In the Shadow of International Law: Obama's Expansion of the Drone Program

           The American public and the world will never know how President Bill Clinton’s and President George W. Bush’s drone programs would have evolved during their respective terms in office due to the two-term limit to the U.S. presidency. There had not been widespread prescient opinion about how the newly elected President Barack Obama in 2009 would conduct his foreign policy after inheriting his predecessor’s two-pronged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Would he expand the wars he inherited? Would he invade Libya or another Middle East country? No one knew for sure. One sound informed comment came from two University of London academics, Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh. They argued in The Wall Street Journal back in June 2008, “Administrations bequeath foreign policies to their successors that are then tweaked, but rarely transformed.”[1] Looking back, this was correct with Obama in the election year of 2008: there has not been a transformational change in his foreign policy from George W. Bush’s.

            In his first term, President Obama expanded Bush’s drone attacks in Pakistan, waged covert wars in Yemen and Somalia, and drastically increased American troop levels in Afghanistan. He overthrew Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya. In 2011, Obama became the first U.S. president to authorize the assassination of an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and ordered the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan. Nevertheless, many pundits and most of the American public continue to perceive Obama as dovish. [2]

            Barack Obama promised some lofty acts in his campaign platform if elected: more transparency in governing, pull out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, ban brutal interrogation of suspects, shut down Guantánamo prison, focus narrowly on the war against Al Qaeda guerrillas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to name a few. But where did these quasi-isolationist notions originate? These notions were the residue of the Democratic Party’s disastrous foreign policy under John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam War in the 1960s. For twenty years - from 1968 to 1988 - the Democratic Party suffered reduction of voters (with the exception of the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter during that era) because of the devastation and disaster that was the Vietnam War.[3] It was a conflict where the United States engaged in a counterinsurgency program that evolved into a full-scale war. A historian and former Washington official even went as far as condemning the U.S. intervention in Vietnam as coming close to committing genocide of the Vietnamese people, where about two million of them were killed.[4] More than 58,000 American troops died in the Vietnam War. The United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam than the combined armed forces of the world during the Second World War.

            With its disastrous reputation in the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party had to change its course from the 1970s on to be more isolationist and multilateral, mirroring its constituency’s position on the American role in the world.[5] This came to be termed the “Vietnam syndrome.” Thus, the Democratic president Barack Obama in 2009, planned to skirt the Republicans’ hawkish foreign policy under George W. Bush of direct invasions of countries - e.g., Afghanistan and Iraq - and move it more in the direction of clandestine warfare involving the use of unmanned aircraft to conduct airstrikes. The first drone strike under Obama’s watch was in Yemen, on December 17, 2009. That strike killed Obama’s intended target, but it also killed innocent civilians in two neighboring families leaving a trail of cluster bombs that killed even more people.[6]

            The advent and development of drone technology at the turn of the century came the opportunity in 2009 for a newly elected Democratic president to take advantage of a program that obviated the need to resort to “boots on the ground” in the war-torn Middle East. Obama did this by ordering unmanned airstrikes in places where his advisers deem international terrorism breeds. The first U.S. predator drone flew over Tarnak Farms (believed to be an al Qaeda camp) in Afghanistan on 7 September 2000 when Bill Clinton was still president. That U.S. predator drone just took photos of a man in what CIA analysts later determined was Osama bin Laden. From that time forward, the U.S. government had been using the drone as an auxiliary tool and weapon for ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, the United States began using drones to kill suspects associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraq, the declared war zones. Between 2004 and 2012, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted 320 drone strikes in Pakistan killing more than 2,560 people including 139 civilians. It conducted 55 drone strikes in Yemen.[7]  

            The first U.S. killing by an armed drone occurred in November 2001 when Muhammad Atef, Al Qaeda’s military commander, was struck. Since then, the U.S. government has regarded the predator drone as an important weapon in its interventions in the Middle East.[8] But it was not until the Obama administration that the weaponized drone was used as the major weapon of choice in its counterterrorism efforts.          

            Upon election, Obama shrewdly navigated enough wiggle room within the U.S. Constitution from which he could act hawkish without seemingly being so to the American public. Yet, among his aides, he has declared several times that he was really adept at killing people.[9] In late June 2016 the Obama administration has released official government statistics declaring that since 2009 it has conducted 473 strikes that successfully killed between 2,372 and 2,581 terrorist suspects identified by his advisors as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Furthermore, it released a statistic showing the number of innocent bystanders that were killed during those strikes - between 64 and 116. But according to various independent sources, such as The Long War Journal, New America, and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism - reported by The New York Times - the number of innocent civilians that were killed in the Obama drone strikes ranges from much higher numbers, 207 to 801.[10] The civilian toll is much higher than the Obama administration would prefer to admit.

            In 2013, international lawyers and human rights groups began criticizing Obama’s drone program. One United Nations official, Christof Heyns, submitted an official report to the U.N. General Assembly regarding drone strikes. Heyns has pointed out that under the laws of war, the standards for attacking a person had to rest on whether or not this person is engaged in ongoing combat function and is directly participating in hostilities.[11] Responding to the criticisms, the president was forced to shift the bulk of the control of drones from the CIA to the Defense Department. The agency continues to conduct drone strikes on Pakistan and Yemen. Initially, it made for good policy that the program of targeted killings had to be completely under the auspices of the CIA because the agency’s modus operandi is conducting foreign interventions clandestinely. Now that the program is mostly under the U.S. military, it will have to be more transparent to the public.

