On Peace - Lectio Magistralis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome
Thank you so much for this special invitation and for your lovely opening remarks. And thanks to all the students and faculty that are here to reflect on our complicated moment.
Ours is a very dangerous time. I don't want to depress everybody, but we are not in a good place in the world right now, and we don't have any assurance that we will get to where we need to go in a safe and just way.
I will start with a grim piece of news. Many of you will be familiar with the Doomsday Clock, which was established by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947, two years after the atomic bomb was created and used twice in Japan.
The authors of the Doomsday Clock, atomic scientists who understood the magnitude of what had changed with the advent of the atomic bomb, were trying to tell the world that we had arrived at a new juncture in history, when humanity has the capacity to destroy human life, to end humanity.
President John F. Kennedy, one of the greatest American leaders of my lifetime, put it very eloquently in 1961, in his inaugural address, when he said: "For the world is very different now. Mankind holds in its mortal hands the ability to end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life."
In 1947, the atomic scientists were trying to convey the existential change of the modern age, and at that time, they put the clock at 7 minutes to midnight. Since then, it has gone closer to midnight and farther away from midnight, depending on the geopolitics and the other realities of our time. When they took notice of the threat to humanity from climate change, they moved the clock towards midnight; with the end of the Cold War after 1989, they moved the hands of the clock further from midnight.
In recent days, they moved the hands of the clock to just 90 seconds from midnight. This is the closest to disaster that they have ever indicated in their judgment: 90 seconds to Armageddon, 90 seconds to complete disaster. This should set off alarm bells throughout the world, yet the resetting of the clock has been mentioned only in passing in news reports, before our papers and TV commentators shifted to other irrelevant topics, or to more drumbeats of war, such as cheerleading for a new escalation of the war in Ukraine.
The message of the Doomsday Clock is the deepest and most important message that we have received in a long time that the world is in great peril. We are not well led, we are not well governed, and we have the armaments to destroy the world many times over. We don't have the wisdom or the creativity to stay away from disaster right now.
The last time that we were in such danger was 60 years and three months ago in October 1962. I wrote a book about that time, entitled To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace, because for me it was such a gripping time.
I remember being in second grade, and I remember a friend pointing to an airplane outside of my primary school. I told my 8-year-old friend knowingly: “Maybe they’re coming to bomb us.” I remember how incredibly afraid my parents were as they watched President Kennedy’s televised speech to the American people about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I still remember those days vividly. It may have been the first political awareness of my life. My second moment of political awareness was on my father's shoulders, watching President Kennedy go by in a motorcade in Michigan a month after, as JFK campaigned for the Michigan governor.
In November, 1962, we escaped from disaster in the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the wisdom of just a handful of people. For me, this is the extremely sobering reality of our fate today. To understand that crisis, to understand how decision-making in Washington works and doesn't work, I recommend the outstanding book, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Vintage, 2020), by the wonderful historian Martin Sherwin, who sadly passed away in 2021. Sherwin’s account is the finest book about the Cuban Missile Crisis ever written. It offers a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour description of the crisis and its ultimate peaceful resolution.
The point of the book is that we came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war and found ourselves at the precipice. This was not because any leader actually wanted nuclear war. The opposite was true. Yet the leaders stumbled, one blundering move after another, to the very brink of nuclear war.
It is important to understand this. I won't tell the whole history, though it's fascinating and important. I want to emphasize one very important point: the Cuban Missile Crisis had roots that went back to the very end of World War II. The crisis built up step by step from 1945 to 1962. Events have history, a background. They are complex and hard to understand, in part because our governments lie about the history.
The long build-up of the crisis should alert us to the fact that our current crisis, the war in Ukraine, similarly has a long build-up, again one in which the US government has repeatedly blundered, and has repeatedly lied about those blunders.
The Cuban Missile Crisis arose at the core from the failure of the US, Soviet Union, and Germany to forge a peace agreement after World War II. There was no such peace settlement, and one of the real fears of the Soviet Union was that Germany would rearm and threaten the Soviet Union again. The Soviet Union lost 20 million people in World War II; their fears were understandable, especially as the US began to re-arm Germany.
Of course, the West was also afraid of the Soviet Union at the time. Therefore, the US and Soviet Union were suffering from a security dilemma, according to which each side viewed the other in the worst light, and each side interpreted every move of the other side, whether defensive or offensive, as a direct and escalatory threat that required an escalatory response. By assuming the worst, the two sides ratcheted the escalation.
