Ukraine Has Become Putin’s Cuban Missile Crisis
Sixty years ago Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took a huge gamble and lost. Within two years he was out of power.
Cold warriors.
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Not merely for the past few decades, but for the past several centuries, Western leaders have grappled with an intractable problem: How to understand what Russia, the growling bear, thinks it is doing?
Most conspicuously, on the morning of Oct. 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy and his advisers racked their brains at the Cabinet Room table over the motivation for the Soviet Union’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. “Well, it’s a goddam mystery to me,” said Kennedy. “I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union, but if anybody can tell me any other time since the [1948-49] Berlin Blockade where the Russians have given us so clear a provocation, I don’t know when it’s been.”