Open thread for night owls'Obama v. Romney: Foreign policy & the myth of the Cuban missile crisis

Foreign policy is the subject of Monday night's final debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It's a political topic about which Americans are the least informed, generally the least interested in and the most vulnerable to chest-thumping posturing. One key moment of the debate last week was foreign-policy related'the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the Obama administration's response to it, both internationally and at home. That part of the debate did not go well for Romney.

If Libya comes up again, as seems inevitable, Romney will no doubt choose his words more carefully. But the message will be the same. Because whatever questions Romney is specifically asked at this sit-down debate, you can be sure he will repeatedly say or imply that Obama is weak on defense, just as he sought to do in the Oct. 16 face-off. It's not a unique line of attack. Republicans have been claiming since 1949 when the Chinese civil war ended with Mao Zedong and the communists victorious that Democrats are feckless wimps when it comes to international affairs. The truth is that the growth of the military-industrial-congressional complex has mostly been a bipartisan affair, as has been the imperial projection abroad of U.S. power. This isn't to say there are no differences between the two parties in their philosophy or implementation of foreign policy.

Any bets on whether Monday's foreign policy
 debate will include questions about the big picture? Many Democrats have bought into the weak-on-defense finger-pointing. Democratic presidents have appointed Republican Secretaries of Defense. Republicans have served as secretaries of Defense for 50 of the 65 years since the post of Secretary of War was abolished in 1947. Only seven of the 25 Secretaries of Defense have been Democrats, the rest of them Republicans except for George Marshall, self-avowedly non-partisan all his life. All 12 post-World War II presidents except Jimmy Carter have appointed or retained a Republican in that post.

One wing of the Democratic Party has resisted wars of choice since the second half of the '60s. Its size in Congress fluctuates, of course. In the elections of 1972 and 1974, the 91 Democrats who took previously Republican seats were overwhelmingly antiwar. The same, but by a narrower margin, for the 52 Democrats who took Republican seats in 2006 and 2008.

But the impact on Pentagon spending has not been as evident as should be the case during Democratic administrations. For instance, the current "core" Defense budget, adjusted for inflation, is only slightly less than it was at the post-World War II peak during the George W. Bush administration, and about equal to what it was at the peak of the Cold War under Reagan in 1986.

Growth in Pentagon spending would be only modestly reduced by President Obama under current plans, assuming budget sequestration does not occur. Even with sequestration, however, the budget would be as high as it was at the height of the Vietnam War. Again, that is adjusted for inflation. Pentagon spending would take its sharpest upward turn in the post-World War II era under Mitt Romney's proposals, an increase of about $2.2 trillion over the next decade, an annual boost in the core Defense budget of about 35 percent.

Foreign policy isn't solely about war and saber-rattling, however. Economic globalization makes it about trade and aid, human rights, resource scarcity, the international flow of finance capital and, no matter how much politicians want to run from it, global warming. Bob Schieffer ought to make that subject the first question out of the box Monday.

It would also be good to hear questions and answers on a broader than usual range of these foreign policy matters. But it's doubtful we will. Nor will we hear about eliminating any of the 800+ bases operated by the United States overseas. We will certainly hear a lot about talking tough, being tough and not being tough.

That's because our foreign policy is captive to the Center-Right, the Right and sometimes, as during the Bush years, the Far Right. Occasionally, however, the Left can glean good insight from a Center-Rightist. In this light, at Foreign Policy magazine last week, Leslie H. Gelb wrote a piece that deserves a read, The Myth That Screwed Up 50 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy:

Kennedy's [Cuban missile crisis] victory in the messy and inconclusive Cold War naturally came to dominate the politics of U.S. foreign policy. It deified military power and willpower and denigrated the give-and-take of diplomacy. It set a standard for toughness and risky dueling with bad guys that could not be matched ' because it never happened in the first place. Leslie H. Gelb Of course, Americans had a long-standing mania against compromising with devils, but compromise they did. President Harry Truman even went so far as to offer communist Moscow a place in the Marshall Plan. His secretary of state, Dean Acheson, later argued that you could deal with communists only by creating "situations of strength." And there matters more or less rested until the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK demonstrated the strength proposition in spades, elevating pressures on his successors to resist compromise with those devils. What people came to understand about the Cuban missile crisis -- that JFK succeeded without giving an inch -- implanted itself in policy deliberations and political debate, spoken or unspoken. It's there now, all these decades later, in worries over making any concessions to Iran over nuclear weapons or to the Taliban over their role in Afghanistan. American leaders don't like to compromise, and a lingering misunderstanding of those 13 days in October 1962 has a lot to do with it. In fact, the crisis concluded not with Moscow's unconditional diplomatic whimper, but with mutual concessions. The Soviets withdrew their missiles from Cuba in return for U.S. pledges not to invade Fidel Castro's island and to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey. For reasons that seem clear, the Kennedy clan kept the Jupiter part of the deal secret for nearly two decades and, even then, portrayed it as a trifle. For reasons that remain baffling, the Soviets also kept mum. Scholars like Harvard University's Graham Allison set forth the truth over the years, but their efforts rarely suffused either public debates or White House meetings on how to stare down America's foes. FROM THE OUTSET, Kennedy's people went out of their way to conceal the Jupiter concession. It started when the president's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, met Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on Oct. 27 to present the Jupiters-for-Soviet-missiles swap. He told Dobrynin: We'll take the Jupiters out, but it's not part of the deal, and you can never talk about it. The Soviets removed their missiles, the United States removed the Jupiters, and the secret held for 16 years, until a small paragraph in an Arthur Schlesinger book upon which few remarked. [...] COMPROMISE IS NOT a word that generally makes political hearts flutter, and it is even less loved when it comes to the politics of U.S. foreign policy. The myth of the missile crisis strengthened the scorn. The myth, not the reality, became the measure for how to bargain with adversaries. Everyone feared becoming the next Adlai Stevenson, whom the Kennedys, their aides, and their foes discredited for proposing the Jupiter deal publicly. It took extraordinary courage to propose compromises in arms control talks with Moscow. Even treaties for trivial reductions in nuclear forces on both sides faced furious battles in Congress. Today, it is near political suicide to publicly suggest letting Iran enrich uranium up to an inconsequential 5 percent with strong inspections, though the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty permits it. And while Barack Obama's team is talking to the Taliban, its demands are so absolute ' the Taliban must lay down their arms and accept the Kabul constitution ' that any serious give-and-take is impossible. Were it at all serious, the White House would have to at least dangle the possibility of a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban. For too long, U.S. foreign-policy debates have lionized threats and confrontation and minimized realistic compromise. And yes, to be sure, compromise is not always the answer, and sometimes it's precisely the wrong answer. But policymakers and politicians have to be able to examine it openly and without fear, and measure it against alternatives. Compromises do fail, and presidents can then ratchet up threats or even use force. But they need to remember that the ever steely-eyed JFK found a compromise solution to the Cuban missile crisis ' and the compromise worked.

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