            Yet, the Obama administration continues to be opaque about its drone program even though the president himself has admitted through his White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, that his administration should “‘be more transparent about both the basis of our counterterrorism actions and the manner in which they are carried out.’”[12] Both The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union have pursued legal efforts to have the Obama administration make public the legal bases for its killing of suspects overseas.

            One way the administration defended its drone program was it had its Justice Department lawyers try to refute the critics’ arguments about the legality of the strikes. The administration’s attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, for example, were in violation of international law, the critics contend. The strikes are extending the armed conflict outside of declared war zones. In response, a counterargument the Justice Department lawyers cited in support of Obama’s drone program was the speech given by State Department lawyer John R. Stevenson on May 28, 1970, when President Richard M. Nixon was secretly bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War, as pointed out by professor of law Mary Dudziak in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times.[13] In the speech to the New York City Bar Association, Stevenson claimed that the Nixon administration kept from bombing Cambodia despite its knowledge that since 1965, North Vietnam was using the country as a base for its military operations. Because the North Vietnamese was in Cambodia, he stated that it had long been justified for the administration to start bombing it for self-defense but they had refrained out of careful adherence to international law. In fact, however, as pointed out by Dudziak, Nixon was already secretly carpet-bombing Cambodia beginning on March 17, 1969 – more than a year earlier of Stevenson’s speech. Why did Nixon have to keep the bombing secret? Because had he consulted Congress and made his attacks of Cambodia public, there would have been an escalation of the mass protests already prominent in the United States against the Vietnam War.[14] The Nixonian precedent, as Obama’s legal backers have invoked, proved inconsistent with contemporary scholarship about the Vietnam War.

            Another exposure of the thin legal rationale for Obama’s targeted killings was when in 2014, the Justice Department was forced by a federal appeals court to release a 2010 memo explaining why the drone strike in Yemen that killed an American citizen and an Al Qaeda Sunni Muslim cleric, Anwar al Awlaki, in 2011 was legal. The administration, to the extent that it could, fought against the memo’s release. One has to wonder why, assuming the administration was being honest, it should feel insecure about its legal justifications for Obama’s orders to kill an American citizen. Were officials worried that it might expose their little regard for Fifth Amendment protections of due process under the normal procedures of a court trial? Additionally, in 2013, the Obama administration refused to declassify a fifty-five-page memo prepared over a six-month period in the Office of Legal Counsel that lays out the legal basis for the use of drones.[15] A plausible answer to the administration’s reticence in releasing information would be what The New York Times editorial pointed out after reading the 2010 memo released in 2014 that justified the drone strike that killed Awlaki: “…the memo turns out to be a slapdash pastiche of legal theories - some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law - that was clearly tailored to the desired result. Perhaps the administration held out so long to avoid exposing the thin foundation on which it based such a momentous decision.”[16] 

            The Democrats have pulled back from direct invasions of other countries during the Clinton era. Now, post-911, the Middle East has been a much more volatile region after George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Both countries have been severely devastated. The latter descended into chaos and sectarian violence. The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent instability it unleashed there has resulted in more than 150,000 Iraqi deaths (mostly civilians) between 2003 and 2009, and a total of 4,491 U.S. service members killed between 2003 and 2014.

            So, how does a new Democratic president in 2009 conduct his foreign policy after these devastating invasions by a Republican administration? By 2008 at the end of the Bush era, American policymakers started to believe that killing jihadists before they attack the American homeland was preferable to direct military invasions.[17] This has been the predilection of policymakers in both parties, especially the Democrats with Obama. And with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, Washington figured out a way to continue to stymie jihadist retaliation against the United States by depending on drones because it is inexpensive, high tech, and secretive. This advantage in foreign policy also resonates with the public, as policy analyst Audrey Cronin has written:

Given the shocking nature of terrorist attacks, U.S. counterterrorism policy depends not just on objective measures of effectiveness but also on public opinion. And the American public demands zero risk, especially of a terrorist attack at home. In this sense, drone strikes offer the ideal, poll-tested counterterrorism policy: cheap, apparently effective, and far away.[18]

            The statistics show an interesting contrast between the views of Americans about the drone program versus the populations of other countries. A majority of Americans support Obama’s drone program, at 58 percent.[19] No surprise that in the rest of the world, especially in heavily drone attacked places like Pakistan, the support is quite low. A majority of Pakistanis, 74 percent of the population, regard the United States as their enemy and 90 percent are against U.S. drone strikes.[20] Other states in the region also have a majority of their population against the U.S. drone program: Turkey at 81 percent; Jordan at 85 percent; and Egypt at 89 percent. Europeans who oppose U.S. drones are the Poles, at 51 percent; the Germans, at 59 percent; the French, at 63 percent; the Spanish, at 76 percent; and the Greeks, at 90 percent.[21]

            Americans’ high support for the drone program may be the outcome of feeling war-weary. Proponents of drones laud it as being very effective in killing key leaders of Al Qaeda and stopping other jihadists from building sanctuaries in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Between 2009 and 2013, Obama’s drone program has killed an estimated 3,300 suspected jihadists.[22] Drones attacks, according to its supporters, are low cost; provide zero risk to U.S. troops, and results in fewer civilian deaths than conventional military means.

