Michael asks: “What business of the United States was it that Cuba wanted to host Russian nuclear missiles?”
This is the usual moral equivalence that we see from people who understand the world the way Michael does. I must admit that I find it flabbergasting, and that I am a little bit amused by these “nationalists” who can’t quite take their own country’s side, retrospectively, in a fight against a genocidal police state with plainly stated ambitions of global domination, but these are strange times.
My view is that the Soviet Union was an aggressive malignant force and the leading element of a worldwide communist enterprise that already had murdered tens of millions of people by the time of the Cuban missile crisis and would go on to murder some 100 million in the 20th century, that the United States had a duty to oppose this, that opposing it was not only permissible but heroic, and that the world should be (and mostly is) damned grateful that we did so.
If Michael Brendan Dougherty and Noam Chomsky see things differently, I can live with that, but I think history will favor my view.
Of course the United States took its own interests into account when leading that opposition, and of course it is possible to do wrong in the service of a just cause, as the United States often has. But none of that makes U.S. foreign policy, as bad as it very often is, anything like what Putin is up to, or what Khrushchev was up to before him, or Stalin before him. Nor is the U.S. role in the world anything like China’s, in spite of Michael’s suggestion of another equivalence there. The comparison is inapt and grotesque.
To fail to see that takes willful blindness.
Michael headlines his response “Asked, and Answered,” but he doesn’t actually answer my question. There isn’t any reason to think that Russian relations with Europe and the West would be easier without the expansion of NATO. What we have seen, in fact, is that Putin is very comfortable invading non-NATO countries but, so far, hesitant about invading NATO countries. That seems to me to show the wisdom of that expansion. That seems to be the view in the countries most immediately threatened, and their views should perhaps be given some weight.