The Cold War started in the late 1940s, and there is much to say about it, but the basic point is that the two sides never properly talked with each other about resolving the Cold War throughout the 1950s. The American view was that there is no one to talk to. The Soviet view was that the US was out to destroy them in a first-strike with nuclear weapons. There was some merit on both sides of this argument, because there were certainly people in the US government who wanted a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, and no doubt there was a lot of grim, terrible behavior by the Soviet Union, as well.
There was cause for distrust, but there was almost no attempt to relieve the distrust, to overcome it. When the US and Soviet leaders met, or planned to meet, something would go wrong. At the end of the 1950s, Eisenhower and Khrushchev were going to meet in a summit to try to reduce the tensions, and just then a CIA spy plane flew over the Soviet Union and was shot down.
Following this, Eisenhower blatantly lied and said there was no spy plane, that it was a weather plane that took off from Turkey and had gotten lost. The Soviets responded that they had the plane and the pilot, Gary Powers, and cautioned the US not to lie to them. The US president was caught in a direct and public lie, and that ended that summit.
At the same time, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. The United States immediately decided that Castro was a dire enemy, which in turn encouraged Castro to turn to the Soviet Union for support. At that point, Eisenhower decided to overthrow Castro and to invade Cuba. The CIA’s plan for invading Cuba was the first thing that was put on the desk of the new young president, John F. Kennedy, in January 1961.
Kennedy didn't like this plan. He thought it was harebrained, and he didn't think it would be successful. But when the CIA told him he must do this, JFK let the CIA plan go forward.
This became known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and it was a disaster. Castro knew everything about what was going to happen because everything about the invasion had been leaked in advance. The Cuban soldiers who were part of the CIA’s operation were quickly captured on the Cuban beach at the Bay of Pigs. Khrushchev wrote an indignant private letter to Kennedy, writing (and I paraphrase), “Mr. President, I'm writing to you to tell you that rogue elements of your government are committing an international crime at this moment in Cuba, and you must put it to a stop.” Kennedy wrote back to Khrushchev denying the US role in the operation, an obvious lie. This was the second major direct lie by a US president to Khrushchev within months. At that point, Khrushchev decided to teach the US a lesson, and ordered the placement of offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba, as the US had in Turkey. The Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was aghast at Khrushchev’s rash move. He warned Khrushchev that the move could lead to war. Khrushchev responded (again paraphrasing), “War? No, God forbid. This is just to give the Americans a taste of their own medicine.”
To make a very long, interesting, and important story as short as possible, the nuclear weapons were indeed put into Cuba and were soon discovered by another CIA spy plane. Kennedy was shown the pictures of these missiles one morning in mid-October 1962.
Kennedy assembled all of his top national security advisers, including his brother Robert; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy; his closest aide, Ted Sorensen; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; and others. They constituted an ad-hoc Executive Committee, or as historians know it, ExComm. ExComm’s meetings were taped, which is one of the reasons why we know today in detail so much about the hour-to-hour decision-making during the crisis.
When they first met, every key adviser to JFK said that obviously the US had to bomb these sites and take out these missiles immediately. The CIA had indicated that the missiles were not yet in place, so they had a few days to do it. ExComm was also informed that there were about 5000 Soviet troops, so they had to be careful not to start a direct war, but they had to bomb those sites immediately.
The CIA was wrong about many critical facts. The missiles were far closer to deployment than the CIA believed. Had the US launched a military attack, there is very good reason to think that nuclear war would have ensued, meaning the end of humanity. Yet Kennedy was wiser than his advisors. He told them to keep thinking, to keep trying to understand Khrushchev’s motives. He put off any decision to attack.
By coincidence, Kennedy met at lunch with UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, and when Kennedy showed Stevenson the photos of the missiles and asked what should be done, Stevenson surprised Kennedy by saying that obviously, Kennedy had to use diplomacy rather than a military attack to end the crisis.
Stevenson suggested that the US should remove its missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviets removing their missiles in Cuba. Stevenson warned JFK that bombing Cuba could lead directly to nuclear annihilation.
Upon returning to ExComm, Kennedy kept thinking of Stevenson’s advice, and kept asking what was on Khrushchev's mind. Why would he make this reckless move? JFK then opened some back channels to Moscow, and started to realize that there may indeed be a diplomatic solution. Two other key world leaders helped to open the door to diplomacy: UN Secretary-General U Thant, and Pope John the 23rd, who was in his dying days from cancer.
