Old school guidance about new Cold War

Russia's invasion of Georgia coincided with my reading of a couple of books that turned out to be instructive about that event: "When Presidents Lie," by Eric Alterman; and National Book Award winner Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes," a history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

These books are not for people who insist on a rose-colored view of American foreign policy. Alterman tells the stories of four presidents -- F.D.R., Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan --whose lies to the American people had serious consequences that reverberated for years. And Weiner's story of the CIA is replete with deeds that were embarrassingly inept, imprudent, immoral, and very often illegal.

This isn't America-bashing; it's a critical honesty that's essential to an enlightened understanding of complicated world events.

The simple version of the invasion is that Russia's actions are a despicable re-assertion of the imperialist tendencies of the Soviet era. This version actually serves pretty well: Russia's dangerous adventurism is deplorable in an age when the world's major powers should be focused on global threats like energy depletion, the food crisis, and climate change, rather than on each other.

Instead, we find ourselves ranged across a nuclear abyss that's familiar to anyone who came of age during the Cold War. A little Cold-War rhetoric has re-emerged, as well: while Russia takes advantage of the U.S.'s limited options, we're waiting to see who "blinks" first, as some have styled the situation.

This is the language that Secretary of State Dean Rusk reportedly used during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, upon hearing that Soviet re-supply ships had reversed course in the face of an American blockade: "We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the classic Soviet/U.S. confrontation, and it set the tone for several decades of wary nuclear stalemate. Within a year, my junior high school adopted the tendentious text "What You Should Know About Communism and Why." Then we learned how to build bomb shelters and to protect ordinary homes from nuclear attack.

The spirit of that era emerged largely from the genuine nuclear scare of October 1962 and the conventional understanding that President John F. Kennedy's steady-eyed resolve had turned back determined Soviet aggression.

But both Alterman and Weiner tell a different, more nuanced story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. They set the Soviet's installation of nuclear warheads in Cuba against the backdrop of an active, covert, and sometimes illegal international anti-communist campaign that had been carried on for years by the CIA. The campaign's focus on Cuba was particularly aggressive and included plans to assassinate the Castro brothers and other Cuban leaders, sabotage, the subversion of the Cuban economy, and the recently failed Bay of Pigs attack.

Furthermore, audiotape and notes from White House meetings indicate that American leaders were fully aware that the Soviets' provocative installation of ballistic missiles in Cuba was as much an act of defense as of offense. Dean Rusk, referring to Soviet Premier Khruschev, said, "We don't really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under ours...we have nuclear weapons nearby, in Turkey and places like that."

Weiner suggests that Kennedy was only vaguely aware of the American missiles in Turkey trained on the Soviet Union, but he and Alterman both argue that those missiles became the fulcrum of a secret deal that eased the crisis. Although Kennedy got credit for resolutely facing up to Soviet aggression, considerable evidence indicates that, first, the Soviets were largely motivated by concerns for their own security, rather than by a desire to spread communism. And, second, diplomacy rather than force resolved the crisis.

None of this excuses Russia's invasion of Georgia. But I wonder if we could exercise foreign policy in a wiser fashion, rather than making the same old mistakes.

Nations, like people, put security and respect way up on their lists of basic desires. A country like Russia doesn't have to be very paranoid to see attempts to pull its neighbors into the orbit of the West as an aggressive threat.

Do we really need Georgia in NATO? And how badly do we need missile systems in Poland?

(John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail him at jcrisp(at)delmar.edu. For more news and information visit www.scrippsnews.com.)