“What would have happened if Kenendy had not listened to Khrushchev and if the two had not secretly talked?” asks Ted Snider, writing at AntiWar.com.
In 1962, the Soviet Union felt threatened by U.S. plans to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba, including with U.S. military intervention. The presence of Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy, armed with nuclear warheads, were another major concern to the USSR. The placement of Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuba brought the situation to a head.
The world at large owes everything to the decision by the two leaders to talk and listen to each other.
In 1999, writes Snider, the NATO bombing of Kosovo drew a furious phone call from Boris Yeltsin. “Don’t push Russia into this war,” he warned Clinton. “You know what Russia is, you know what Russia has at its disposal!”
That crisis led to a compromise in which NATO and Russian peacekeeping forces were deployed to Kosovo under the banner of the UN.
Is NATO listening to Putin today? Does the threat of potentially civilization-ending nuclear warfare cause reflection?