Kennedy came to understand intuitively that Khrushchev didn't want war and that Khrushchev was in a parallel situation to Kennedy, surrounded by hardliners in a very fragile situation. Kennedy feared being impeached if he didn't take strong action and Kennedy feared the pressure of his own advisors.
Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed on the way out of the abyss, essentially the one that Stevenson had recommended at the start. The US committed to never again invade Cuba. The Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its missiles from Cuba, while the US would withdraw its missiles from Turkey. This became the basis for ending the crisis.
Yet Kennedy added a remarkable proviso. He told Khrushchev that he must keep the US withdrawal of its missiles from Turkey a secret, and that it could not be an explicit part of end of the crisis, because Kennedy needed to get the approval of NATO in order to withdraw the missiles, and that would take some months. Incredibly, Khrushchev agreed to keep the US withdrawal of its missiles a secret.
Most observers at the time believed that Khrushchev had fully capitulated, because they did not know of the US quid pro quo. Only decades later it was understood that it was diplomacy, not brinkmanship, that ended the crisis. The key role of diplomacy and compromise was not understood for decades, alas.
There is one more astonishing fact. After the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement was reached and the crisis was nearly over, a disabled Soviet submarine in the vicinity of Cuba nearly fired a nuclear-tipped torpedo, erroneously believing that it was under attack by the US. At the very last moment, a Soviet Communist Party official, Vasili Arkhipov, countermanded the captain’s order, and prevented the firing of the torpedo.
That man you never heard of saved the world.
It was the US military doctrine of the time that in case of any nuclear attack, the US would go to a full nuclear attack against all enemies and at full force, including the Soviet Union, China, and Central and Eastern Europe. The US planned – yes, planned – for several hundred million deaths of innocents. What the US planners did not know was what Carl Sagan taught the world years later: such an attack would end all life on earth because the nuclear winter would end food production for decades to come.
Am I cheering you up?
The world is governed by fools. The world is governed by irresponsible people. Russia, today, has around 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons. The United States has around 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons. Yet, we have politicians in the US and Europe talking daily about “defeating” Russia in Ukraine. They are idiots; there's no other word for it. Every historical analogy to World War II and to everything else makes no sense without an understanding of the basic reality of nuclear arms.
We are told once in a while not to worry about it or succumb to nuclear blackmail. But let me tell you: you should worry about it, a lot. As President Kennedy said in his remarkable Peace Speech: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
Please also understand that just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was decades in the making, the Ukraine War is also decades in the making. And just as regards the Cuban Missile Crisis, United States presidents have lied again and again. These lies do not exonerate Vladimir Putin, but they help to explain the war as a crisis of two superpowers that need to tell the truth and reach a peaceful modus vivendi, thereby saving Ukraine, and possibly the whole world.
The US has lied repeatedly in the lead up to today. The lies started in the early 1990s. In 1990, the US and German governments promised President Mikhail Gorbachev that just as the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance, NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”
That promise was not a casual remark. That was not a saying on a fortune cookie or some person's fantasy. That was US and German policy, explained repeatedly to Gorbachev by US Secretary of State James Baker III and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Yet as early as 1992, with the fall of the Soviet Union, US leaders decided that NATO would enlarge eastward, despite the promises and the heated opposition of the new Russian Government.
Within a few years, Clinton agreed with his neoconservative Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and her deputy, Richard Holbrooke, that NATO would start expanding. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the timeline for expansion, first to Central Europe, then to Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, and then to Ukraine during 2005-2010. The actual process followed the Brzezinski timeline.
The second lie took place in 1999. Without going into all the details, NATO bombed Belgrade for six weeks straight. The bombing of Serbia and the US push for an independent Kosovo, thereby breaking Serbia in two, constituted the first war in Europe after decades of peace. The bombing was not well-received by Russia, an ally of Serbia.
In 2004, NATO enlarged to seven additional countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia. That, too, was not well-received by Russia. Then in 2008, George Bush proposed that NATO would enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia, at which point Putin warned that if the US pushed that, there really would be a cause for war. The US Ambassador to Moscow at the time, William Burns, who is now the US CIA Director, warned in a long memo, that expanding NATO to Ukraine would cross Russia’s red lines, and could well lead to war.
I consider all of this to be cheating by the United States, and also incredibly provocative and stupid policy making. European leaders knew in 2008 how stupid it was for the US to push NATO enlargement to Ukraine, but as is so often the case, European leaders remained basically silent in public, and acceded to the US demand to commit NATO to enlargement to Ukraine.
