Wow. I recently encountered on twitter an idiot who was trying to argue that Hitler had created the Berlin Wall. Actually, this was part of a broader discussion. Our idiot (OI for short) was trying to defend Trump's wall building. Somebody else had apparently mentioned the Berlin Wall as an example of the evils of building walls. OI apparently thought it important to make the point that Hitler had built a wall through the middle of his own capital, whereas Trump was dong things the right way, putting the wall on a border. Then some other genius popped up and explained (???) that Stalin had actually built the Berlin Wall. This was too much. Yours truly intervened and informed them that the Wall was constructed at the insistence of Nikita Khrushchev, isolating West Berlin from the eastern part of the city and the country of East Germany, when the latter was being run by a Khrushchev puppet, Walter Ulbricht. I'm such a spoilsport. But hey: if the Trumpets want to compa...
Posts
JFK authorized the Attorney General, his brother, to cut the deal that the US for years thereafter would deny it had ever made, the deal agreeing that the US missiles in Turkey would be dismantled in return for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Robert Kennedy wrote the following of the moment of the crucial contact, with Dobrynin. "We have to have a commitment by at least tomorrow that those bases [in Cuba] would be moved. This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove those basis, then we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action, but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans, there would also be dead Russians. He then asked me about Khrushchev's other proposal dealing with removal of the missiles from Turkey. I replied that there could be no quid pro quo --- not deal of this kind could be made ... If some time elapsed --- and ... I me...
Today is the 53d anniversary of the day that President John Kennedy's advisors first informed him of the photographic evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba. Thus, Oct. 16th might be considered the date of the start of the crisis that was resolved 12 days later, when Nikita Khrushchev publicly agreed to the dismantling or withdrawal of those missiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis is important not only as one intense incident within the long Cold War, a stand-off stretching from 1945 to 1987. It is important as an example of game theory playing itself out in great power politics. The key was that the President had solid domestic political reasons not to be seen making concessions to the Soviet in return for the withdrawal of these missiles. Nonetheless, he also understood that he had to make some sort of concessions to NK in return for the withdrawal of these missiles. The key concession was successfully kept secret not only at that time, but for more than a decade thereafter: ...