Transcript of 1944 Bretton Woods Conference Found at Treasury

Transcript of 1944 Bretton Woods Conference Found at Treasury - International Monetary Fund and World Bank Beginnings Reappraised (

(Pic: Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson, standing at center, and representatives of 28 Allied nations met in Washington in 1945 to sign the pact reached at the Bretton Woods conference. )

NY Times

WASHINGTON — A Treasury economist rummaging in the department’s library has stumbled on a historical treasure hiding in plain sight: a transcript of the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 that cast the foundations of the modern international monetary syste

Historians had never known that a transcript existed for the event held in the heat of World War II, when delegates from 44 allied nations fighting Hitler gathered in the mountains of New Hampshire to create the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But there were three copies in archives and libraries around Washington that had never been made public, until now.

“It’s as if someone handed us Madison’s notes on the debate over the Constitution,” said Eric Rauchway, a historian the University of California, Davis.

Economic historians who have viewed the transcript say it adds color and detail to the historical record, an already thick one given the many contemporaneous and subsequent accounts of Bretton Woods. The transcript seems to contain no great surprises, but it sheds light on the intense debates as the war raged abroad.

It depicts John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, hurrying to marshal support for the broad agreements on international finance. It underscores the tremendous power then wielded by Britain and, especially, the United States. It also shows the seeds of contemporary disputes being sown.

For instance, seven decades ago, a number of poorer or smaller countries were protesting their International Monetary Fund quotas, which determine power in the fund. Many of those countries, including China and India, are still pushing for more influence today.

In one section of the transcript, an American representative lays out a proposal for apportioning power in the fund and underscores what was at stake, with the war coming to its bloody climax in Europe.

“We fight together on sodden battlefields. We sail together on the majestic blue. We fly together in the ethereal sky,” said Fred M. Vinson, who later became chief justice of the United States. “The test of this conference is whether we can walk together, solve our economic problems, down the road to peace as we today march to victory.”

But the response was not one of absolute unity.

“In spite of the very eloquent and moving speech of the United States delegate, on behalf of the Iranian delegation I wish to state that the quota proposed for my country is entirely unsatisfactory,” a delegate from Tehran responded.

Then, a delegate from China added: “I hesitate greatly to sound a note of discord at this conference. It has been the effort of the Chinese delegation to promote harmony and the success of this great common enterprise. But every delegation has its difficulties.”

The Netherlands, Greece, Australia, India, Yugoslavia, New Zealand, France, Ethiopia, Norway and Britain then added their comments and objections. “I think that a lot of people have thought of Bretton Woods as being a stitch-up job between United Kingdom and the United States,” Mr. Rauchway said. “But that’s overstated, and it’s definitely visible in this transcript. You can see the poorer countries fighting their own corner.”

Kurt Schuler a Treasury Department economist, was browsing in an “out of the way” section of uncataloged material in the library two years ago when he came across the Bretton Woods document. He flipped through and saw some remarks by Keynes that he was not familiar with, sort of the economists’ equivalent of a Bob Dylan fan finding unknown lyrics.

“I checked them against Keynes’s collected works,” Mr. Schuler said. “And I knew I had something.”

His research revealed that there were three copies of the transcript that scores of economic historians were not aware of: the version at the Treasury Department; one in the National Archives; and the third in the International Monetary Fund archives.

In his spare time, Mr. Schuler set about turning the yellowed transcript into a book, with a co-editor, Andrew Rosenberg. It took a tremendous amount of work, Mr. Schuler said. They read the transcript aloud into transcription software. They added hyperlinks to documents referenced at the conference, and wrote summaries, annotations and historical notes.

This week, the polished transcript was published as an 800-page e-book by the Center for Financial Stability, a nonprofit group based in New York that researches financial markets, where Mr. Schuler is a senior fellow and Mr. Rosenberg a research associate.

“Everyone thinks they know what happened at Bretton Woods, but what they know has been filtered by generations of historical accounts,” Barry Eichengreen, a professor or economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. “International monetary history will never be the same.”

The transcript provides “insight in how it was that they were able to maintain a pace of work which allowed them to reach two really big agreements, on the I.M.F. and the World Bank, within a space of three weeks,” Mr. Schuler said. “Keynes was something of a task master,” he added.

