HOLMES: Miscalculating engagement

John F. Kennedy

Story Topics

• Politics
• Barack Obama
• Iran
• John F. Kennedy
• Nikita Khrushchev

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Direct diplomatic outreach to America’s foes and rivals defines President Obama’s foreign policy. It underpins everything from “resetting” relations with Russia to making concessions to Iran. It’s intended to distinguish Mr. Obama from his unpopular predecessor, thereby garnering more support from friends and allies for U.S. policies.

The idea is appealing. Even Winston Churchill reportedly said “it’s better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.”

But the approach carries a mixed historical record. As with so many well-meaning gestures, it can result in things going horribly wrong.

A classic example is John F. Kennedy’s early overtures to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. An inexperienced and overly eager Kennedy invited Khrushchev to a summit in Vienna, Austria, in June 1961, suggesting through back channels that he could compromise on nuclear testing if Khrushchev made it appear to be a Soviet suggestion. The move didn’t work.

The summit ended miserably. Khrushchev “just beat [the] hell out of me,” Kennedy said. Having sized up the young president, Khrushchev two months later bucked the West, erected the Berlin Wall and restarted nuclear weapons testing.

The story continued. A year later, surveillance flights found Khrushchev putting missiles in Cuba, apparently calculating that Kennedy would not respond forcefully. He was wrong. Kennedy publicly exposed the missile installations on Oct. 22, 1962. A missile attack from Cuba, JFK announced, would be seen as an attack by the Soviet Union, and the U.S. would respond accordingly.

It had been a dangerous double miscalculation: Kennedy wrongly believed that “reaching out” would make Khrushchev more conciliatory, while Khrushchev read Kennedy’s friendliness as weakness. Both were guilty of projection - believing the other thought just like he did. Like American liberals today, Kennedy incorrectly thought sophistication and good will could charm our foes. Meanwhile, the wily, cynical Khrushchev thought the perceived missile gap would leave Kennedy weak-kneed.

Both were mistaken. And by acting on those erroneous assumptions, they brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

President Carter’s outreach to the Soviet Union provides another example. Six days after his inauguration, he wrote Leonid Brezhnev, the Communist Party’s general secretary and de facto Soviet leader, assuring him that the U.S. didn’t seek military superiority. He proposed an early summit to hammer out a quick strategic arms limitation and nuclear test ban agreement.

In his quest for disarmament, Mr. Carter canceled the U.S. neutron bomb and B-1 strategic bomber programs. His obsession with arms control helped convince the Soviets that he would not respond to an invasion of Afghanistan, and they went ahead and did so in December 1979. (For the record, President Reagan restored the neutron bomb development and B-1 production in 1981, shortly after assuming office.)

In these cases, U.S. leaders misunderstood how their foes would interpret their friendly overtures. How could their good will could go unreciprocated?

Their assumption was not so much naivete as an ideologically induced idea that others’ grievances against the U.S. are partially justified; remove the grievances and they’d come around. Little weight was given to the fact that countries challenge us for reasons of power and interest, not simply because they are upset with our treatment of them.

These examples should serve as cautionary tales. Mr. Obama appears deeply committed to the notion that many of America’s problems in the world arise from President George W. Bush’s lack of direct diplomatic engagement. Reaching out to Iran, Russia and Muslims is predicated on this idea, which is more an ideological default position than a pragmatic plan for correcting past mistakes.

If Mr. Obama adheres to this belief too rigidly, he will lose sight of the same realities that wound up biting the Kennedy and Carter presidencies.

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