Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1480113
15 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 28 SEPTEMBER 2022 WORLD vasion. At the time, Georgia's ef- forts to confront Russian-backed separatists were seen by Putin as an unacceptable threat. After the NATO summit that year, in which the Bush administration had attempted to rush Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and failed, an emboldened Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili cracked down on the breakaway province of South Ossetia. When Putin responded by ordering Russian troops to invade Geor- gia, he certainly had no doubts about Bush's readiness to send U.S. troops to war. After all, he had seen him dispatch 130,000 troops to invade Iraq in 2003 and tens of thousands more to Af- ghanistan. Rather than deterring Putin, the evidence suggests that Bush's bravado served mainly to encourage Saakashvili's reckless- ness, which in turn provided the pretext for Putin's invasion. As Russian invaders ap- proached Georgia's capital, the Bush administration faced a fur- ther choice. Predictably, some members of the administration, particularly aides in Vice Presi- dent Dick Cheney's office, called for sending U.S. troops to pre- vent Russia's seizing Georgia. At a special National Security Council meeting chaired by the president, his national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, posed the question directly: "Are we prepared to go to war with Rus- sia over Georgia?" The president then asked each participant at the meeting to offer his or her own answer. As Hadley put it afterward, "I wanted to make people show their cards about a possible military response"— knowing that otherwise some of them might later claim that they were prepared to fight for Geor- gia but were overruled. As they went around the table, no one, including Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Sec- retary of Defense Bob Gates, was prepared to vote yes. The United States did not come to Georgia's aid, and the war was over within two weeks. A precedent with many presi- dents Instructively, the choices made by the Biden and Bush adminis- trations are consistent with those made by every other U.S. admin- istration that has faced a simi- lar dilemma. When the Soviets blockaded the highway to Berlin in 1948, President Harry Truman rejected his military command- ers' proposal to have U.S. forces fight their way through. Presi- dent Dwight Eisenhower chose not to send U.S. troops to defend the 1956 Hungarian uprising—a decision repeated by President Lyndon Johnson in Czechoslo- vakia during the 1968 Prague Spring. Kennedy refused to at- tack Soviet troops building the Berlin Wall. And when, in 1983, the Soviets shot down a commer- cial airliner that had mistakenly strayed into Soviet airspace—an attack that killed 52 Americans, including a sitting member of Congress—President Ronald Reagan likewise refused to esca- late. In every case, the man with whom the buck stopped was not prepared to risk the survival of the nation for anything less than a clear vital national interest. Like their predecessors, Biden, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, Na- tional Security Advisor Jake Sul- livan, and others in the adminis- tration have not only read about what happened in the Cuban missile crisis but have also par- ticipated in simulated war games designed to allow them to vicari- ously experience nuclear danger. They have played the roles of those who sat around the table with JFK, debating choices that they knew could provoke a nu- clear attack that could kill their own families. They have reviewed the SIOP, or Single Integrated Operational Plan—the United States' general plan for a nucle- ar war, first devised in the early 1960s, which provides a menu of launch procedures and targeting options for the U.S. nuclear arse- nal, should it be necessary. Bid- en and his senior advisors have reflected on the fact that while U.S. strategic nuclear forces can erase Russia from the map, at the end of any such confrontation, the United States would also be gone. They thus understand the profound truth captured by Ron- ald Reagan in his famous one-lin- er: "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." Reagan's two propositions are easy to recite, but hard to in- tegrate into strategic thinking. Even though the United States has the mightiest military in the world, with nuclear forc- es that could turn Russia into a graveyard, Reagan's first point reminds us that at the end of that war, Russia would also have completely destroyed the United States. No one could call that vic- tory. This condition—described by Cold War strategists as MAD (mutually assured destruction)— has made all-out war between enemies with robust nuclear ar- senals madness. Technology has, in effect, made the United States and Russia inseparable conjoined twins. While either can kill the other, neither can do so without simultaneously committing sui- cide. Particularly in the hot air of Washington today, it may be useful to recall that when Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Wash- ington Post columnist George Will accused him of "accelerat- ing moral disarmament—actual disarmament will follow." The leading conservative intellectu- al of the time, William Buckley, called Reagan's INF agreement a "suicide pact." About such criticism, Reagan wrote, "Some of my more radical conserva- tive supporters protested that in negotiating with the Russians I was plotting to trade away our country's future security. I as- sured them we wouldn't sign any agreements that placed us at a disadvantage, but still got lots of flak from them—many of whom, I was convinced, thought we had to prepare for nuclear war be- cause it was 'inevitable.'" War by other means Among the many lessons from the Cuban missile crisis, one may prove particularly important to the Biden administration in the weeks ahead—particularly if Pu- tin finds himself backed into a corner. As JFK said in his most impor- tant foreign policy speech, just months after the Cuban missile crisis, "Above all, while defend- ing our own vital interests, nu- clear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war." If those were the only two options between which Putin had to choose, there is no guarantee that he would pick the former. Although Biden has careful- ly avoided forcing Putin to that point, events are now moving toward what the Russian leader could see as such a crossroad. If the facts of war on the ground leave him with no alternatives other than losing this war or shocking Ukrainians and the world with a tactical nuclear at- tack, it would be foolish to bet against his selecting the latter. To prevent this, Biden and his team should review what JFK did as he saw events moving rapidly toward a dead end. Despite the success of the U.S. naval block- ade in preventing the Soviets from bringing additional missiles to Cuba, it had done nothing to stop them readying missiles al- ready there for launch against the United States. Thus, on the final Saturday of the crisis, Kennedy's advisors told him he had only two options: attack or accept a Soviet missile base in Cuba as a fait accompli. Kennedy rejected both. I nstead, he crafted an imagina- tive alternative that consisted of three components: a public deal in which the United States pledged not to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles, a private ultimatum threatening to attack Cuba with- in the next 24 to 48 hours unless Khrushchev accepted that of- fer, and a secret sweetener that promised the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months after the crisis was re- solved. In the complicated multilevel negotiations and diplomacy that will be required to create a simi- lar off-ramp for Putin in Ukraine, the United States and its allies will need even more imagination than Kennedy and his advisors did in 1962. But as Biden and his team rise to this challenge, they can find inspiration in JFK's fin- est hour. Russian President Vladimir Putin overseeing a missile test at the National Defense Control Center, Moscow in 2018