Well, at least he wouldn’t be tweeting.
Regards,
Shodan
Trump utilizes crony Russian back channels throughout presidency. He does not escalate with deployment of missiles in faraway lands. Missile Crisis does not enter American lexicon.
Hmmm… you seem to be assuming a level of competence that has never been in evidence in anything to do with Trump, especially his comical administration that has all the suave sophistication of a Three Stooges episode where Curly has his head stuck in a bucket. “Competence” is not a word or even a concept in the Trumpian lexicon.
And the actual crisis was not “escalate[d] with deployment of missiles in faraway lands”, it was de-escalated with their removal. And if you’re trying to blame Kennedy for the original installation of nuclear missiles in Turkey, you might note that the agreement to put them there as a Soviet deterrent was made in 1959, under the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower.
I seriously believe Trump would have reacted to this in a manner calculated to make himself look powerful and fearless and to feed his enormous ego at any cost, and the cost to the future of civilization might have been grave indeed. It’s fortunate for the world that Kennedy was extremely intelligent, knowledgeable, and incredibly well-read, and deferential to those who he knew understood things far better than he did.
Trump would just give control of the missiles in Turkey to Russia, along with the codes to all our other missiles as well, during a boasting session with them.
This of course would happen during a closed doors meeting with Russians in the white house, and we’d only find out about it when the Russians nuked the pentagon with our own missiles. (This is assuming a pre-tweet scenario. In a scenario with twitter, he would brag about giving away our missile codes immediately.)
No. Kennedy had committed blunder after blunder in Latin America. He had attacked the Eisenhower administration and its so-called “missile gap”, so the deployment of the missiles was not only in line with his reckless hawkishness, but well within his ability to control.
So much for being intelligent knowledgeable and well-read:
“On the first day of the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for sending the missiles to Cuba, Kennedy made what must be one of the most staggeringly absentminded (or sarcastic) observations in the annals of American national-security policy: “Why does he put these in there, though? … It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, immediately pointed out: “Well we did it, Mr. President.””
He was advised, by among others Secretary McNamera, that the Soviet deployment of MRBM in Cuba did absolutely nothing to upset the strategic balance that was already heavily in the US government’s favor. He still blundered on, blockading Cuba in an act of war and issuing an ultimatum that was unnecessary. So much for being deferential:
“Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.””…
“In a 1987 interview, McNamara explained: “You have to remember that, right from the beginning, it was President Kennedy who said that it was politically unacceptable for us to leave those missile sites alone. He didn’t say militarily, he said politically.” What largely made the missiles politically unacceptable was Kennedy’s conspicuous and fervent hostility toward the Castro regime—a stance, Kennedy admitted at an ExComm meeting, that America’s European allies thought was “a fixation” and “slightly demented.””
It was Kennedy who blundered innocent people into a crisis because of his domestic political concerns. Competence is irrelevant. Trump could have avoided the crisis with a pure self-interest play.
Schwarz’s article is intentionally provocative and more than a little one-sided, colored by his isolationist ideology. How come it fails to mention that the plan to put Jupiter missiles in Turkey was initiated by Eisenhower? How come it fails to mention the extremely intense paranoia about the Soviets and the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack that dominated all American thinking in the 50s and 60s? This is almost impossible to overestimate. Or the equally intense fears of Soviet threats to Europe – the Berlin airlift had been barely a decade earlier, and the infamous Berlin wall was still being completed.
As for Trump, please, go ahead and believe that this gang of laughable bumbling buffoons, an administration that’s been in relentless chaos since Inauguration Day and has yet to accomplish anything other than digging itself in deeper and deeper, would have handled this crisis masterfully! :rolleyes: You’ve got the North Korea situation for a kind of rough comparison, where your hero is being told by knowledgeable experts to shut the fuck up because every time he opens his pie-hole he’s making things worse.
To be entirely fair to Trump, it’s entirely possible that he might have diffused the situation simply by surrendering everything out of love for his Russian masters. The way he’s saber-rattling at North Korea isn’t comparable, because NK doesn’t have him by the pursestrings.
Cool smear term.
The article was about a small period of time during which the crisis took place. It focused on the advisement Kennedy received and his decisions.
So people were paranoid and that is an excuse for Kennedy’s near catastrophic political maneuvers? Kennedy’s advisers explained to him allowing the missiles in Cuba would not matter much, was Kennedy paranoid?
Europe was bent out of shape because missiles were being deployed in Cuba? This stuff did not and should not have entered into the analysis during the crisis, therefore it was omitted.
You miss the point. There would have been no crisis. Trump would have never deployed the missiles or Trump would have ignored the deployment in Cuba because it made no difference if they were there or not.
Since we are transposing Trump to that time that goes then also for his business, and I do think that Trump would had lost property with casinos in Cuba or hotels that he would had developed when the Batista regime was in power.
IMO a lot property loss that would be considered by Trump to be a personal affront coming from Castro, so no, Trump would not had ignored that.
But that is not the only angle that would had led to Trump mishandling that crisis. If Trump had attempted to ignore the threat the buildup of nuclear missiles in Cuba would had eventually leaked to at least the congress people in charge of security. Or leaked to the media, that was more influential then.
Finding that Trump was a chicken or a stooge of the soviets would not had been dismissed by congress or the American people when nuclear missiles and communist threats were on everybody’s mind.
Thank God for men like Vasili Arkhipov, is all I can say.
+1000 to this. This is the best reason, I think, why Trump would probably have been even more aggressive than Kennedy was.
And, speaking of pure fantasy…
We wouldn’t be having this discussion, since with a loose cannon like Trump, odds are I wouldn’t have seen my eighth birthday.
I bet his tiny hands couldn’t press teh button lol
Kennedy’s advisors were clear when telling him that the deployment of missiles in Cuba was not a threat that would have in any way tilted the strategic balance back towards the Soviets.
In any case you misunderstand the role of the media in this period. The media was more influential, yes. The media was also even more deferential to the government than it was during the Obama regime.
Uh, you are talking about the same media that just a few years later had Nixon on its sights. No, with an even more corrupt fellow than Nixon there would had been nothing left but the feathers of the chicken/soviet stooge in that option.