Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis

"This I chose as a very good example of interpretive international relations. It starts from the classic realist assumption in international relations: national interest is everything. Nations do what they do because it’s in their national interest to do so, rationally understood. And Allison offers alternative accounts to that, not to the exclusion of it, but to supplement it. What makes it a really neat book is that it focuses on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. US spy planes flying over Cuba discovered tell-tale signatures of Russian missile sites under construction, and just about finished at this point. Cuba is very close to the US. Any missile fire from Cuba would reach anywhere in the eastern half of the US within a matter of minutes, cutting down response time in Washington, which was strategically not good. The US couldn’t allow them to stay – but it was really tricky figuring out how to get rid of them, which involved trying to figure out what the Russians were up to. It was a dangerous time. President Kennedy thought at the time that there was a fifty-fifty chance of it all ending in nuclear war. So the case was of more than just academic interest. So: what were the Soviets up to, and what should the Americans do in response? Well, the classic unitary rational actor model, the realist model, says that states have national interests and they act in an instrumentally rational fashion in pursuing them. Why did the Soviet Union install those medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba? Because Russia was falling behind the US in the nuclear arms race, and this was a way of catching up, cheap and easy. How should the US respond? On this account, there’s no point trying to talk Russia out of it. If it’s in Russia’s national interest, Russia is going to do it, and talking is not going to help. You have to either invade or bomb, and if you bomb, you have to bomb big, because you aren’t quite sure where all the various missiles and components and warheads might be. That’s the classic realist response, and of course, that’s what the Pentagon was arguing for. There are other sides to the story. Allison offers two other conceptual models, as he calls them. One’s an organizational process model. On this account, states are complex organizations, consisting of many loosely linked sub-organizations. Each of those has a mission and competencies and standard operating procedures of its own. Thinking of it this way, we start asking different questions… Why were the Soviets behind in the arms race, anyway? Well, it turns out that until just a couple of years earlier, missiles in the Soviet Union were under the command of the Soviet Ground Forces. They were interested in missiles that would complement their mission – the ground war in Europe – so they were interested more in short and medium-range missiles. They had no interest in intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US, because that was not their job — and they were in control of missile procurement. That’s the organizational reason the Soviets had mostly short-range missiles that couldn’t reach Washington from Petrograd. Installing them in Cuba solved the problem of how to threaten the US with the missiles they actually had. But they had that problem because of an organisational issue. If that’s what’s going on, what should the US do? I’ll tell you what they did do. It’s another organizational story. The US ended up secretly withdrawing its missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union withdrawing its missiles from Cuba – and had to do it secretly, because they couldn’t be seen to be giving in to Russian blackmail. And here’s the organizational angle to it: President Kennedy was pretty pissed off when he realized that the missiles were still in Turkey, because he had twice before ordered them to be removed, and the army just didn’t do it. So forget the unitary rational actor model — the President was not really in command of this show. The third model that Allison offers is the bureaucratic politics model. This model emphasises that the sub-organisations have goals and interests of their own, which often conflict with one another’s. What happens is just the outcome of ordinary bureaucratic political struggles. One agency is at war with another, and who wins determines what the policy turns out to be. Looking through this lens, one question arises: why did it take so long for the US to realize that these missile sites were being constructed in Cuba? Well, there was a war going on between the Air Force and the CIA over who should have control over the spy planes. Until that struggle got settled, no flights took off – and this was the six-week period during which the missile sites were being constructed. Fortuitous, from Russia’s point of view. One last story: how did it all end? President Kennedy went public, demanded that the Soviets withdraw their missiles from Cuba, set up a naval blockade around Cuba and turned back any ship that had weapons missiles aboard. The Americans then got two official cables from Russia. One of them agreed to the President’s demands. The other one belligerently refused. The first letter was all soppy and personal, talking about our children and grandchildren. The other was full of official prose. And Kennedy figured, “Look, the first letter came directly from Khrushchev. The second letter was negotiated in the Politburo. What I’m going to do is just accept the first letter as the official Soviet response, and ignore the second letter.” What Kennedy was effectively saying was, “I bet there’s a power struggle going on in the Soviet Union. I am putting my money on Khrushchev.” It worked. The Soviets withdrew their missiles. There’s a sad epilogue for Khrushchev , who was overthrown two years later. Had he known that would be the upshot of his backing down in Cuba, Kennedy’s prediction of nuclear war may have been realized."