastly outmatched by the US strategic arsenal. Unlike the Soviets, the Iranians can’t ever hope to match the US. Thus, in any crisis, American negotiators will have the upper hand and should be able to compel the Iranians to back down quickly, even accepting significant reversals to avoid a war.
On past occasions when Iran crossed an American red line and was at risk of a US military response — during the Tanker War in 1988, after the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 — the Iranians have backed down quickly and even made humiliating concessions of their own (such as ending the Iran-Iraq War and agreeing to suspend uranium enrichment) to avert an American attack. A third observation from the Kennedy era is that communication is critical. Misperceptions are inevitable in international relations, and the fear conjured by nuclear weapons only adds to that risk. Kennedy resisted demonising Khrushchev, seeing him instead as a mercurial leader prone to taking big gambles to try to address the challenges he faced. Although Kennedy’s sense of Khrushchev was broadly correct, he and the US government in general still tended to misunderstand the Soviet leader’s goals and thinking.
Kennedy helped institutionalise direct, reliable US-Soviet communications. The growing realisation of the importance of this channel led to the “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Kenneth M Pollack
It may seem like a stretch, but the Cold War crises that President John F Kennedy faced hold important lessons for the nuclear impasse with Iran. Newly released historical files on the confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s can help us better understand what to expect if the current negotiations with Tehran fail and we are soon confronted with a nuclear-armed Iran.
Kennedy faced an unpredictable, risk-taking and at times aggressive opponent in Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Yet he frustrated Khrushchev’s ambitions and helped the US avoid war through a combination of American nuclear superiority, firmness in defending national interests and a willingness to resist alarmist thinking.
The first observation from Kennedy’s Cold War experience is that if you assume the worst, you may get the worst. If any one lesson emerges from the documents, memoirs and research published in recent years, it is that the US and the Soviet Union wasted billions of dollars and roubles guarding against a surprise nuclear attack that neither country ever seriously contemplated launching. The obsession with this worst-case scenario made many crises far more dangerous than they needed to be — and even caused some of them.
During both the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis, however, Kennedy chose not to assume the worst regarding Soviet motives and likely behaviour. Instead, he saw the Russian leadership as driven by a range of different goals and emotions, including fear and uncertainty.
Kennedy rejected the prevailing assumption that the Soviets were only interested in amassing power and only understood the language of force. A more nuanced approach led him to opt for a blockade of Cuba rather than the airstrikes and invasion recommended by virtually all of his advisers. His strategy gave the Soviets the chance to realise they had made a mistake and back down without causing a war.
This precedent doesn’t mean we should think that Iran’s leaders are benign or well-intentioned toward us. But it would be a bigger mistake to assume that they are hellbent on destroying us, the Israelis or other US allies in the region, and that they are willing to invite their own obliteration to do so.
Although Iran is often caricatured as a nation of irrational, would-be martyrs, its behaviour has been ruthlessly rational for the most part. Even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — a far more committed ideologue than his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — agreed to end the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 when his subordinates told him that continuing the conflict would only result in further Iraqi victories and could threaten the Islamic regime itself.
Another lesson of the Cold War is that military superiority, particularly nuclear superiority, matters. During the Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower administrations, the Kremlin’s thinking was dominated by the knowledge that the US’ arsenal could obliterate the Soviet Union. In those days, the US could launch hundreds of bombers and dozens — soon hundreds — of intercontinental ballistic missiles against Russia, while the Soviets had fewer than a half-dozen unreliable missiles that might theoretically hit the US.
At most, the Russians could have done horrific damage to a few American cities. That was more than enough to deter US leaders from a first strike, but the Soviet leadership thought that the US would be willing to accept such a disproportionate exchange and so would be willing to go to war with the USSR.
As a result, when the Soviets overstepped themselves and provoked crises over Berlin and then Cuba, they panicked when the Kennedy administration showed a willingness to go to war rather than give in to their demands. In both cases, Moscow quickly sought to defuse the situation as fast as possible, even accepting humiliating conditions to avert a war they knew they would lose.
Like the Soviet Union early on in the Cold War, even a nuclear-armed Iran would be vastly outmatched by the US strategic arsenal. Unlike the Soviets, the Iranians can’t ever hope to match the US. Thus, in any crisis, American negotiators will have the upper hand and should be able to compel the Iranians to back down quickly, even accepting significant reversals to avoid a war.
On past occasions when Iran crossed an American red line and was at risk of a US military response — during the Tanker War in 1988, after the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 — the Iranians have backed down quickly and even made humiliating concessions of their own (such as ending the Iran-Iraq War and agreeing to suspend uranium enrichment) to avert an American attack. A third observation from the Kennedy era is that communication is critical. Misperceptions are inevitable in international relations, and the fear conjured by nuclear weapons only adds to that risk. Kennedy resisted demonising Khrushchev, seeing him instead as a mercurial leader prone to taking big gambles to try to address the challenges he faced. Although Kennedy’s sense of Khrushchev was broadly correct, he and the US government in general still tended to misunderstand the Soviet leader’s goals and thinking.
Kennedy helped institutionalise direct, reliable US-Soviet communications. The growing realisation of the importance of this channel led to the “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin.
WP-BLOOMBERG
