The Gamble the World Cannot Take: Lessons from a Cold War Conflict

‘The further backward you can look, the further forward you are likely to see.’
Winston Churchill

In the wake of the horrendous car bomb and mortar attacks on Baghdad's Sadr City district on November 23, the world must collectively step back and hold its breath. In order to combat the sectarian violence that now plagues Iraq, a serious effort at diplomacy must be made; otherwise, the nascent state in Iraq may never develop beyond violence. Lessons from the recent past can inform our handling of international problems today.

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44 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world was on the verge of nuclear war, today’s world faces a dual nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran. How this threat is dealt with will very much influence relations with these so-called ‘rogue states’ over the coming years. The work of the United Nations Security Council, in imposing sanctions on North Korea, for example, has ensured that a strong but not aggressive policy has been pursued thus far. In an article on the BBC News website, on October 15, 2006, World Affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds asserted that, ‘The sanctions policy and the lack of a military option basically means that containment is the order of the day for the indefinite future.’

The United Nations has so far played a positive role in mitigating the situation; it must continue to do so. During the Cold War, the United Nations was an international forum in world affairs acting as an intermediary between the two superpowers. The power of the United Nations lay in its neutrality in the face of two competing world ideologies. Today, lacking this ideological framework, the United Nations has unfortunately found itself without such a presence in the course of international power politics. The Iraq war demonstrated this loss of authority: American and British politicians chose to undermine United Nations article 51 which states that an attack on another power must only be in self-defence of an armed attack. Clearly, neither country faced this threat and thus reduced the power of the UN to rhetoric with their invasion in 2003. Yet with its huge base of members and its remit to work in the international order, the United Nations can fulfil the role of the arbiter of global peace once again, if it so desires.

But it is not an easy card to play. During the Cold War, America represented not only its own interests but the interests of the Western world as well. Now, much of the Arab world perceives American activities as entirely self-interested. The ‘wars by proxy’ during the Cold War directed by European imperialists, Americans and Soviets have now ended. But to the Arab world, these wars have simply been replaced by American attempts to export democracy to the Middle East, aiming to stop the spread of radicalism. As was shown before the Iraq War, the United Nations has been unable to play a significant role in the development of this situation.

In the case of Iran, debate continues over how to face the potential threat of nuclear weapons, should the Iranians continue to ignore international pleas and succeed in obtaining nuclear power. The proliferation of nuclear weapons and the growth of nuclear powers during the last fifteen years after the end of the Cold War have made the world a very dangerous place: there is the possibility of disaster in Kashmir as well as in the Middle East. The fear of Al Qaeda obtaining and using nuclear weapons or dirty bombs is a potentially catastrophic consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union: many of the Soviet’s old weapons are now unaccounted for and their location unknown. This fear of nuclear attack is most apparent in the Iranian case, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has launched a number of diatribes against the West, and particularly against Israel. As reported by the BBC News Website, on 15 October 2006, in a speech to the United Nations in September of this year, he contended that “’hegemonic powers…have misrepresented Iran's healthy and fully safeguarded technological endeavours in the nuclear field as pursuit of nuclear weapons.’”

The world needs to find out how to properly deal with Islamic fundamentalism and extremism. In this, the year of the 50th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, it should be abundantly clear that the best policy to take is not an aggressive one that leaves many dead in its wake and brings the world closer to a global conflict. In the Suez Crisis, by invading Egypt, the British, French and Israeli forces favoured aggression over diplomacy, resulting in total failure. In the same way as the Suez Crisis firmly marked the decline of the British Empire, so Iraq has become an albatross around the Americans’ neck. It is not in angering Muslims in the Middle East that true peace will be achieved. We need to court the moderates, and not interfere with the life of the Muslim world and the Middle East. The one lesson we can learn from recent experience is that the people of the Middle East became tired of their subservient position long ago. The sense of humiliation at the hands of ruling foreign powers contributes to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as well as Arab attacks and complaints against the actions of the West.
This is one of the potential dangers of mismanaging relations with Iran and North Korea. A diplomatic solution must be sought in this crisis. This will set a precedent for the proper and effective dealing with Islamic fundamentalism and extremism, which has so far been severely lacking in the policy of both the United States and the United Kingdom in their respective attempts to deal with this threat.

We can certainly take on lessons from the past in our dealings with perceived ‘rogue states’ today. If there is one thing the Cuban Missile Crisis taught us, it is that nuclear brinkmanship is dangerous. For one terrible moment in 1962, the world stood on the brink of nuclear holocaust, and only through patience and diplomacy was a peaceful conclusion achieved. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to underestimate the danger that the Cuban Missile Crisis posed. But this ignores the fear, foreboding and uncertainty of the thirteen long days of the crisis, when people all over the world stood in fear and waited, making preparations to save themselves in case of an attack. During and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro certainly thought that nuclear weapons ought to be used to protect his island from American invasion. Thankfully, Castro’s catastrophic suggestion never occurred, but this was a crisis that threatened the very nature of the world we live in.

The diplomatic solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis is the lesson for our dealing with the Iranian and North Korean threats today. In the face of nuclear annihilation, the Kennedy Administration and the Soviet Union leadership, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, managed to avoid nuclear war. Instead of pursuing hard-line military options, such as an aerial bombing of Cuba in order to destroy the Soviet missiles based on the island Ex Comm—Kennedy’s emergency committee of key advisers—brought the decision on a naval blockade and the chance of peace. There are certainly lessons in this for us today. Reactionary and violent responses to a global threat in October 1962 would have put the world on the brink of disaster. Such a response would have the same effect today. There is no doubt that should today’s geopolitical conflict escalate, the world could face a similar threat to that of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Though the Cold War has ended, and the icy period of the 1950s has not been repeated, rogue states are the threat that faces us today.

As Churchill noted, the lessons of the past can and must influence our actions in the world of today. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nikita Khrushchev’s attempt to change the balance of power in the Cold War was, in the end, a failure. While he achieved a small victory in forcing America to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, he had been forced to back down by America’s diplomacy. More importantly, by pursuing a policy of nuclear brinkmanship, he had brought the world to the edge of disaster. The dual threat posed by Iran and North Korea has yet to threaten this generation, the youngest of whom never really experienced the fear and tension of the Cold War years in the same way that the generation of the Cuban Crisis did in the early 1960s. But this does not mean that a crisis—as great in scale as the one that occurred nearly 50 years ago—could not occur again today. Instead of the American-Soviet conflict of the Cold War, the world now faces the threat of dangerous men. There will be dire consequences if leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran and Kim Jong-Il in Korea are not dealt with properly. The actions and rhetoric of both Chavez and Ahmadinejad can be compared with that of Fidel Castro. Castro once posed a threat to American power after the Cuban Revolution in the same way that this new class of dictators do today. It remains to be seen whether the policy the Bush Administration concerning Iran and North Korea will be affected by the recent Democratic victory in the mid-term Congressional elections. What is certain is that the United Nations, under its incoming Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, must play a significant role in dealing with the problems of the early Twenty-First Century. While the post-Cold War world is still young, the emergence of dangerous new threats, especially on September 11, 2001 and afterwards in the War on Terror, has almost created a ‘clash of civilizations’, at a time when what is really needed is effective and persistent diplomacy. As long as Western foreign policy is seen as combative towards the Arab world and as long as anti-Western rhetoric emanates from rogue states, a ‘clash of civilisations’ hangs in the balance. The world must not take a gamble: this is the lesson of history.