Then came a new President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who wanted to main a delicate balance, recognizing that Ukraine was situated between the two superpowers. He pressed the Ukrainian Parliament to adopt neutrality. This was very smart. The US opposed neutrality and therefore opposed Yanukovych. When demonstrations broke out against Yanukovych in late 2013, the US poured gasoline on the fire, eventually turning the protests into the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. The US Assistant Secretary of State at the time, Victoria Nuland, was captured on a phone call brazenly planning the post-Yanukovych government. Now she has been promoted to Under-Secretary.
Immediately after the violent coup in which the US played a key role, Putin annexed Crimea and war broke out in the Donbass, the Eastern part of Ukraine predominated by an ethnic Russian population. So, the war actually started with the overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014, not on February 24, 2022.
This war has been going on for more than eight years. The US has poured in vast armaments during this eight-year period and the US has repeatedly committed that Ukraine will join NATO. Germany and France offered to help secure a peace after the events of 2014, and the so-called Minsk agreements were signed, yet Ukraine never followed through on the Minsk agreements, even after the Minsk II agreement was supported by the UN Security Council.
In December 2021, President Putin put diplomatic proposals on the table. At the core of Putin’s proposals were an end to NATO enlargement and limitations on the placement of NATO troops and armaments. I called the White House at the end of 2021 to urge President Biden to negotiate with Russia in order to avoid the war. Instead, Biden slammed the door on negotiating over NATO enlargement, claiming that it was none of Russia’s business. This is the so-called “NATO open-door policy.”
The open-door policy is terrible idea. There's should be no such thing as an open-door military alliance. The big powers need to stay away from each other’s red lines, not to put their military alliances right up against each other. Enlarging NATO to Ukraine was a recipe for disaster.
After Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Zelensky said publicly that Ukraine could accept neutrality combined with security guarantees. He agreed that resolving the issues of Crimea and Donbass would take years, and that peace should not be delayed for a complete political solution. At that point, Ukraine and Russia entered into fruitful negotiations, with Turkey acting as mediator. Yet the US killed the negotiations, telling the Ukrainians that they should defeat Russia on the battlefield rather than accede to neutrality.
This was absolutely awful advice. It has put Ukraine into the middle of a deadly and escalating war of attrition between Russia and NATO, really between Russia and the US, with Ukrainians dying by the tens of thousands.
As far as we know, Biden and Putin have not had one phone call since the war began. How can two leaders engage in war for more than a year without directly communicating and trying to end the fighting?
I have explained repeatedly to Ukrainian counterparts that this war of attrition will make Ukraine “the Afghanistan of Europe,” meaning the site of endless bloodshed. These counterparts stopped talking to me because they believe the US Government’s assurances that they will win on the battlefield. This is a naïve and dangerous belief, especially when confronting a nuclear superpower.
Peace through negotiation is not impossible. It's not even ar-fetched, in my view. My proposal is that the world outside of the West, meaning Latin America, Africa, and Asia, tell the US, EU, Russia, and Ukraine to get serious in negotiating.
The essence of a true and ambitious peace deal is in sight. In my view it would or could include the following: (1) no enlargement of NATO; (2) withdrawal of Russian troops; (3) Crimea remaining in Russian hands, as home to Russia’s naval fleet since 1783; (4) armistice lines to end the fighting, to be followed by political negotiations and long-term solutions for the Donbass and other contested regions; (5) a phaseout of sanctions against Russia; (6) a reinvigoration of OSCE collective security arrangements in Europe; (7) strong guarantees for the sovereignty and safety of Ukraine, including by the UN Security Council and other key countries (e.g., Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, Turkey, and others); (8) EU membership for Ukraine; (9) a phased re-establishment of EU-Russia trade and financial relations.
Let me end with a word about the European Union. The EU has, by far, the highest living standards on the planet, a reflection of the productivity and social justice embedded in the EU’s social charter. The EU was created to forge peace and prosperity in Europe, after endless wars over more than two millennia. The EU accomplishments are vast. The EU leads the world in happiness (subjective wellbeing), longevity, and commitment to sustainable development. The EU leaders have long known that NATO enlargement to Ukraine is dangerous and ill-advised. The EU leaders know that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that failed to implement the Minsk II agreements.
I emphasize all of this because the EU should champion the path of diplomacy, making clear that Ukraine is welcome as an EU member but not as a NATO member, and that security in Europe includes Russia’s vital interests as well. I am a believer in Europe’s capacity to lead to a diplomatic and peaceful outcome, and I deeply yearn for that European leadership.
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