![]() But at the time-and for forty years thereafter-the United States didn’t know that the Soviets had hidden small nuclear weapons on the island. During the crisis, Americans planned out the battle meticulously, based on the best intelligence they could get on Soviet weaponry and the large nuclear weapons our spy satellites had spotted. The other discouraging fact is that Cuba should also remind us that things can be worse than the worst-case scenario. The Red Sox never make a deal with the Yankees at the trade deadline because both teams want the same thing, and both teams want the other to lose. Democrats want to look like they’re part of The Rational Party Republicans want the same. Obama wants to improve his 2012 election chances Republicans want to weaken them. Neither side wants default, but there’s nothing that the Democrats want that the Republicans don’t. In our current crisis, however, there are no obvious asymmetries. Asymmetries are why teams with little chance to win this year trade good old players for promising young players (Carlos Beltran, Zack Wheeler). That trade worked because they United States cared more about something (political opinion) than the Soviets did, which meant that the Soviets could offer something which seemed small to them but big to us. They would pull the missiles out of Cuba and we’d pull missiles out of Turkey however, to protect the Kennedy political brand, the Soviets would have to keep the agreement secret. Robert Kennedy made a secret deal with the Soviets. What’s discouraging about the analogy, however, is that the Cuban missile crisis was ultimately resolved largely because of an asymmetry. ![]() “Unless we can return to political arrangement, we will all fry,” reads a note that Defense Department official Paul Nitze wrote in a meeting in the office of Under-Secretary of State George Ball’s office on Saturday, October 27th. Khrushchev was so rattled, he spent the last night sleeping in his clothes. Cuba shot down an American pilot another American military plane got lost above Alaska and strayed over Russian territory. At the very end of those negotiations, mayhem struck. ![]() Maybe, in fact, Cuba should make us sanguine. And perhaps both crises will be resolved by men who, blessedly, appear to become more rational the closer they get to the edge: John Boehner and Nikita Khrushchev. (The new ones in Havana were tellingly called “political range ballistic missiles.”) Another similarity is how both crises started: a weak player, pushed by its ideological fringe-hard-line Soviet generals, Tea Partyites-decided to challenge its stronger opponent. Soviet missiles in Cuba would not have vastly altered the strategic balance in the Cold War because the Soviets already had missiles that could hit us. We shouldn’t have a debt ceiling, and the differences between the current Republican and Democratic plans are slim. Then, as now, two sides moved toward calamity over a relatively small issue.
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