            The alternatives to the drone program, proponents argue, are just too risky and unrealistic. To capture, arrest, search compounds, interrogate, and try militants in court are just too cumbersome and dangerous to the military. Professor of Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and a proponent of Obama’s drone program, David Byman, has argued that:

Raids, arrests, and interrogations can produce vital intelligence and can be less controversial than lethal operations. That is why it should be, and indeed already are, used in stable countries where the United States enjoys the support of the host government. But in war zones or unstable countries, such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, arresting militants is highly dangerous, and even if successful, often inefficient. In those countries, the government exerts little or no control over remote areas, which means that it is highly dangerous to go after militants hiding out there.[23]

            Thus, as vulgar as it sounds, “It has become more politically palatable for the United States to kill rather than detain suspected terrorists,” Byman added.[24] If the United States wants to continue its hegemony in the Middle East region and to stop jihadists in places where they are plotting attacks in the United States without having to put boots on the ground, then drone attacks are the way to go. But what makes this method of war unpalatable to most of the world besides the countries being drone attacked? Writing a review of a book by New York Times journalist Scott Shane called Objective Troy, Thomas Nagel in the London Review of Books has pointed out that, “The president as killer is a chilling new face of the role of commander-in-chief. I suspect that it is the personal individualised nature of drone warfare that many people find so repellent.” It is the newness and strangeness of drone warfare in the United States under Obama that many in the world feel uneasy about. The world is familiar with conventional wars - Europe suffered through two world wars that devastated it. But it is not used to a lone world hegemon, the United States, and with one person taking responsibility for targeted killings (assassinations) that makes this program particularly unpalatable. “War is hell, as we all know,” writes Nagel, “But when the president puts someone on a kill list to be taken out by a precise drone strike, it creates the illusory sense of a more direct responsibility for that death than for the other kind.”[25]

            Besides the “illusory sense” the world experiences about Obama’s drone program, it also has at least two official problems. In June 2014, a bipartisan panel produced a report on the drone program. Two major warnings from the report were noted by The New York Times: One, the targeted killings put the United States in a dangerous position of perpetual war; and second, the method may be adopted by other countries like China and Russia. On the concern of perpetual war, more than a decade has passed since the United States started using drones to kills suspects but it still has not thoroughly analyzed its benefits versus its costs. The one possible major drawback of Obama’s drone warfare is that it is creating more enemies as it is killing them - though no conclusive evidence of this has been put forth. Nevertheless, the picture is mixed when it comes to drone warfare. As Audrey Cronin has written: “drones are killing operatives who aspire to attack the United States today or tomorrow. But they are also increasing the likelihood of attacks over the long term, by embittering locals and cultivating a desire for vengeance.”[26] One very dangerous situation of note is in Pakistan, where, as mentioned above, 90 percent of the population is angered by the U.S. attacks in their country: it has about 100 nuclear weapons entirely controlled by the Pakistani military. If those weapons land in jihadi hands it could spell nuclear conflagration, a situation well worth avoiding.

            The other issue raised by the panel on drones is the dangerous precedent it may inculcate in other countries like China and Russia. They brought up the latter country as an example: in circumstances where Russia conducts drone attacks on suspected anti-Russian militants in Ukraine and then refuse to be transparent about the basis for its attacks, the United States then would be in no position to condemn Russian targeted killings in Ukraine. Other examples are as troublesome. It would be predictable what President Bashar al-Assad of Syria would do with drones, if he had them, considering his violent response to the peaceful pro-Democracy protestors during the Arab Spring. Iran can conceivably send drone attacks against rebels in Syria. And China has announced in 2013 that it was considering the targeted killing of a drug trafficker hiding in Myanmar, though Beijing has later denied it.[27]

            As President Obama is nearing the end of his term it is imperative that he continues to be more transparent with his use of drones, particularly in the countries the United States is not at war with (Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) because his successor will most likely continue to abuse them.[28] Since Obama has decided recently to switch the bulk of the drone program from the CIA to the Department of Defense, there has been a decrease in civilian deaths. As David Cole has pointed out in The New York Review of Books, according to the New America Foundation in 2011, there had been between forty-nine and sixty-three innocents who have died in Pakistan; but from 2014 through 2016, when Obama became more transparent about his drone program and has subjected his administration to some limitations on its operations, there were only two reported. In Yemen in 2012, there were sixteen civilian deaths reported compared to only five in 2014.[29] These changes suggest that when the administration decides to be a bit more discriminating and transparent with its drone program, as it had in its second term, fewer civilian deaths occur. This may lead to an improved U.S. standing in the world.

            Nevertheless, grave problems are inherent in drone warfare for any U.S. president. As historian Lloyd Gardner has written:

American policymakers…have been unable to reconcile national interests with a strategy that will satisfy demands for changes in the world order. Drones are an exciting prospect for holding down American casualties and killing fewer civilians than in old-style wars. But the “lesser evil” argument really doesn’t work when in the long run the strikes creates new enemies and force the construction of new kill lists…Not only do drones threaten the nation’s future by creating and sustaining an endless, seemingly mystical war against terrorism, but defending drones requires the abandonment of the Constitution. And that means the perpetrators of 9/11 have won.[30]  

           

             

           

             

             

           

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[1] Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, “Don’t Expect a Big Change in U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Wall Street Journal, June, 2, 2008, A15.

[2] Peter L. Bergen, “Warrior in Chief,” The New York Times

[3] James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 13.

[4] William R. Polk, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, & War, From the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), xvii.

[5]  Benjamin I. Page and Marshall M. Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 227-228. Also, see James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 13-14.

[6] Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, May 29, 2012, A1.

[7] Editorial, “Rules for Targeted Killing,” The New York Times, November 30, 2012, A34.

