Trump in a missile crisis: a fearful prospect

Probably the saddest criticism Michael Wolff has made of Donald Trump is that everyone who knows him sees him as a child.

This, Wolff says, means that Trump’s constantly seeking instant gratification. When he wants something, he wants it now. He has trouble understanding that anyone can stand in his way and, if they attempt to, his instinct is to try to bulldoze over them.

Recently, I’ve been listening to a great book by Larry J. Sabato on the The Kennedy Half Century. It’s concerned not only with the short presidency of John F. Kennedy but the long legacy he left behind. It’s a compelling tale.

JFK
For all his flaws, 
it’s a chilling thought that Trump now occupies his office

In particular, I was held by Sabato’s description of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union had begun to station missiles on Cuba, only 90 miles off the US coast. That represented a direct, immediate, existential threat to the United States. In turn, that brought the world to the brink of the greatest man-made catastrophe in history. It would have taken little to trigger a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union which would certainly have killed millions and might have left the planet uninhabitable.

Many of Kennedy’s military advisers pushed for an immediate strike on the missile bases. The reasoning was simple enough: the bases are the problem; a surgical strike takes them out; they provide the solution.

But Kennedy’s greatest blunder, the Bay of Pigs invasion right at the beginning of his presidency, had taught him a lesson. He’d allowed his military and CIA advisers to talk him into backing an invasion of Cuba by US-trained and armed insurgents. The operation had ended in colossal and shameful failure, and Kennedy was left looking both dishonest and guilty.

If anything came out of that fiasco, it was the lesson not to be persuaded too quickly by the military and CIA. As my wife pointed out to me when I told her this story, it’s just like asking a surgeon whether an operation is a good idea: that’s what surgeons do, they operate; they’re most unlikely ever to advise against surgery. So it is with soldiers: the military option is the one they’re drawn to most strongly, because it means doing what they do.

During the missile crisis Kennedy, burned by the Bay of Pigs experience, held back. After much debate, he chose a more cautious approach. He drew a “quarantine” zone around Cuba and announced the US would prevent any shipping entering it.

It’s interesting that he avoided the word “blockade” which is generally seen as an act of war, and Kennedy didn’t want to take quite so irrevocable a step that early into the crisis.

He had made his resolve clear, but also showed he was looking for a solution by peaceful means if at all possible. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, reacted to both messages. He ordered ships he’d already sent towards Cuba to turn back and return home. And he offered Kennedy a deal: he would dismantle the missile bases in return for a commitment by the US not to invade Cuba.

Both happened. War was avoided. A small thaw began in the Cold War.

Within a few months the US and the Soviet Union were negotiating a Test Ban Treaty, ending further atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere. It was one of Kennedy’s proudest achievements to see it ratified by the US Senate, one of his last successes before being assassinated.

Sabato points out that the defusing of the crisis was down to a lot of calm assessment of options and highly intelligent decision-making by two leaders. Both had understood that no apparent gain from war would be worth the devastating price it would exact.

But what would have happened with a President in the White House who couldn’t brook any delay in gratifying his desires? Might he not have gone straight away for the military option? After all, that was the one that promised the quickest solution to the most immediate problem. Does a man incapable of deferred gratification see any other option as more attractive?

Trump is sitting where Kennedy sat. Kim Jong-Un is playing the Kruschchev role. That’s not just a measure of the decline there has been in political standards.

It’s also frankly frightening.

Trump and Wolff: a fine tradition of obtuse authoritarianism

Excellent. I’ve taken delivery of my copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. 

My Kindle edition of Fire and Fury
Now I'll decide whether or not I read it, not some tinpot autocrat

I previously had little intention of buying it, and couldn’t have until next week anyway, but Donald Trump’s attempts to block publication made purchasing the book more attractive and brought the launch date forward.

Thus we rush more quickly to our fate by lashing out against it…

This experience evokes a strong sense of nostalgia in me. In 1987, during the heady days of the height of Maggie Thatcher’s power, she was more inclined than ever to indulge in spasms of complete battiness. One concerned a rather bad book, Spycatcher by a certain Peter Wright, formerly of the spook service MI5.

Maggie decided that the book represented a security threat to our fine kingdom. She seems not to have cottoned on to the obvious fact that anything the book contained would have been known by our then principal foes in Moscow, probably well before Wright had got around to writing it down.