Benn Steil, a senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said readers can see the British Empire “disintegrating before your eyes,” in the transcript. “The Indians are so vociferous that the British are ripping them off. The British are both furious and mortified that their colony would do this to them,” he said, describing a dispute over debts with the colonies.

“Bretton Woods was itself 95 percent Kabuki theater,” he said. “But it’s interesting Kabuki theater.”

John Maynard Keynes addressed the Bretton Woods conference, where the International Monetary Fund was created.

Sihanouk : Political Broker

Political broker - BBC

Born in 1922, Sihanouk was the eldest son of King Norodom Suramarit and Queen Kossamak.

Educated at French schools in Saigon and in Paris, the Nazi-controlled Vichy government in France crowned Sihanouk king of Cambodia in 1941, bypassing his father in the hope that the 18-year-old could easily be manipulated.

However, after the war Sihanouk embarked on an international campaign aimed at ensuring independence for Cambodia.

It was achieved without bloodshed in 1953 - after nearly a century of French rule. Two years later Sihanouk abdicated in favour of his father and became both prime minister and foreign minister of his country.

He tried - but failed - to keep the country from the Cold War conflict that engulfed South East Asia in the 1970s.

When a US-backed coup installed Lon Nol as Cambodia's leader, Sihanouk - by then alienated by US bombing raids on Vietnamese communist guerrillas inside Cambodia - was forced into exile in Beijing.

It was from there that he struck an ill-fated deal with the emerging Maoist rebel force, the Khmer Rouge. When the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, Sihanouk returned as head of state but was subsequently detained.

He remained confined to the royal palace for most of the four years of the regime's rule, during which time an estimated 1.7 million people died.

People were killed or worked and starved to death, as the Khmer Rouge emptied cities and forced Cambodians to work on the land.

Sihanouk later condemned the Khmer Rouge for the deaths of the Cambodians, including of several of his own children.

When Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk went again to Beijing. He was to remain outside the country for 13 years, as Cambodia faced civil war and the struggle to rebuild from economic devastation.

When the UN in 1991 persuaded the Vietnamese to withdraw and set Cambodia on the road to democracy, Sihanouk returned, and was again crowned king in 1993.

His role was increasingly one of broker between Cambodia's warring political factions. But as the country slowly worked its way towards political stability, Sihanouk's health steadily worsened.

In 2004, he announced he would step down in favour of one of his sons, the little-known Norodom Sihamoni. The former ballet dancer was crowned king in October 2004.

After that, Sihanouk spent much of his time overseas, in Beijing and Pyongyang.

But he remained a prominent national figure who - although criticised as autocratic and elitist, and blamed by some for his initial endorsement of the Khmer Rouge - symbolised constancy through Cambodia's years of violence.

Obituary: Cambodia former king Norodom Sihanouk dies aged 89

Cambodia former king Norodom Sihanouk dies aged 89
BBC

Unpredictable, ebullient, mercurial, autocratic, self-indulgent - these are just some of the descriptions applied over the years to former King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia.

Married six times and the father of at least 14 children, a saxophone player, a song writer, a film maker, a bon vivant who loved French cooking and wines, Sihanouk was never afraid of appearing eccentric.

"Cambodians are all naughty boys, and that includes me," he once said.

Yet beneath all the joking and indulgence was a master politician and leader who frequently changed allegiances but always tried to preserve the unity of his country and prevent it being gobbled up by the big powers.

Sihanouk was born in 1922, the eldest son of King Norodom Suramarit and Queen Kossamak.

Educated at French schools in Saigon and in Paris, the Nazi controlled Vichy government in France crowned Sihanouk king of Cambodia in 1941, bypassing his father in the hope that the 18 year old could easily be manipulated.

However, after the war Sihanouk embarked on an international campaign aimed at ensuring independence for Cambodia.

Despite being rebuffed by the US, whose policies towards Indo China Sihanouk was always scathing about, Cambodia won its freedom in 1953.

It was achieved without bloodshed after nearly a century of French rule. Two years later Sihanouk abdicated in favour of his father and became both prime minister and foreign minister of his country.

