“Agreed. Ukraine does live in fear of Russia. Just as Castro’s Cuba lived in fear of the United States. But what would the US have done had Cuba been admitted to the Warsaw Pact? We already know that answer from the Cuban missile crisis.”
Nice try, son. Our bitch about Cuba in the 1960s was that the Soviet Union had introduced offensive nuclear missiles into Cuba, with the capability of striking virtually all of the continental Unites States in the Lower 48, except for a small slice of the extreme northwest.
> Our bitch about Cuba in the 1960s was that the Soviet Union had introduced offensive nuclear missiles into Cuba <
Well, yes. Just as the United States had previously introduced offensive nuclear missiles into Turkey. Before anyone gets all worked up, I’m not saying that we were wrong to put missiles in Turkey, or that the Soviets were right to put missiles in Cuba.
We were the good guys of that era and the communists were the bad guys. Period. My point is simply that it is an error to make policy without considering how other nations might react.
That doesn’t mean we should defer to those nations! It does mean that their reactions must be part of the equation. Just like in chess.