[8] Warren Bass, “The Dawn of the Drone Era,” The Wall Street Journal, July 26-27, 2014, Review sec. C3.

[9] Thomas Nagel, “Really Good at Killing,” review of Objective Troy: A President and the Rise of the Drone, by Scott Shane, London Review of Books, Vol. 38, number 5, March 3, 2016, 6.

[10] Scott Shane, “Drone Strike Statistics Answers Few Questions, and Raise Many,” The New York Times, July 4, 2016, A1 and A3.

[11] Steve Coll, “The Unblinking Stare,” The New Yorker, November 24, 2014, 103.

[12] Adam Entous and Gordon Lubold, “Drone Plan Gives Pentagon Wider Role,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2016, A7.

[13] Mary L. Dudziak, “Obama’s Nixonian Precedent,” The New York Times, March 22, 2013, A29.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Lloyd C. Gardner, Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare (New York: The New Press, 2013), viii-ix.

[16] Editorial, “A Thin Rationale for Drone Killings,” The New York Times, June 24, 2014, A26.

[17] Audrey Kurth Cronin “When Drones Fail,” Foreign Affairs 92 (2013): 49.  

[18] Ibid, 52.        

[19] “Public Continues to Back U.S. Drone Attacks,” Pew Research Center, http://www.people-press.org/2015/05/28/public-continues-to-back-u-s-drone-attacks/ (accessed August 22, 2016).

[20] Daniel Byman, “Why Drones Work,” Foreign Affairs 92 (2013): 39.

[21] Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” Foreign Affairs, 49-50.

[22] Byman, “Why Drones Work,” Foreign Affairs, 33.

[23] Ibid., 34.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Nagel, “The Ethics of Drones,” London Review of Books, Vol. 38, number 5, March 3, 2016, 6.

[26] Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” Foreign Affairs, 52.

[27] Byman, “Why Drones Work,” Foreign Affairs, 41.

[28] Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman, “The Next President’s Drone War,” The New York Times, March 8, 2016, A25.

[29] David Cole, “The Drone Presidency,” review of Drone: Remote Control Warfare, by Hugh Gusterson, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict: Ethical, Legal, and Strategic Implications editors David Cortright, Rachel Fairhust, and Kristen Wall, Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy editors Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, The New York Review of Books August 18, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/the-drone-presidency/ (accessed August 24, 2016).              

[30] Lloyd C. Gardner, Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare (New York: The New Press, 2013), 232-234.

John F. Kennedy's Cold War Management: The Cuban Missile Crisis

After U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower made the formal decision to invade Cuba in March 1960, there was no evidence of a major Soviet Communist threat yet. The island of Cuba had been a place for American investments since the United States took over in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. From 1902 to 1961, the United States intervened in Cuba four times (the last one being the Bay of Pigs) to protect its investments. In 1898, U.S. businesses had $50 million in investments on the island and by 1920, they reached to half a billion dollars. Among other resources, American investment claimed eighty percent of Cuban utilities and 40 percent of its sugar. Also, the United States owned its strategic location: Guantánamo Bay. The main export of Cuba was sugar, which was controlled by Washington. To control Cuba’s sugar economy meant controlling much of Cuban life. Cuba was the prized possession of the United States since 1898. Once the Kremlin got involved in Cuba at the height of the Cold War, Washington had to respond. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis was not only the most dangerous moment in Cold War history, it was the most dangerous moment in human history, stated historian Arthur Schlesinger during a three-day conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis held in October 2002 in Havana, Cuba. To the shock of most of the participants during the crisis was the revelation that the United States and the Soviet Union were closer to nuclear war than previously believed. On 27 October 1962, just before Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pulled the Soviet missiles out of Cuba, an American destroyer ordered to enforce the U.S. quarantine was firing depth charges to a Soviet submarine armed with nuclear weapons. The Americans in the destroyer did not know that the submarines Khrushchev sent to the island to protect the Soviet ships were armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. The Russian submarine commanders interpreted the Americans' firing of depth charges as the beginning of World War III. One senior Russian commander in the submarine, angered by American aggression, ordered the firing of a nuclear-armed torpedo against the U.S. destroyer. Fortunately, another Russian commander in the submarine, Vasili Arkhipov, mollified the senior commander, intercepting the order. In that conference, director of the National Security Archive, Thomas Blanton, declared Arkhipov as "a guy...who saved the world."

The Cuban Missile Crisis, in light of new discoveries, becomes a good case study of Cold War management. It was here that President John F. Kennedy, more than any other president in American history, had been tested on his decision making at the height of the Cold War. When President Kennedy was shown aerial photographs of Soviet SS-4 launching installations under construction in Cuba on the morning of 16 October 1962, he called out his advisers – military and civilian – to discuss what would then become the most intense time in American history during the Cold War. Never had diplomacy and civilian control over the military been so crucial in the United States government (and for the world) because of the stakes involved. In the 2004 documentary, The Fog of War, Robert S. McNamara, the Kennedy administration’s Secretary of Defense, reminiscing about the crisis 40 years later says that there are no lessons to be learned in nuclear war, “You make one mistake and you destroy nations,” warns McNamara.

In 1962 the Soviets had begun, in secret, constructing missile bases with a striking range of two thousand miles capable of killing “ninety million Americans.” In 1992, as McNamara later discovered, there were already “one hundred sixty-two nuclear warheads” and ninety tactical nuclear missiles on the island at the “critical moment of the crisis.” Six days after the CIA showed the aerial photos to Kennedy on 16 October, he went on television to publicly address the crisis and to announce that there was going to be a “quarantine” of Cuba to keep any more Russian military supplies from getting to the island. On 25 October, Soviet ships on their way to Cuba stopped at some distance to the one hundred eighty U.S. Naval ships guarding the island.