Khmer Rouge deal

For the next 10 years, he successfully steered Cambodia on a neutral course. However, as the war in Vietnam escalated, Sihanouk became more critical of America, accusing Washington-supported South Vietnamese troops of repeated incursions into Cambodian territory.

Meanwhile, Washington accused Sihanouk of allowing North Vietnamese troops passage through his country.

In March 1970, while Sihanouk was visiting the Soviet Union, General Lon Nol, then Cambodian Prime Minister, seized control of the government with American help.

Sihanouk went into exile in Beijing and threw his support behind the Khmer Rouge guerrillas who were emerging as a considerable fighting force.

When the Khmer Rouge moved into Phnom Penh in 1975, Sihanouk returned as head of state. He was criticised for acting as the chief apologist for the murderous Khmer Rouge regime and its leader Pol Pot.

Later Sihanouk, who spent much of the Pol Pot era a virtual prisoner in the royal palace, said he was unaware of the Khmer Rouge's worst excesses which included the killing of about one million Cambodians.

Among those who died were five of Sihanouk's own children, and at least 15 grandchildren. In early 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and, once again, Sihanouk fled into exile in China.

For the next decade, Sihanouk worked from his bases in China and North Korea to expel the Vietnamese from Cambodia. He refused to break with the Khmer Rouge who still held much military power.

'Tragic hero'

In 1990, the Vietnamese withdrew. Sihanouk was at the centre of complex negotiations involving royalists, the Khmer Rouge and Hun Sen, the Vietnamese-backed prime minister, to form a new government.

Though he cajoled and joked his way through these talks - Sihanouk occasionally brought his poodle to the negotiations - his performance was judged by many to be a triumph of diplomacy.

In 1991, Sihanouk was appointed president, then two years later, amid the numerous twists and turns of Cambodian politics, he was, for the second time, crowned King, a position he retained until his abdication in October 2004 due to ill health.

Sihanouk did an about face on the Khmer Rouge, roundly condemning them as murderers, calling for their leaders to face trial and seeking to exclude them from any role in government.

In his later years, often absent from his country to undergo medical treatment for cancer and a series of mild strokes, Sihanouk was seen less and less by his people.

But to the end he maintained their loyalty and was a vital force for unity in a turbulent part of the world.

He once said it would take a Shakespeare to do literary justice to his reign. "But the tragic hero is not Sihanouk but the people of Cambodia," he said.

Analysis

Jonathan Head South East Asia correspondent, BBC New

Mercurial, vain, contradictory, with an impossibly twisting career; Sihanouk was all these things, so summing up his legacy is tricky.

He was a very different King from Bhumibol Adulyadej in neighbouring Thailand, who revived a traditional, ritualistic form of monarchy in the post World War II era. Sihanouk chose instead to be a charismatic, autocratic ruler in the style of other post-colonial leaders like Sukarno of Indonesia. There was little democracy in his Cambodia, but there was little anywhere else in South East Asia.

Then there were his constant switches of allegiance, from the West towards China in the 1960s; from suppressing the Khmer Rouge in the 1960s, to allying himself with the movement in the 1970s and 80s. He was at heart a Cambodian nationalist, struggling, and often failing, to protect his small, impoverished country from the storm of the Vietnam War and the pressure from larger neighbours and Cold War superpowers.

He often promised far more than he could deliver. Sihanouk was as much at the mercy of the cruel waves of history that washed over Cambodia as were its people. From the 1960s he believed communist victories were inevitable in South East Asia, and was resigned to working with whatever regimes emerged. He was a survivor, more than a nation-builder.

He did use his authority to play a pivotal role in bringing the warring parties in Cambodia's civil war to the talks that ended the conflict in 1991. And in a country that has lost so much, he was always there, embodying the hope of a better Cambodia, freed from the turmoil of its recent history.

Iban Tracker and Sarawak Rangers: The Brave Few
Posted on September 4, 2012

Despite Sarawak’s official entry to the Malaysian Federation was in July 22,1963, Sarawakians’ contribution for the fight of Independence in Malaya begin as early as 1948. Malaya was under communist threats at that time, with the terrorist seems to have the upper hand in jungle warfare, it’s about time that the British recruited another master of the jungle to fight these bandits as well.

