Obama advisor's historical blunder

Now that the two parties seem to have settled on their nominees, I am planning to do some posts on the foreign policy positions of both Barack Obama and John McCain. I’m starting with a comment from Obama’s chief foreign policy advisor Susan Rice, who uncorked this whopper recently on CNN.

The set up to her comment is that Obama has been receiving criticism for saying a number of times on the campaign trail that he is willing to meet with world leaders “without preconditions”. Critics have said that it shows that Obama is naïve that you can’t just sit down with dictators and talk. His supporters have replied by saying George Bush’s belligerent foreign policy has not helped the United States’ standing in the world and that a new approach is needed.

Enter Ms. Rice. In her comment she drew the comparison to John F. Kennedy (someone who Obama has often been compared to) meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, our then adversary. Rice said “thank God he (JFK) did because if he hadn't we would have not been able to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis.” A good sound bite, one that seems to make the “meet without preconditions” idea seem valid, there’s just one problem – she is totally wrong about the JFK/Khrushchev meeting.

She is factually wrong – the only JFK/Khrushchev meeting happened in Vienna, in June of 1961, more than a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis. So it would have been impossible for this meeting to “resolve” an event that had not yet occurred.

Secondly, most historians agree that the meeting actually helped to cause the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. Kennedy was steamrolled in the meeting by the aggressive Soviet leader. Khrushchev spent two days berating Kennedy so badly that JFK became physically ill from the encounter. Khrushchev, meanwhile, saw Kennedy as a weak leader, which prompted him to take aggressive steps against the West, like building the Berlin Wall and putting nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Kennedy’s aides had pleaded with him not to meet one-on-one with Khrushchev because of the Soviet leader’s reputation as a tough, hard-nosed negotiator, but Kennedy ignored them. So really the JFK/Khrushchev meeting could be seen as an argument against meeting another leader (especially a leader from a hostile nation) without preconditions.

What’s more disturbing though is how Ms. Rice, who has a PhD from Oxford and has spent two decades as a foreign policy analyst could get a milestone moment in US/Soviet relations so wrong. If this is the quality of foreign policy advice Obama is getting, then he has a lot of work to do.