Guerra Fria, 1962: término da crise dos misseis em 28 de outubro

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Crise dos Mísseis chega ao fim

Em 28 de outubro de 1962, a União Soviética concordou em retirar seus mísseis de sua base militar em Cuba, encerrando a Crise dos Mísseis

28 out, 2016

Após dias de negociações entre Kennedy e Kruschev, os dois líderes chegaram a um acordo pela retirada da base soviética em Cuba (Foto: Wikimedia)

Em 28 de outubro de 1962, o líder da União Soviética Nikita Kruschev decidiu retirar seus mísseis do território cubano, o que encerrou o episódio conhecido como a Crise dos Mísseis. Em troca, o presidente americano John Kennedy teve que respeitar soberania territorial de Cuba e também teve que retirar os mísseis americanos da Turquia.

O caso teve início após um avião de espionagem americano ter sobrevoado o território cubano em 14 de outubro de 1962 e visto o que parecia ser uma base militar em construção. Dias depois, as autoridades americanas descobriram que os soviéticos estavam instalando diversos mísseis nucleares na ilha caribenha, com alcance para atingir o solo americano.

Em 22 de outubro, o presidente americano comunicou a população sobre a existência desses mísseis e da possibilidade de um ataque nuclear soviético, o que iniciaria mais uma guerra mundial. No entanto, do lado soviético, Kruschev alegou que a instalação dos mísseis tinha como finalidade de impedir que houvesse uma nova invasão dos Estados Unidos à Cuba, como a ocorrida em 1961, no chamado “Ataque à Baia dos Porcos”, para derrubar o governo de Fidel Castro.

O período ficou marcado pela grande tensão dos dois lados, devido ao poderio bélico-nuclear de ambas as nações hegemônicas. Após dias de negociações entre Kennedy e Kruschev, os dois líderes chegaram a um acordo pela retirada da base soviética em Cuba no dia 28 de outubro.

Como consequência desse conflito, as relações diplomáticas entre os dois países ficaram bastante instáveis. Contudo, em 1968, Estados Unidos e União Soviética assinaram o Tratado de Não-Proliferação de Armas Nucleares.

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Tocqueville, sobre academicos e politicos: correto sobre ambos... - comentario por Paulo R. Almeida

Retraduzido do inglês:

Eu já cruzei com homens de letras que escreveram sobre a história sem ter tomado parte em assuntos públicos, e com políticos que se ocuparam de produzir eventos sem jamais pensar sobre eles.
Eu observei que os primeiros estão sempre inclinados a buscar causas gerais, enquanto os segundos, vivendo em meio a fatos diários desvinculados entre si, são levados a acreditar que tudo é devido a incidentes específicos, e que os fios que eles movimentam são os mesmos que movimentam o mundo.
É de se presumir que ambos estão igualmente equivocados.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Extraído do frontspício do clássico de Graham Allison e Philip Zelikow:
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
(2nd edition; New York: Longman, 1999, 416 p.; ISBN: 0-321-01349-2)

Na introdução a esse clássico, os autores dizem que "The Cuban missile crisis stands as a seminal event." (p. 1), no sentido em que ela sucitou uma nova fase da Guerra Fria, novos procedimentos, e alguma contenção na corrida maluca aos extremos que estava representada pela "doutrina" do MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, ou seja, o pacto de aniquilamento recíproco que guiava as estratégias (ou táticas?) de dissuasão entre os dois principais contendores da Guerra Fria.
O mesmo poderia ser dito, e foi dito por George Kennan, da Grande Guerra (1914-1918), descrita por ele como "the greater seminal event of the 20th century", aquele do qual derivaram todas as tragédias do século mais mortal de toda a história humana.

Voltando ao Tocqueville, preciso buscar o locus dessa citação, mas desde já concordo com o publicista e grande pensador francês: acadêmicos estão sempre pretendendo generalizar eventos singulares e deles extrair causas gerais, geralmente inutilmente, enquando políticos, que são homens práticos, vivem apenas cada momento, sem pensar nos antecedentes ou consequentes.
Enfim, para que servem os pensadores que ficam encontrando falhas em todos os demais mortais comuns? 
Para nosso prazer intelectual, unicamente.
Acho que isso basta...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 29/07/2017

Book discussion: Mandelbaum and USA in post-Cold War World (Cato)

Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era
Book Forum
Cato Institute - Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Washington, DC, 12:00PM - 1:30PM

Featuring the author Michael Mandelbaum, Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; with comments by Keir Lieber, Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University; and Brad Stapleton, Visiting Research Fellow, Cato Institute. Moderated by John Mueller, Senior Research Scientist, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow, Cato Institute.