Having lived in jungle environment for hundreds of years, the indigenous people of Iban in Sarawak was seen as an appropriate option to do the job. And so, thousands of Iban men were recruited and sent to combat in hot spots across Malaya. One of them was Awang anak Raweng, the only Malaysian recipient of George Cross during the 12 years conflict which end in 1960.

While tracking the communist terrorist in Kluang on May 27, 1951, he and his patrol were ambushed by some 50 well-armed communist terrorist. During the fierce firefight which have already killed several of the patrol members, Awang managed to rescue a Private named Griff Hughes. Awang, however, was hit on the left thigh and right forearm during the process.

Despite his injuries, Awang remain firm and continue fighting until reinforcement came. While defending his injured colleague, Awang has managed to shot dead several communist insurgents.

Awang was lucky as 21 other Iban Trackers did not came back from their service in Malaya alive. Being buried for many years in various cemetery across the Peninsular Malaysia, their remains were exhumed in 2011 and returned to Sarawak as part of Ops Mai Pulai (Operation Home Coming). They were reburied at a cemetery behind St Joseph’s Cathedral in Kuching, near the World War II Heroes Memorial.

In 1962, a young Iban man by the name of Kanang anak Langkau has signed in to join the Sarawak Rangers. With Sarawak joining in the Federation, Kanang’s unit was amalgamated into the Malaysian Armed Forces and his unit was known as the Malaysian Ranger Regiment.

As the communist insurgent reinforced and regain their strength back, another insurgencies has started in the late 1960′s. The fighting got fiercer in years to come which peaks in the 1980′s. Kanang rose to fame when his Unit Combat Intelligent Section (UCIS) of the 8th Royal Ranger Regiment (8 RRD) met communist resistance in Tanah Hitam, Perak on February 19, 1980.


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Iban Tracker and Sarawak Rangers: The Brave Few
Posted on September 4, 2012

Despite Sarawak’s official entry to the Malaysian Federation was in July 22,1963, Sarawakians’ contribution for the fight of Independence in Malaya begin as early as 1948. Malaya was under communist threats at that time, with the terrorist seems to have the upper hand in jungle warfare, it’s about time that the British recruited another master of the jungle to fight these bandits as well.

Having lived in jungle environment for hundreds of years, the indigenous people of Iban in Sarawak was seen as an appropriate option to do the job. And so, thousands of Iban men were recruited and sent to combat in hot spots accross Malaya. One of them was Awang anak Raweng, the only Malaysian recipient of George Cross during the 12 years conflict which end in 1960.


While tracking the communist terrorist in Kluang on May 27, 1951, he and his patrol were ambushed by some 50 well-armed communist terrorist. During the fierce firefight which have already killed several of the patrol members, Awang managed to rescue a Private named Griff Hughes. Awang, however, was hit on the left thigh and right forearm during the process.

Despite his injuries, Awang remain firm and continue fighting until reinforcement came. While defending his injured colleague, Awang has managed to shot dead several communist insurgents.

Awang was lucky as 21 other Iban Trackers did not came back from their service in Malaya alive. Being buried for many years in various cemetery across the Peninsular Malaysia, their remains were exhumed in 2011 and returned to Sarawak as part of Ops Mai Pulai (Operation Home Coming). They were reburied at a cemetery behind St Joseph’s Cathedral in Kuching, near the World War II Heroes Memorial.

In 1962, a young Iban man by the name of Kanang anak Langkau has signed in to join the Sarawak Rangers. With Sarawak joining in the Federation, Kanang’s unit was amalgamated into the Malaysian Armed Forces and his unit was known as the Malaysian Ranger Regiment.

As the communist insurgent reinforced and regain their strength back, another insurgencies has started in the late 1960′s. The fighting got fiercer in years to come which peaks in the 1980′s. Kanang rose to fame when his Unit Combat Intelligent Section (UCIS) of the 8th Royal Ranger Regiment (8 RRD) met communist resistance in Tanah Hitam, Perak on February 19, 1980.

