Post by dodger on Sept 24, 2013 20:06:18 GMT
Fine study of a poor leader, 24 Sep 2013
This review is from: Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (Paperback)
This is a fascinating, well-researched account of the Soviet Union's foreign policy under Khrushchev.
In 1956, Khrushchev let himself be duped twice over. In the Suez crisis, he chose to believe that the British-French ceasefire ultimatum to Egypt and Israel was genuine. And he believed that Hungary's Imre Nagy would stay loyal to the Soviet Union, allowing the counter-revolution to grow to the point where the Soviet Union had to send troops.
In 1960, just before crucial disarmament talks, the crash in the Soviet Union of a US spy plane revealed that the USA conducted secret, illegal spy flights over the Soviet Union. Khrushchev allowed his justified anger at the flights to override his country's vital interest in nuclear disarmament. His mishandling of the incident wrecked the talks, after which both sides built huge numbers of nuclear weapons. In 1960, the USA and the USSR each had just 10 nuclear warheads; by 1986, they had 9,000.
The authors note that the US government made plans to assassinate foreign leaders whom it opposed, like President Arbenz of Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba the prime minister of Congo, and Fidel Castro. The authors write disingenuously, "It is one of the conundrums of the Cold War that it was the democratic West and not the Soviet Union that considered the use of political assassination as a means of increasing its influence in the third world."
But this was no puzzle; it was a fact that revealed that the West was not as democratic as it claimed. And the US government didn't just `consider' political assassination - it tried many times to kill Fidel Castro.
On 12 April 1961, President Kennedy pledged at a press conference, "there will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces. This government will do everything it possibly can, and I think it can meet its responsibilities, to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba." Five days later, he ordered the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, launched from US bases, with US mercenaries alongside Cuban exiles.
In the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev was over-ambitious, placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in a vain attempt to change the balance of power between the USA and the Soviet Union. After the confrontation, he retreated in confusion, without even keeping Cuba informed. Khrushchev's usual approach, in foreign policy as in domestic policy, was blustering excess followed by hasty retreat.