At around this time, the Kennedy administration received a letter from Moscow indicating they would remove the missiles only if the United States promised not to invade Cuba. This letter would later be termed the “soft message.” But before the crisis managers in Washington could respond, they got another letter. This second letter was to be termed the “hard message.” In addition to the U.S. promise not to invade Cuba, it demanded that the United States pull out its nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. Only in this context would the Soviets agree to pull their missiles from the island. Sometime later, an American reconnaissance plane was shot over Cuba (not under Khrushchev’s orders). On 28 October, Khrushchev, fearing nuclear war, finally removed the Soviet missiles from Cuba settling on the first letter’s demand. Although further diplomatic solutions between the two super powers were yet to be made days later, this date finalized the intensity of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The one constant in American politics after World War II was the maintenance of U.S. credibility. Since 1945 the United States became the most powerful nation in the world. Having an economy three times the size of the Soviet Union’s and surpassing its nuclear armaments, it put major pressure on any subsequent post-war president to maintain that supremacy. The crisis managers were fully aware that there was no “missile gap” as Kennedy had spoken of before in his political campaign. If there was a missile gap, recalls McNamara, it was to the Soviet Union’s disadvantage.

Despite the fact that the United States had superiority in nuclear arsenals than the Soviet Union and the fact that the Russian missiles bases were under construction in Cuba (so it was believed at the time), Kennedy still stated that the Russian missiles must be removed - as that Soviet posturing was unacceptable to U.S. credibility. According to historian Stephen Ambrose  “The issue of Cuba was prestige.” American democracy requires that its potential leaders advertise their strengths in high competition against each other. At the start of his campaign for the presidency, Kennedy boasted that if elected he would be an awesome Cold Warrior. He promised in his campaign speeches that he would fight Communism one step higher, go the extra mile than any other candidate. Whenever Nixon says, “ ‘We never had it so good,’ ” Kennedy usually retorts, “ ‘I say we can do better.’ ” In his book Rise To Globalism, Ambrose noted Theodore Sorensen, the speechwriter for Kennedy, believed that the Russian missiles in Cuba alone were not the issue but the mere appearance of Soviet superiority was the problem.

A document that may give insight to the thoughts and motivations of Cold War politicians in the United States is the National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68). The former top-secret document of the Cold War, written in 1950 by Paul Nitze, the assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs for the Kennedy administration and Dean Acheson, a former Secretary of State, and in 1962, was President Kennedy’s unofficial foreign policy adviser during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This major Cold War document gives the background on Washington’s attitude toward the Kremlin. NSC-68 also addresses the objectives and strategic plans of the United States after WWII.

Reading NSC-68 is quite revealing; it can put the reader in the policymakers’ shoes.  Reading such top-secret document, one may get the experience of how policymakers in Washington really think in a candid manner; that is, minus the filtering effects of the major media or journalists’ interpretations of top-level government officials’ policy motivations.

In the first part of NSC-68, the authors provided background on the “present crisis” of the time, which was Soviet military power and hegemony. The document boldly assumed that, “the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony [France and Britain], is animated by a new fanatic faith, anti-thetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” The document also explained that the “Fundamental design of the Kremlin” is to “retain and solidify their absolute power” in the Soviet Union itself and in the rest of the world. Not only does NSC-68 emphasize the imperial ambitions of the Kremlin towards vast areas of the “non-Soviet world,” it also constantly associated the Kremlin with the ideas of “slavery” and “oligarchy” in society, while only associating the United States with the ideas of “freedom” and “justice,” assertions that were without much evidence or support.

It is in this context of NSC-68 that the Cuban Missile Crisis should be viewed. The document provides the background in order to better understand the thinking and the motivations of the crisis managers toward either military action or diplomacy. For example, Washington believed that the Soviets’ motivation for putting nuclear missiles in Cuba was to try to balance U.S. power posturing in the world by deploying missiles in Turkey and Italy. As Khrushchev stated in his memoirs, as quoted by Raymond Garthoff:

The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.

            Although true that this was a major reason for the importation of Soviet missiles in Cuba, it was not the primary reason. The number one reason for the deployment was the protection of Cuba from an American invasion. According to Garthoff, Khrushchev and his advisers wanted to spread Socialist revolution throughout Latin America. The motivation was to protect Cuba, as Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet after the crisis in December 1962.

McNamara maintained that there was no official plan to invade Cuba again right after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs. Nevertheless, the Cubans and the Russians had substantial reasons to believe that the United States would invade again soon. In fact, in 1961 Kennedy adopted the Eisenhower plan to invade the island. Just as Eisenhower was leaving office plans by the CIA were in the works for a coup to topple Castro. Shortly after Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 toppling the U.S. backed Fulgencio Batista, he was popular in the United States. A majority of Americans believed that Castro’s democratic reforms were a substantial improvement for the Cuban people who were suffering poverty and repression under Batista.

Top officials in Washington, such as CIA director Allen Dulles, were deeply suspicious of revolutionaries such as Castro and his main comrade Che Guevara. They were leery of Communist infiltration in the Western Hemisphere in general. Even though Castro himself had made public statements that he was not a Communist, the United States still branded him as so.