With one of his comrade seriously injured and Kanang himself was also seriously injured during the intense firefight, he and his unit has managed to kill 5 communist terrorists. First Warrant Officer Kanang was conferred with the Seri Pahlawan Perkasa (SP) and Pingat Gagah Berani (PGB) medals for his bravery. He was the only MAF serviceman who had ever being conferred with two bravery medals by the Malaysian Government

Kanang: Battle still fresh in my mind
My Star Online, Aug 1, 2012

KUALA LUMPUR: Thirty-two years have passed since he and his platoon members came face-to-face with the communists in the Perak jungles, but Temenggong Datuk Kanang Langkau remembers the incident as if it happened only yesterday.

He still gets teary-eyed when reminiscing about the Feb 19, 1980 incident, not because of his close shave with death but because of how his teammates had fought for their country.

“I am mighty proud to have been able to serve the country,” he said at the Warriors’ Day celebration. “I fought the communists, so I am disappointed that there are some who glorified the communists.”

Kanang said this in obvious reference to PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu who had allegedly praised communist guerillas over the Bukit Kepong incident.

Back then, Kanang and 30 other men exchanged fire with communist insurgents in the jungles of Ulu Kinta. Two rangers died while another lost his leg. Kanang himself took three rounds.

At yesterday’s celebration, a pantomime was staged in which a section of it was dedicated to the incident involving Kanang and his platoon members.

Asked how he felt being a part of the nation’s history, the 68-year-old Kanang said: “I can never be more proud. But this (fame) and medals are not the reward I expect for my service to the country. I just want the country to be peaceful and the people happy.

“Everytime I look at the Jalur Gemilang, I feel a deep sense of sadness and pride,” he said. “I hope that the younger generation appreciates the peace they enjoy today.”

Hertiage Sabah NGO

Heritage Sabah NGO cites the importance of effective government policy-making to save Sabah’s landmarks and historical sites.

PRESS RELEASE

KOTA KINABALU: Heritage Sabah NGO President Richard Nelson Sokial expressed the NGO’s support for the Land and Survey Department’s recent bid to ‘save’ historical structures via 3D modeling.



However, he urged the Government and the public to bear in mind that genuine preservation and promotion of Sabah’s history, culture and identity relies on areas of policy-making and public participation.

“As an NGO that is dedicated towards raising the profile of architectural and cultural heritage conservation, we have been advocating for a collaborative and holistic approach in identifying and protecting areas and aspects of historical and cultural significance across Sabah.

Heritage Sabah believe that the Land and Survey Department’s initiative would open doors to effective dialogue and partnerships between government and the local community to address heritage conservation matters if it is open to the input that can be given by key stakeholders and interest groups in the community,” he said.

“Sokial particularly regards this statement to the Land and Survey Department’s intent to commence their exercise with the Atkinson Clock Tower. He informed that Heritage Sabah has in fact been working closely with the Sabah Museum to monitor recent repairs of the 107-year-old Atkinson Clock Tower.earlier this year and with the strong support of Sabah Museum, have recently been granted the opportunity to conduct a field investigation exercise on the structure of the tower.

“We have actually just completed a 3D model of the clock tower based on measured drawings taken by Heritage Sabah’s volunteers”, says NGO president Richard Nelson Sokial while adding that the NGO is more than happy to share their expertise and resources to contribute in the Land and Survey Department’s efforts if the opportunity arises.

Heritage Sabah finds it encouraging to see government playing their part in heritage conservation and would do all it can to achieve shared goals. In the meantime, the NGO continues to strive to engage more members from the local community to participate in heritage awareness projects that they will be coordinating in the near future.

Nevertheless, Heritage Sabah questions the change of land use of the area surrounding the clock tower from ‘Ridge Conservation Area’ to ‘Commercial Zone’, raising questions about the transparency of zoning demarcations under the purview of various state government departments in Sabah.