She set out to ban publication of the book. Since her writ never ran quite as far as she would have liked – which would have been worldwide (at least) – she was only able to block UK publication.

The result was glorious: the book could be bought anywhere in the world, including in Moscow, but not in Britain. You might almost have wondered whether Thatcher was trying to prevent her own electorate reading about the ineptitude of some of our spies, rather than trying to protect secrets from the Soviet Union.

I wasn’t particularly tempted to read the book, but I was damned if the iron lady was going to stop me. I persuaded a friend in the US to buy a copy and mail it to me, which he kindly did. As it happens, I didn’t read the blessed book for years and when I did, I found it turgid and unconvincing. I struggled to finish it. But at least, I’d made it my choice, and not Maggie’s, whether I read it or not.

The point of this story is that Maggie’s fixation with banning the book turned an obscure third-rate work into a worldwide publishing sensation. Just as Trump’s rantings against Fire and Fury have taken the book from 48,449th on Amazon’s list to the number 1 spot.

By the way he has tried to block a book that claims he’s unfit for office, Trump has demonstrated just the kind of incompetence that makes the case against him. In fact, his reaction to the book condemns him far more powerfully than the book itself possibly could: it no longer matters if the book is entirely false, his reaction to it is authentic and visible to anyone. At least, to anyone with the eyes to see. 

There’s nothing new about any of this.

Nearly three centuries ago, Voltaire spent three years exiled in England. Such was his talent, he not only learned English, he mastered it well enough to write a book in the language, a book that sparkles with humour and provocative insights. His Letters on the English would have made the King of France as apoplectic as Trump is over Wolff – only in the French case, most of his officials would have agreed.

The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government where the Prince is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from committing evil.

Resisting Kings? Restraining their freedom to act? Oh, no, Louis XV would have taken a distinctly dim view.

There was worse still.

An Englishman, as one to whom liberty is natural, may go to heaven his own way.

What? There might be a way to heaven that didn’t go through the one true Church? The clergy would have been as incensed as the King.

No wonder Voltaire didn’t publish.

Well, at first he didn’t. But it must have gnawed at him to have a book that good mouldering in a bottom drawer. He gave in to temptation. He published, though only in English.

Still. Voltaire’s natural audience was his countrymen. Could he bear to deny them something that would enhance his reputation so forcefully?

It seems, naughty boy, he’d prepared a translation and adaption which he called the Lettres Philosophiques. And he let a printer see them. And then another. And then, for good measure, a third. Under strict instructions not to publish.

But they could see how well the book would sell. And when they discovered that others held the manuscript they began to fear that one of the other two would publish it first, creaming the most profitable part of a lucrative market.

Eventually, the book appeared. Without the permission legally required, a permission the authorities would certainly not have granted anyway. And Voltaire was in trouble – worse trouble than Michael Wolff because eighteenth-century France had few restraints on the power of the authorities to make their displeasure painfully known. Trump might envy them their unbridled authority but he doesn’t have it.

Voltaire’s friends got him away from Paris and into the deepest provinces. Eventually they persuaded the powers-that-were to leave him alone, on condition he stayed there, kept quiet and behaved himself.

But something had to be punished, if only for the form of the thing. So the authorities seized a copy and condemned it to be shredded and burned on the steps of the Palace of Justice. A sentence that was carried out in all its brutality.

Except that – actually, it wasn’t. The public executioner could spot a market opportunity as well as anyone else. In his hands was a first edition of the Lettres Philosophiques, a book that was selling (clandestinely) like hot cakes. He was going to burn it? Not a chance.

He substituted some inoffensive and far less marketable text for shredding and burning. Keeping the Voltaire work as a nice little nest egg for later.

Three centuries ago it was clear that obtuse autocrats trying to prohibit a provocative book would only make it more attractive and enhance its sales.

Louis XV was an obtuse autocrat. Clearly, we have another such in the White House today. As Michael Wolff points out, “not only is he helping me sell books, but he’s helping me prove the point of the book”.

I doubt Wolff’s book will be as good as Voltaire’s. But it belongs to the same fine tradition. It’s in that spirit that I’ve bought it.

And I, rather than Trump, will decide whether I read it or not.