Biden must learn from JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Four Russian warships are now 100 miles from Florida, making a port visit to communist Cuba. Yet the Biden administration says there's nothing to see here, folks.

“This is not a surprise. We've seen them make these kinds of port calls before and these are routine naval visits that we've seen under different administrations,” Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon's deputy press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan echoed the same talking points: “We've seen this kind of thing before and we expect to see this kind of thing again.”

Team Biden's indifference is as hollow as a Kamala Harris speech. After screwing up Afghanistan and Ukraine and reigniting the Middle East, the last thing President Joe Biden's campaign needs is another Cuban missile crisis.

Indeed, America has seen this sort of thing before. The year was 1962 and tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States nearly sparked World War III during a 13-day standoff. Fortunately, President John F. Kennedy ignored calls from senior military officials and the intelligence community to invade Cuba. Instead, the young American president reached an agreement with Nikita Khrushchev. Although it remained a classified secret for 30 years, Kennedy called off the American offensive Jupiter Missiles of Turkey and pledged not to invade Cuba in exchange for the Soviets withdrawing their medium- and medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) from the small island off the US coast.

Unfortunately, old Joe Biden is no Jack Kennedy.

Kennedy directly warned the American people in a television broadcast of the Cuban threat, including the horrors of a nuclear war “in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths.” He described Soviet weapons in Cuba and presented seven steps to de-escalate the crisis. His words alarmed the nation, but at least our citizens knew the risks involved in the political actions their president was taking.

Today, few Americans understand how closely the Biden administration is dancing toward outright war with the world's largest nuclear power. Biden's national security team continues to secretly increase US involvement in Ukraine and publicly downplay the risk.

Earlier this month it was reported that Biden quietly approved allowing Ukraine to use US offensive weapons to strike deep into Russian territory. Yet despite this huge strategic decision, Biden is carrying on as normal, freezing at Juneteenth concerts and licking ice cream: There has been no political speech from the president, no seven-step scheme to victory, no warning to the American people of the risks. involved

And there are great risks.

On June 7, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to Biden's latest escalation with two stern warnings from St. Petersburg. In the first, he promised that if the United States and NATO could arm a small nation on its southern border with offensive weapons “to launch attacks on our territory and create problems for us, why don't we have the right to supply the same weapons?write in some regions of the world where they can be used to launch strikes on sensitive facilities in Russia?

True to his word, Putin sent a Russian flotilla that arrived in Cuba with the Admiral Gorshkov frigate, which is armed with Russia's Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles.

Putin's second warning was to point out Russia's nuclear doctrine to reporters: “Look at what's written there. If someone's actions threaten our sovereignty and territorial integrity, we consider it possible to use all the means at our disposal.”

The average Russian knows what “all means” means. Fifty-four percent of Russians say they live “under constant fear” of nuclear war. Unlike Americans, Russians understand that they are at war with the United States and the West, not just Ukraine.

So when National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says “we don't expect there to be any imminent threat or any threat, frankly,” don't believe him. The threat is clear and present, the risks are not only high, but immense.

In today's political environment, neocons are quick to label any kind of negotiation as “appeasement.” For warhawks, all agreements are Munich, 1938.

Talking is not appeasement. Trying to find a negotiated settlement is not appeasement. It is worth saying that it was the Kremlin, in 1962, who opened the door to the de-escalation of the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev wrote Kennedy: “Let us not only relax the forces that pull the ends of the rope, but take steps to untie this knot.”

History repeats itself: At the same conference call last week, Putin said he wrote a letter to Biden offering to end the war if the United States stopped supplying Ukraine with weapons.

Has our commander in chief responded to this overture to stop the conflict where hundreds of thousands of people have died and billions of dollars have been wasted?

Maybe Biden should listen to a wiser, younger president in his own party. As Kennedy told the American people, “The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”

Morgan Murphy is a former DoD press secretary, US Senate national security adviser, and an Afghanistan veteran.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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