“The importance of the Atkinson Clock Tower warrants its protection and the subsequent protection of its immediate surrounding area from unchecked commercial development. Now that the Land and Survey Department has decided to do their own 3D studies of the Atkinson Clock Tower, as their way to ‘save’ heritage buildings, we hope that they will also support our public appeal for the area surrounding the clock tower to be re-gazetted as a historical precinct for Kota Kinabalu city. “

http://heritagesabah.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/heritage-sabah-ngo-cites-the-importance-of-effective-government-policy-making-to-save-sabahs-landmarks-and-historical-sites/

The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited Why It Matters Who Blinked By James A. Nathan and Graham Allison October 11, 2012

The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited
Why It Matters Who Blinked
By James A. Nathan and Graham Allison
October 11, 2012

DIPLOMACY, NOT DERRING-DO
James A. Nathan

Graham Allison ("The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50," July/August 2012) seems to believe that U.S. President John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis was an unalloyed success. He also contends that the Kennedy administration's response to the crisis forms a template for the kind of steadfast resolve that U.S. policymakers should adopt today, specifically with regard to Iran and North Korea. But the Cuban missile crisis was hardly a triumph of presidential fortitude. At the core of Kennedy's strategy was a deal: the United States pledged to remove its missiles from Turkey within six months in exchange for the Soviet Union's withdrawal of its nuclear forces from Cuba.

The Soviet side of the bargain was public, but the central U.S. concession was kept secret. The Kennedy administration feared that it would appear weak if its agreement on the missiles in Turkey came to light. But the missile swap was hardly a mere "sweetener," as Allison claims; it was the main reason the Cuban missile crisis ended peacefully.

The facts of the compromise were long veiled. It was not until 1989 that Kennedy's former speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, confessed that he had edited out the details of the missile swap from the published version of Attorney General Robert Kennedy's diary. It is now clear that President Kennedy engaged in two sets of negotiations: one with Moscow and the other with his ad hoc team of high-ranking advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm). And in his negotiations with the latter, Kennedy made sure that only his few most trusted advisers were privy to the crucial missile concession.

The ExComm barely contemplated a diplomatic solution to the Cuban missile crisis, putting forward a series of military plans ranging from a blockade to a preemptive strike. Unbeknownst to many other members of the ExComm, however, the president, Robert Kennedy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were striving for a deal involving the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey. The president even authorized Rusk to announce the missile swap at the United Nations if the Soviets would not accept a secret agreement. To Kennedy's relief, Moscow agreed to keep the understanding secret.

Without full knowledge of how the crisis was settled, U.S. policymakers exalted in an apparently unqualified victory. In this view, it was the Kennedy administration's gumption, not its deft diplomacy, that had compelled the Soviets to stand down. "We were eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked," said Rusk of the crisis' resolution. This false characterization had unfortunate consequences-"resolve" became the watchword of Washington's Cold War policy, and a succession of administrations discarded the classic repertoire of diplomacy: international law, a respect for negotiation, and a prudent definition of the national interest.

Allison's narrative underscores the utility of threats, as long as they are credible. But straining to appear more determined, genuine, and fearsome can lead to miscalculation and heighten danger. Moreover, as Allison correctly notes, threats that are not carried out-even ones that initially appear credible-can seriously undermine policy. Each successive idle threat invites an adversary to test boundaries even more than the last time, and so the consequences of bluffing grow increasingly perilous. Allison is wrong, however, to conclude that it is necessary to risk war to achieve lasting peace.

The real lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is not that the measured use of threats is the key to defusing crises; it is that the essential challenge of crisis resolution is crafting an acceptable compromise to silence the drumbeat of war. This challenge is particularly critical in cases such as Cuba in 1962 and Iran today, when the price of failure is a potentially catastrophic confrontation.

Kennedy well understood this lesson. In nearly every international crisis of his presidency, he opted for diplomacy and dealmaking over force. In June 1961, he reached an agreement with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that maintained Laos' neutrality rather than risk the military action the Joint Chiefs of Staff had advocated. Later, in July 1961, Kennedy signaled to the Soviets that Washington would accept a divided Berlin, thus unwinding a confrontation that was just as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis. And after the Cuban crisis was resolved, Kennedy began a public campaign to temper the arms race. Yet Allison's account of the crisis as a case study of presidential resolve emphasizes the calculated use of threats over the more fundamental task of structuring a bargain.

Based on his reading of the Cuban missile crisis, Allison suggests that parts of an eventual U.S.-Iranian deal might also have to be kept secret. But surely, it would have been better for the Kennedy administration to reveal the truth about the settlement that ended the crisis; instead, Rusk and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara repeatedly lied to Congress. The long mischaracterization of how the Cuban missile crisis really ended not only taught a generation of U.S. policymakers a faulty lesson about the importance of threats but also damaged the American people's trust in official foreign policy narratives. A public deal to end the United States' protracted confrontation with Iran would be better than a secret one.