Please join us as Michael Mandelbaum—prominent columnist and author, and a leading foreign-policy thinker—discusses his new book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era. In this definitive work, Mandelbaum critically assesses American military interventions since the end of the Cold War and the deeply flawed post–Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world. Each intervention was designed to transform local economic and political systems, and each, argues Mandelbaum, failed. It is, he writes, “the story of good, sometimes noble, and thoroughly American intentions coming up against the deeply embedded, often harsh, and profoundly un-American realities of places far from the United States.” In these encounters, he concludes, “the realities prevailed.” We hope you will be able to join us for what will be a provocative and highly illuminating event.

REGISTER     or Watch online Apr 20

Cold War: deja vu, all over again? Opinion Steven Erlanger - NYT

NATO’s Hopes for Russia Have Turned to Dismay

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By STEVEN ERLANGER

The New York Times, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

LONDON — The NATO summit meeting last week in Wales was dominated byRussia’s military intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.
The rift with President Vladimir V. Putinof Russia was an extraordinary contrast to the last NATO summit in Britain, in 1990. A year after the Berlin Wall fell, NATO issued the London Declaration, asserting that “Europe has entered a new, promising era.” Eastern Europe is liberating itself, the declaration said. “The Soviet Union has embarked on the long journey toward a free society. The walls that once confined people and ideas are collapsing,” and those people “are choosing a Europe whole and free.”
The hopes expressed in that declaration 24 years ago seem so much dust today, and among many Russia watchers, there is considerable sadness.

“I could weep for the hopes that we had in the early 1990s,” said Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia, now at the Center for European Reform. “The walls that divided us were collapsing, and Putin is building them up again.”

Graphic | How Much Europe Depends on Russian EnergyMap of European energy imports that come from Russia.

Rather than moving toward democracy and individual liberties, Mr. Bond said, the Russian government obsesses about public uprisings like those in Ukraine in 2004 and this year. “Putin wants to show that you can’t have a real democracy in a former Soviet state,” Mr. Bond said. “He’s scared witless by the idea of people power.”
For Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister, there is sorrow, too. “We Balts are the first who would like to have good, predictable relations with Russia,” he said. “But to have a strategic partnership with Russia,” as NATO has tried to establish for 20 years, “is not possible now.”
Diplomatic dialogue with Moscow remains vital, he said. “But it’s important to have dialogue based on rules, and now people are opening their eyes, realizing something serious is happening.”
There is plenty of blame to go around, said Kadri Liik, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Boris N. Yeltsin, independent Russia’s first leader, failed “in defining Russia’s new place in the world and its engagement with the West,” she said. “He was adept at destroying the system but not at building a new one.”

Interactive Feature |Ukraine Crisis in MapsThe latest updates to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.

Russian democrats were too busy with domestic change to worry much about foreign policy. Asked about NATO, Boris Y. Nemtsov, once deputy prime minister, said simply, “I was responsible for Gazprom,” the huge company created from a Soviet ministry.
Mr. Yeltsin presided over the chaotic privatization of Soviet industry, which led to oligarchic theft of public assets. “Yeltsin became delegitimized over privatization, and liberal views toward the West became delegitimized as well,” Ms. Liik said.
Some wonder whether Russia’s break with the West was almost accidental, set off by unforeseen events in Ukraine.
But James Sherr, author of “Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia’s Influence Abroad,” believes that Mr. Putin was heading toward rupture regardless. “Putin has had clear strategic objectives, even fixations, from the start, but he has pursued them by tactical improvisation,” Mr. Sherr said.
Mr. Putin is not just aiming to restore Russian primacy in the former Soviet Union, he said. “One of his fixations is Ukraine,” whose independence Mr. Putin regards as a crime.
At the same time, Mr. Sherr said, “we in the West had a very specific, hopeful, illusory idea about the end of the Soviet Union and the kind of Russia we’d be dealing with.” But even by 1994, Russian democrats were being called “romantics,” if not yet traitors. “I think Putin or something like Putin was almost preordained from this whole period of romanticism and illusions,” Mr. Sherr said. “That was fueled by the equally naïve projection of a Western liberal model of economic and political change on Russia.”
Mr. Putin has miscalculated in Ukraine because he failed to understand how much Ukrainians had changed, Ms. Liik said. But the West has its own blindness, Mr. Sherr said. Ukraine “is a crisis for us because of the things we knew and pretended not to know.”

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