When Castro instituted extensive land reform program and nationalized American property in Cuba along with the circus trials and executions of Batista supporters by his government, Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Havana and boycotted Cuba’s sugar. Since sugar was the staple of the Cuban economy, the Eisenhower administration thought the boycott would weaken the Castro government and make it easier to overthrow. The action had an adverse effect though: it made Castro cozy up with the Soviets. To the delight of the new Cuban leadership, the Soviet Union agreed to buy Cuban sugar. Thus came the biggest fear of Washington: the Castro government allying with the Kremlin.

In April 1961, under President Kennedy’s approval, 1,400 Cuban exiles trained and armed by the CIA tried to invade Cuba. It ended in failure. The invasion was executed covertly. American airplanes were covering the Cuban exiles carried in American ships on their way to the Bay of Pigs. The idea was to mount up anti-Castro sentiment among the Cuban people to help topple his government. Seeing disaster ahead, Washington refused to provide any additional air support for the invasion, as they feared that the illegal activity might hurt Kennedy’s administration politically. The CIA plan was an ill-conceived one from the beginning, as Castro was supported by ninety percent of the Cuban people, according to New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc. It was a fiasco. Kennedy was embarrassed by the invasion’s failure and got so angry that he ordered Castro assassinated. At this point Kennedy authorized the CIA to set up plans to kill Castro with the provision that his administration could deny leaks in the press if it turns out a failure.

Historians Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley argued that President Kennedy “played a delicate game” in the Bay of Pigs. It may be understandable, since Kennedy promised in his campaign that he would be a fierce Cold Warrior, better than any other leader. His campaign earlier criticized the Eisenhower administration for not being tough enough against the Communists. The rhetoric of the Republicans consisted of hostile attitudes against the Communists but the Democrats had to be better, and through their actions, they wanted to show the American public that they would fight Communism with “dynamic militancy.” President Kennedy had to live up to that promise. Historian Alonzo Hamby describes the Bay of Pigs as the “result of bad advice [by the ‘experts’] and the inexperience that any new president brings to his job.” Another factor, according to Hamby, was that Kennedy did not know how to deal with Castro in “a careful and moderate way,” the way he had approached other problems. He described Kennedy as a “frustrated idealist” attempting to “strike out at a hated enemy.” His extreme obsession with putting up a strong front and his extreme stance against Communism seemed to have been his weakness.

Kennedy became depressed with the failure in the Bay of Pigs invasion. For a while, he was blaming the CIA for the failed operation. Ambrose and Brinkley quotes Kennedy as saying, “‘all my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?’” Though the authors did not buy Kennedy’s lament. They stated, “the explanation [of Kennedy] was patent nonsense.” The plan was in complete accord with the president’s views and it was as much his ill-conceived plan, as it was the CIA’s. The CIA plan sounded good to Kennedy and he had advocated such a Machiavellian policy in his campaign in 1960. The general belief of the president was that there could be a “liberal” alternative to Castro. Although the dictator Batista had dismayed the American administration in some ways, they thought it worse and completely unacceptable that Castro “confiscated” American property in Cuba.

Admittedly, Kennedy regarded the Bay of Pigs invasion “a misjudgment.” The fiasco is a good case study of bad Cold War policy. His disastrous decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs may have been due to his inexperience and to his obsession with anti-Communism - a strong sentiment in both the Republican and Democratic parties, but each side claimed to be better Cold Warriors than the other.

Although, the Bay of Pigs turned out to be a disaster for the Kennedy administration in terms of Cold War policy, the Missile Crisis proved to be managed well. No one could deny the intensity of the Missile Crisis in 1962 when the two countries were extremely close to nuclear war. In light of new discoveries about the Missile Crisis, President Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense McNamara, among other doves, should be admired for their cautious stance when major voices in the United States were calling for an air strike followed by an invasion, which would have, in McNamara’s words, ended up “in utter disaster.”       

 

                                                  Bibliography

Ambrose, Stephen E. and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy

            Since 1938, 4^Th ed.  (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). 

Chang, Laurence, and Peter Kornbluh, eds. The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

(New York: The New Press, 1998).

Garthoff, Raymond L. Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington D.C.:

The Brookings Institution, 1989).

Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From FDR to Bush, 2^nd ed. (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992).  

Lloyd, Marion, “Caution called the Cuban Missile Crisis,” The Boston Globe (12 October 2002,

sec. National/Foreign, final edition).

“The Cuban Missile Crisis,” The Fog of War prod. Errol Morris, 107 mins.

Sony Pictures Classics, 2004.

May, Ernest R. and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the

Cuban Missile Crisis (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).

U.S. Department of State. NSC 68: United States Objectives and Program for National Security

(Naval War College Review, Vol. XXVII May-June 51-108. Taken from <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-2.htm>

The Reign of Finance in American Politics

In the spring of 1945 the United States emerged after the Second World War as the preeminent global power. The two previous empires, France and Britain, were devastated after the war and played minor roles in the management of global affairs. Since then, the United States faced only two major deterrents in its global hegemonic ambitions: nationalist movements in the Third World and the Soviet Union. The United States exerted its power in the world by leading militarily and economically. Along with Britain, it led the creation of the framework for managing the global monetary system called the Bretton Woods (named after the conference of forty-three countries at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944). The pith of the U.S.-led system was the fixing of exchange rates of the major currencies to the dollar; and the dollar, in turn, was tied to gold at the guaranteed U.S. price of $35 per ounce. Because the United States possessed sixty percent of the world’s gold, fixing the rate of exchange to the dollar became de facto policy. The dollar became the source of global monetary reserve.