Against the backdrop of increasingly stiff U.S. and European sanctions on Iran and an incipient civil war in Syria, the Islamic Republic's sole ally in the Middle East, a diplomatic agreement could still end the standoff over the Iranian nuclear program. It would be folly for Washington to allow misplaced analogies to shape a decision that could lead to a third open-ended war in this still-young century.

JAMES A. NATHAN is Khaled bin Sultan Eminent Scholar in Political Science and International Policy at Auburn University at Montgomery.

ALLISON REPLIES

James Nathan disputes my interpretation of the central lessons of the Cuban missile crisis. Unfortunately, Nathan misreads my argument. He asserts that I consider presidential resolve and threats to be the essence of successful crisis management, arguing instead for compromise and restraint. In fact, my article contends that all these components are required for success.

President John F. Kennedy's resolution of the 1962 crisis involved a subtle mix of threat and compromise, candor and ambiguity, coercion and inducement. If Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had not accepted Kennedy's demand that he announce the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba within 24 hours, would Kennedy have ordered the air strike he threatened? The answer will never be known, but what seems certain is that Khrushchev would not have removed the missiles without the threat of force.

Resolving today's slow-motion confrontation over Iran's nuclear program will demand a similarly subtle mix. First, the United States needs to accept the irreversible realities of the situation: Tehran already knows how to build centrifuges and enrich uranium, and no U.S. policy is going to change that. Washington should work to place constraints on these activities so as to keep Iran as far from the development of a nuclear weapon as feasible, implement verification and transparency measures that maximize the likelihood that cheating will be discovered, and, finally, unambiguously threaten Tehran with a regime-ending attack in the event that it moves to construct nuclear weapons. Although Nathan may disagree, in my view, unless Iran's leadership believes that the costs of building nuclear weapons will be greater than the benefits those weapons would provide, the Islamic Republic will become a nuclear-armed state.

Ironically, U.S. actions in the Middle East over the past decade have taught regimes in the region both the value of nuclear weapons programs and the dangers of giving them up. Former Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, who ended his country's nuclear program under U.S. pressure, wound up on the wrong side of U.S. air strikes last year; former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who didn't even have a nuclear weapons program in 2003, faced a full-scale invasion. As Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, summarized in an address to his people: "Qaddafi gathered up all his nuclear facilities and gave them to the West. And now, you can see the conditions our nation is living in versus their conditions." Given recent examples, Tehran has no reason not to want nuclear weapons if it could acquire them without triggering an attack.

Nathan correctly notes that the Kennedy administration embraced-indeed, exaggerated-news headlines emphasizing the president's steely resolve in forcing Khrushchev to back down. And no one in the administration said anything for many years to cast doubt on Secretary of State Dean Rusk's oft-quoted line, "We were eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked." But in fact, Kennedy knew better. After a celebratory victory lap, the president identified what he believed was the central lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: "Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war."

In other words, having peered over the nuclear precipice, Kennedy took away a simple lesson: Never again. He used the crisis as a learning experience to clarify what he called the "rules of the precarious status quo." After October 1962, neither superpower dared surprise the other with provocative actions that might risk nuclear war. Together with the Berlin crisis of 1961, then, the Cuban missile crisis became a turning point in the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of these events, Washington and Moscow established a hot line for direct communications, signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty to stop nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, and began negotiations that culminated in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which limited the spread of nuclear weapons.

If these were the lessons that Kennedy drew, then why did he keep his concession on the missiles in Turkey a secret? Too many students of foreign policy imagine countries as moving pieces on the chessboard of international politics alone. Rarely do they remember former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill's adage, "All politics is local." Applied to international affairs, O'Neill's maxim can serve as a reminder that U.S. presidents have to play three-dimensional chess. Every move on the horizontal board against an international adversary simultaneously moves a piece on the vertical board of domestic politics. While mistakes on the international chessboard can have major consequences for the world, blunders on the domestic chessboard can remove the leader in question from both games entirely. Kennedy kept the missile concession a secret, as many shrewd politicians would, to protect his seat at the domestic chessboard.

