This is, as best as I can tell, wrong: I had thought that it was not Khrushchev but Kennedy who cut the backroom deal—and that the deal was secret only because Kennedy thought he needed to hide it from people like, well, Niall Ferguson. Before the Cuban missile crisis the U.S. had missiles in Turkey threatening Russia with no Russian counterbalance, and the U.S. had already supported one invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro. After the Cuban missile crisis the U.S. had pledged not to invade or support an invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro, and neither America nor Russia had IRBMs threatening the other. This does not look like successful "brinksmanship" to me. This looks like both Kennedy and Khrushchev cooperating to defuse the crisis against the opposition of their own hawks—that both realized that they had an overwhelming common interest in not pulling too tightly on the ends they he'd of the Knot of War. Am I wrong? Niall Ferguson: Brexitian Rhapsody Going on Far too Long: "Dulles['s] brinkmanship meant that the United States must be willing to threaten nuclear war.... This high-stakes approach was much criticised by liberals, who feared nuclear Armageddon more than they feared the consequences of appeasing the Soviet Union. Yet Eisenhower’s Democrat successor, John F Kennedy, gave a masterclass in brinkmanship during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. When Kennedy learnt that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles on Cuba, he decided to impose a naval blockade to halt further Soviet shipments of military hardware to the island. In a television address, he issued an ultimatum, demanding the withdrawal of missiles. In case Moscow did not comply, Kennedy ordered the preparation of an invasion force.... Kennedy’s brinkmanship paid off. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was sufficiently intimidated to cut a secret back-channel deal, whereby he agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba if the Americans withdrew theirs from Turkey...
#noted