In the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s was the adverse consequence of its decades long unregulated financial sector. After World War II, Britain and the United States responded to the financial crisis by deciding to tightly regulate the global financial sector and created a system in which major currencies were tightly managed in order to cut back speculation. Also, they restricted the flow of capital. The Bretton Woods’s founders, Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes, designed a monetary system that could protect against competitive currency manipulations and exchange controls. The new economic system proved effective in managing global finance and trade. For over twenty years, the Bretton Woods underpinned a world economy that was stable and prosperous. Under this system, between 1945 and 1971, developing countries did not experience any banking crisis.[1]

This all changed on 15 August 1971 when President Richard Nixon and his Treasury Secretary John Connally decided to close the gold window. The president ordered Connally to suspend all sales and purchases of gold (to the misgivings of some important figures in his economic team like Paul Volcker and Arthur Burns). The act cancelled the convertibility of the dollar to gold, which was the staple of the Bretton Woods system. The Bretton Woods did not long survive Nixon’s policy that by 1973, it was completely finished.

The consequences were dire. The closing of the gold window put the private sector at foreign exchange risk. Until then, the private sector was protected as governments maintained fixed exchange rates tied the dollar, and the dollar to gold. Foreign exchange was stable – only minimal speculation against currencies existed and thus, there was no need to have large-scale currency dealing facilities in Wall Street that exists today. With the demise of Bretton Woods, exchange rates fluctuated significantly. (As a point of contrast, in 1971, as pointed out by two economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, there were only eleven Wall Street banks that traded in foreign exchange markets. By the late 1990s, when speculation against currencies became rampant, there were nearly two hundred major foreign exchange trading institutions doing business at Wall Street).[2]  

In addition, the demise of Bretton Woods precipitated the free-flow of capital. In 1973, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland eliminated restrictions on capital movements. A year later, the United States followed suit. Years later, other countries joined in: Great Britain in 1979; Japan in 1980; France and Italy in 1990; Spain and Portugal in 1992.[3] The governments of these advanced industrial nations were induced to eliminate capital controls in order to hedge against the cost of fluctuating exchange rates on the private sector. Risk was no longer supported by the public and was privatized.[4]

The privatization of risk imposed strains on the domestic and global financial systems. Speculation against currencies soared. It precipitated the creation of exotic financial instruments that required the removal of regulatory barriers that obviated risk. The result of this new financial system has been a world that is rife with major financial crises. Lewis Lehrman, writing for The Wall Street Journal on the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s new economic policy, described the result of his decision: “The ‘Nixon Shock’ was followed by a decade of one of the worst inflations of American history and the most stagnant economy since the Great Depression. The price of gold rose to $800 from $35.” Moreover, the purchasing power of the dollar in 1971 declined to $0.18 by 2010.[5] The rest of the world felt the tremors of financial crises; one region after another: Latin America’s Southern Cone in 1979-81; the Third World debt crisis of 1982; Mexico in 1994-95; Asia in 1997-98; Russia 1998, and Brazil in 1999.[6] 

Eatwell and Taylor characterized this series of global financial crises as:

highly volatile, with exchange rates, interest rates, and asset prices subject to both large short-term fluctuations and longer-term swings…the new system is susceptible to contagion when financial tremor spread from the epicenter to countries and markets that have seemingly little connection with the initial problem.[7]

This means that when a person opens a savings or checking account at a local bank, it may be based on bad debt from anywhere in the world.

One notable problem in the financial sector that proliferated as a result of the unregulated financial market is what economists termed “systemic risk.” Systemic risk, otherwise known as externality, is the adverse side effect to society at large stemming from financial transactions between firms. For example, when a firm sets up factory that belches out dirty smoke in a town, it may make a good profit for the business and the town, but the externality from the factory - the smoke and the pollution it causes - is not accounted for in the company’s spreadsheets or the cost of the transaction. In this system, the firm is not concerned about paying for, say, someone’s medical bills because he or she develops respiratory problems associated with the smoke. Or the firm does not account for the town population’s expensive dry cleaning bills, which resulted from the dirty smoke. In a market transaction, the risk is privatized [dirty smoke] and the cost socialized [people’s medical and cleaning bills]. “In the same way,” as Eatwell and Taylor pointed out, “financial firms do not price into their activities the costs of their losses might impose on society as a whole. Yet those costs are a familiar consequence of financial failures.”[8]

“Markets are inherently unstable,” the business magnate George Soros recently remarked, and when the risks in financial transactions are not priced into the market, more and more of them can cause damage and crash the economy. The privatization of risk is the problem: “Taking risks is what financial institutions are for,” explained Eatwell and Taylor, “But markets reflect the private calculation of risk, and so tend to under-price the risk faced by society as a whole.”[9] What happens when the economy crashes? In our current political system, which is a money-driven political system, the government steps in and bails out the banks that caused the damage to the economy as a whole, thereby unjustifiably socializing the costs of privatized market risks. In other words, the American taxpayer usually ends up paying for the high cost of financial failures and economic crises caused by financiers.

