Shock of Reality

November 12, 1962

People who write on the future of American business ordinarily do so on the tacit assumption that the forces determining the future of business lie within the realm of business itself. Along comes a Cuban crisis, and suddenly everyone realizes that the future of American business is simply a part of the future of America. What happens to business depends as much on our “foreign” policy as on our “economic” policy.

I trust I shall not be thought to roam too far out of the purview of this department, therefore, if I express the hope that the outcome of the Cuban crisis may lead us to abandon some of the unrealistic assumptions on which that foreign policy has rested for the last eighteen years.

It is clear in retrospect that, prior to the present agreement on Cuba, the Kennedy Administration made some very costly errors. These were not merely the errors in the few weeks preceding the Oct. 22 announcement of the blockade—the denials, for example, of Republican charges that offensive missile bases were being constructed in Cuba. The errors go back at least to April 12, 1961, when (after his own State Department, nine days before, had correctly described developments in Cuba as “the seizure by international Communism of a base and bridgehead in the Americas”) President Kennedy declared that “there will not under any conditions be an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces.” This was followed five days later by the disastrous failure, through the Administration’s vacillation and timidity, of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs. This blow to American prestige was followed by eighteen months of tragic inaction while the Soviet buildup went on.

RECORD OF APPEASEMENT

But we can now hope that the apparent victory resulting from our finally firm stand on Cuba may signal a reversal of the yielding and appeasement that have plagued our foreign policy under both Democratic and Republican leadership for the last eighteen years. President Truman must accept responsibility for acceding to an untenable position for the West at Berlin, and for his prior ambiguity about our willingness to defend South Korea. And President Eisenhower must accept responsibility for not only failing to provide any real aid, physical or moral, to the Hungarian Freedom Fighters in 1956, but for actually diverting world attention from that Communist crime by taking that moment to halt France, Britain, and Israel in an action that, without his intervention, would have deposed Nasser and prevented the immense harm he has since done. It was the Eisenhower Administration, also, that rushed to recognize Castro and failed to break off relations with him until its last weeks in office.

FRUITS OF FIRMNESS

The truce resulting from President Kennedy’s bold action once more confirms the ancient truth that honorable or tolerable peace is not to be bought by a timorous appeasement but by firmness. As the Swiss economist Wilhelm Röpke put it eight years ago: “Pacifism, merely as an attitude of mind that rejects war, is not only sterile but indeed dangerous to a tragic degree, since at the very moment when the danger of war is greatest it further increases that danger immeasurably by encouraging the attacker. Such pacifism not only fails but actually becomes one of the fatal links in the chain of causes which trigger off the war and possibly effect the triumph of the aggressor. The chief task of war prevention is to make plain to every potential aggressor, beforehand and in a completely indubitable way, that the risk is overwhelming.”

The outcome in Cuba does not mean, of course, that the dangers of the cold war are past. No one knows what Khrushchev’s next moves will be in Berlin, or what the consequences will be if Cuba is allowed to remain as a Communist “base and bridgehead in the Americas.” But we have now learned that, in the moment of crisis, time does not allow us to consult a score of other nations, and that we must decide and act swiftly and alone, trusting in our own strength and the readiness of other countries to follow a firm, clear lead.

And what’s best for America is best for American business.