NOTE: This is a hypothetical, fantasy, speculative scenario. Why? *Why not. *
In a nutshell:
If you want to play, please speculate on one or both of the following versions of this fantasy scenario:
A) Trump is president instead of Kennedy and only the technology available in 1962 is in play (basically phone–local and long distance-- radio, telegraph, and television).
B) Trump is president and all of today’s technology is available (the above plus cell phones, internet, email, Skype, Twitter, the whole shebang).
Trump follows the advice of the more hawkish military and launches a pre-emptive strike on the missile sites. USSR follows with a strike against US missile sites in Turkey.
At this point either
A) The two strikes make both sides recoil in horror before further destruction
B) Attacks escalate and theDoomsday Clock strikes midnight.
Game theory says that Trump’s unpredictability would be a significant strategic advantage in such a situation. It might have inhibited the Russians from escalating.
However, from a game theoretic perspective the advantage is gained entirely from your opponents’ belief that you are crazy enough to do anything. If you are actually crazy enough to do anything, of course that may significantly increase the probability of Armageddon.
“Nikita, what kind of deal did Fidel offer? I’ll cut his price by 10%, but we have to use my contractors to build the silos. There’s a perfect place along the 12th fairway at Mar-a-Lago. I’ll throw in a free membership. What do you say?”
Wittingly or not Trump already is an adherent to Nixon’s Madman Theory of Foreign policy, so what was Nixon’s thoughts? Surely he expressed an opinion on what he would have done?
Second, does this scenario consider John Bolton in the picture? If so, the result would be to nuke Iran.
At the moment, I think we still don’t have a good sense for what sort of president Trump will be. Probably not a very good one, but that still leaves a wide range of options. I think he still hasn’t cottoned on to the position he is in, potentially getting people killed, ordering people to kill others, being the guy who everyone is looking to when something like Katrina happens, etc. He thinks that the President is just a guy who walks around telling people what to do, and that the shit only rolls downhill. He doesn’t appreciate that the President has very little power, and more responsibilities than almost any other job.
What he does when everything goes sideways could vary anywhere from that he suddenly straightens up and starts taking the job seriously, and doing the right things, to curling into a ball and asking to be let go to cry his way back home. In a sense, I’m more hopeful for his ability to do the job right than I was with Bush II. I don’t think that Trump is an idiot, he’s just been able to get away with doing whatever he wants for too long, without anyone around to give him a good slap and tell him to stop being an infant. The job he’s taking on might be one of the few things that is capable of doing just that. (Bush, on the other hand, was an idiot.)
Unfortunately, he’ll almost certainly be the cause of whatever calamity it is that first slaps him in the face.
The Soviets thought JFK was weak and tested him. He wasn’t afraid to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. I doubt the Russians will do the same with Trump.
Trump strikes me as the kind of leader who 1) does not want a nuclear war but 2) is so focused on image, pride, and getting the better of an altercation that he could “escalate against his will” - i.e., not want a war, but also not want to blink first, so he reluctantly keeps escalating to try to get the other guy to blink first, and if Kruschnev doesn’t blink, then Trump has to keep escalating in order to be the alpha.
There wouldn’t have been any immediate danger because Trump wouldn’t have cared about missiles in Cuba, especially if his good buddy Khrushchev wanted them there. If Twitter had existed back then, Trump would tweet that both Castro and Khrushchev had called him to tell him that the way he was managing the crisis proved that he was the greatest president any country had ever had in the history of the universe.
Later on, with missiles firmly entrenched just off America’s coast, the Soviets would have had unlimited leverage to threaten the US at every opportunity. Trump would tweet that this was all Eisenhower’s fault, and then unfriend Khrushchev on Facebook and threaten his former pal with “fire and fury”. At which point the Soviets would deploy the Cuban missiles and nuke the entire east coast of the US.
I realize I’m way late in responding to this, but this description doesn’t accurately characterize what happened. The Russians didn’t put missiles in Cuban just to test to see if Kennedy had balls; they did so with the specific purpose of having JFK remove missiles in Turkey, which he did.
There’s a notion that leaders play dangerous war games just to flex muscles and see how much someone’s going to tolerate, but the truth is usually more complex than that. When Russia invades Ukraine, they don’t do it to test Bush or Obama; they’re doing it because they want something out of it, and they calculate that a Bush or an Obama won’t do anything to stop them. Or that whatever price they pay won’t be so severe.
Kim isn’t firing missiles at Japan and building nuclear missile just to see how strong Trump is, or how crazy he is. He wants something tangible that will increase the likelihood that he maintains the survival of his state and his grip on power.
Going back to the context of 1962, if you listen to Bob McNamara’s account of what happened, JFK’s instincts were militaristic; he had to be more or less talked into taking a more diplomatic approach with Russia. But that first required understanding what Russia was doing and why they were doing it. That required someone with the intellect to understand Russia, which they had in a former ambassador to Russia, Tommy Thompson. Thompson served on JFK’s National Security Council. It was he who basically counseled Kennedy that the Russians wanted a face-saving way out of this, to back out gracefully while getting something in return. Kennedy had enough intellect to reason, to listen to his advisers, to understand that he didn’t have to be the smart person in the room.
Now contrast this with a guy who just today thanked – fuck-ingthanked – a foreign adversary for sending home several hundred diplomatic staff, hired people with no credentials to be on the NSC, marginalized his own Sec of State, has probably only half of those critical diplomatic offices filled, has turned his White House staff into a fucking reality TV show, has repeatedly said that he knows more than the generals do about military affairs, has rejected the entire intelligence community, tried to suppress investigations into election meddling by a foreign adversary, and who now engages in tweeting nuclear threats against arguably among the most volatile and ruthless leaders who himself is now in possession of a very potent military machine.
What would have happened? World War Three. That’s exactly what would have happened. And there really isn’t even any debate about this.
You do realize that Cuba requested the missiles for defensive purposes, right? The US had backed an unsuccessful attack on Cuba by Cuban-American exiles the year before the crisis, and part of Kennedy’s solution to the crisis involved a promise not to sponsor any more such attacks. At least in the Latin American region, the Soviets and their clients were always in the role of the weaker party, not the stronger one (and IIRC they maintained a no-first-strike policy anyway, although modern Russia has dropped that restraint).
I think friendly or at least semi-cordial relationship between the US and the Soviet Union would have been a good thing, not a bad thing.
Considering what happened today, when Trump thanked Russia for kicking out hundreds of our diplomats, my best guess is that he would have offered them Guantanamo Bay as a place to put their missiles.