Eye-opening article by Noam Chomsky, reliant on declassified American intel, on how the Kennedy administration undermined the deal between the Soviet Union and the U.S. after we agreed to pull Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for the dismantling of nuclear missiles at the height of the Cuban missile crisis: secret commando raids on the island. As for the encomia that JFK received for his Steely Coolness, he puts it in context:
In a very narrow sense, that judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature violence. There is, however, a further question: How should JFK’s relative moderation in the management of the crisis be evaluated against the background of the broader considerations just reviewed? But that question does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts without question the basic principle that the U.S. effectively owns the world by right, and is by definition a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, one in which it is plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to deploy massive offensive force all over the world while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.