A recent example is well known. The major catastrophic events of the late 2000s reverberates today. A boom in the housing market beginning in 2001 in the United States and in Europe precipitated a bust that torpedoed the market in 2007. It created the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The housing market peaked in 2006 and in June 2007, Wall Street showed signs of grave trouble: the investment bank Bear Stearns went bankrupt. As regulators strove to quell the turmoil, what emerged in September 2008 was a full-fledged crash. It entailed a global financial panic. Hundreds of billions worth of mortgages and related investments went down; some big investment banks turned into commercial ones. The federal government took over the behemoth international insurance company, the American International Group (AIG). Responding to the crisis, Congress passed a $700 billion bailout plan in October 2008 and the Federal Reserve pumped money into the financial system; both helped rein in a full-scale financial collapse. The activities of financiers and the government over the course of thirty-seven years - starting from Nixon’s economic policy in 1971 - contributed highly to the great crash of 2008. A brief history sketched out below of that fateful event in 1971 may help readers gain some insight into the current character of the U.S. and world economy - which since the 1970s has been dominated by finance instead of manufacturing.

Against the backdrop of huge balance of payments deficit reaching an annual average of $3.6 billion, anemic economic growth, and high inflation, Nixon called his economic team, Paul Volcker, George Shultz, and John Connally to concoct dramatic measures to deal with America’s economic problems. In 1971, Nixon presided over his predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War and Great Society program. The war itself had dire fiscal consequences: soaring inflation coincided with the escalation of the Vietnam War while the high cost of implementing Great Society programs compounded it. Nixon dealt with both issues by deficit financing. In 1969, his budget deficit reached $25 billion. The inflation rate reached five percent. Meanwhile, energy prices rose threatening to exacerbate the already high inflation rate. Nixon decided to cut spending and pushed the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates. The result was stagflation: a combination of high inflation and economic recession. Nixon implemented one economic policy to another in an attempt to curb high inflation and end the recession. Finally, in late 1971, he devalued the dollar and imposed a ninety-day freeze on wages, prices, and rents. This new policy successfully remedied inflation and recession, but only for a short time.

Another major factor that contributed to Nixon’s new economic policy in 1971 was his response to the downturn in the manufacturing sector in the United States from 1965 and 1973.[10] During this time, profits in the U.S., European, and Japanese manufacturing sector dropped steadily, followed by a drop in the private economy in the United States. How did business bounce back to restore profits? For one, business prodded Nixon to devalue the dollar against the yen and the mark, which provided a basis from which the manufacturing sector restored its vitality.[11] Though there are a number of perspectives from scholars regarding the cause of the downturn in the manufacturing sector in the late 1960s, the fact of the matter was there was a fall in profits connected to labor rights. Concentrated capital needed to find other venues for manufacturing where it can thrive without having to be restricted by labor rights and union bargaining. Certainly, when Nixon dismantled the Bretton Woods system, it liberalized capital flow. Since then, firms could easily move manufacturing offshore where labor and environmental constrictions were minimal to none. Firms do not have to deal with labor rights and environmental restrictions in the Third World as they would in the United States. Also, since then, they can focus solely on exploiting workers and the environment to restore high profits. The other advanced industrial countries emulated this U.S. government action. Political economist Robert Brenner lucidly explains this trajectory:

[F]irms, assisted by the governments, throughout the advanced capitalist world engaged in an ever more self-conscious, systematic, and all encompassing effort to restore their profit rates by means both of the obsessive reduction of costs, above all direct and indirect labour costs, and the transformation of their ways of doing business. They detonated an ever more vicious assault on the organizations of the working class, so as to force down the growth, and in some cases, the level of compensation and social services…They shifted capital out of high-cost, low-profit manufacturing lines, especially into financial services and turned increasingly to speculation.[12]

            Nixon and his economic team on that fateful Friday afternoon in August at Camp David did not foresee the trajectory the financial sector was about to embark on when they decided to close the gold window. When the gold window was closed on 15 August, the Bretton Woods system struggled to survive. After three months of confusion by the major economies at a meeting in Washington, they agreed on new fixed rates on foreign exchange; but it soon fell apart. Nixon’s remedies were to allow the pound sterling to float against the dollar in the summer of 1972; then when it failed, his administration then tried to negotiate new fixed rates in 1973, but still to no effect. Finally, in March that same year, the European Community agreed on a joint float against the dollar; and by then, the Bretton Woods system was dead.[13] Among John Connelly’s compelling reasons to recommend to Nixon to close down the gold window, historian Allen Matusow argued that Nixon had his own reasons for destroying Bretton Woods:

Nixon closed the gold window when he did not only because he thought he had to but because he wanted to. It was his opening move in a historic offensive to correct the overvalued dollar and reorder the trading world to serve his political purposes. Breaking with the liberal premises of postwar U.S. foreign economic policy, he had adopted the mercantilist paradigm, which he hoped would keep the United States number one and help rally a New Majority in ’72.[14]   

            Whatever the motive of Nixon in deciding to close the gold window - whether he was being politically expedient or simply being pragmatic – the decision to dismantle the one economic system that maintained financial stability and kept markets calm “sowed chaos for a decade” – and today’s world generation, as Lewis Lehrman put it, “reaped the whirlwind.”

---

[1] Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 87.

[2] John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, Global Finance at Risk: The Case for International Regulation, (New York: The New Press, 2000), 2.

[3] Ibid., 3.

[4] Ibid., 2.

[5] Lewis E. Lehrman, “The Nixon Shock Heard ‘Round the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2011, sec. A.

[6] Eatwell and Taylor, Global Finance at Risk, 5.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 17.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, (New York: Verso, 2006), xx.

[11] Ibid., 2.

[12] Ibid., xxii.

[13] Eatwell and Taylor, Global Finance at Risk, 1.

[14] Allen J. Matusow, Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes (Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1998), 148.