By Sascha Glaeser
Sixty years ago, the deployment of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba brought the world to the precipice of nuclear annihilation.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the peak of Cold War confrontation, with both the United States and Soviet Union agreeing thereafter that a more stable relationship between the two superpowers was desperately needed. Efforts to reduce tensions and mitigate future crises were established such as the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Washington-Moscow hotline allowing for direct communication between U.S. and Soviet leadership. While the ensuing decades had their fair share of mistrust and close calls, none were as serious as what transpired in 1962. Today, the sobering lessons of the Cold War seem to have been forgotten as Russia issues a nuclear threat over the war in Ukraine and storm clouds gather over the Taiwan Strait.
Many American foreign policy elites experienced their formative professional years after the Cold War while U.S. power was at its zenith. Great power war and the possibility of thermonuclear conflict was deemed a thing of the past. Through hubris and naivety those same elites managed to erode America’s position in the world, entangling the United States in non-strategic endless wars in the greater Middle East, poisoning U.S.-Russia relations, building China into an economic powerhouse and then adopting a zero-sum adversarial approach to Beijing. Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and deteriorating U.S.-China relations over Taiwan have brought the United States to a dangerous inflection point—one where the terrible destructive power of nuclear weapons must once again be considered not so unthinkable.
This piece was originally published in The Orange County Register on October 25, 2022. Read more HERE.