Revisiting the most dangerous moment in recorded history, Nathan is right to stir up debate over the secret nature of the deal to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey. But he is wrong to attribute Kennedy's success purely to concessions made to Moscow, just as he is wrong to mischaracterize my work as attributing the world's escape from nuclear catastrophe in 1962 simply to threats and presidential resolve.

Cuban Missile Crisis - Fifty Years On

Fifty years since Soviets blinked over the Cuban missile crisis

by: Joseph S. Nye
From: The Australian
October 12, 2012 12:00A

THIS month marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. Those 13 days in October 1962 that were probably the closest the world has come to a major nuclear war. President John F. Kennedy had publicly warned the Soviet Union not to introduce offensive missiles into Cuba. But Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to cross Kennedy's red line surreptitiously and confront the Americans with a fait accompli. When an American surveillance plane discovered the missiles, the crisis erupted.

Some of Kennedy's advisers urged an air strike and invasion to destroy the missiles. Kennedy mobilised troops, but also bought time by announcing a naval blockade of Cuba. The crisis subsided when Soviet ships carrying additional missiles turned back, and Khrushchev agreed to remove the existing missiles from the island. As then US Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it: "We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."

At first glance, this was a rational and predictable outcome. The United States had a 17-to-1 advantage in nuclear weaponry. The Soviets were simply outgunned.

And yet the US did not preemptively attack Soviet missile sites, which were relatively vulnerable, because the risk that even one or two of the Soviet missiles would be fired at an American city was enough to deter a first strike. In addition, both Kennedy and Khrushchev feared that rational strategies and careful calculation might spin out of control. Khrushchev offered a vivid metaphor in one of his letters to Kennedy: "We and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war."

In 1987, I was part of a group of scholars that met at Harvard University with Kennedy's surviving advisers to study the crisis. Robert McNamara, Kennedy's secretary of defence, said he became more cautious as the crisis unfolded. At the time, he thought that the probability of nuclear war resulting from the crisis might have been one in 50 (though he rated the risk much higher after he learned in the 1990s that the Soviets had already delivered nuclear weapons to Cuba).

Douglas Dillon, Kennedy's treasury secretary, said he thought that the risk of nuclear war had been about zero. He did not see how the situation could possibly have escalated to nuclear war, and thus had been willing to push the Soviets harder and to take more risks than McNamara was. General Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also believed that the risk of nuclear war was low, and he complained that the US let the Soviet Union off too easily. He felt that the Americans should have removed the Castro regime.

But the risks of losing control of the situation weighed heavily on Kennedy, too, which is why he took a more prudent position than some of his advisers would have liked. The moral of the story is that a little nuclear deterrence goes a long way.

Nonetheless, there are still ambiguities about the missile crisis that make it difficult to attribute the outcome entirely to the nuclear component. The public consensus was that the US won. But how much the US won, and why it won, is hard to determine.

There are at least two possible explanations of the outcome, in addition to Soviet acquiescence to America's superior nuclear firepower. One focuses on the importance of the two superpowers' relative stakes in the crisis: the US not only had a greater stake in neighbouring Cuba than the Soviets did, but could also bring conventional forces to bear. The naval blockade and the possibility of a US invasion strengthened the credibility of American deterrence, placing the psychological burden on the Soviets.

The other explanation questions the very premise that the Cuban missile crisis was an outright US victory. The Americans had three options: a "shoot-out" (bomb the missile sites); a "squeeze out" (blockade Cuba to convince the Soviets to withdraw the missiles); and a "buyout" (give the Soviets something they want).

For a long time, the participants said little about the buyout aspects of the solution. But subsequent evidence suggests that a quiet US promise to remove its obsolete missiles from Turkey and Italy was probably more important than was thought at the time (the US also gave a public assurance that it would not invade Cuba).

We can conclude that nuclear deterrence mattered in the crisis, and that the nuclear dimension certainly figured in Kennedy's thinking. But it was not the ratio of nuclear weapons that mattered so much as the fear that even a few nuclear weapons would wreak intolerable devastation.

How real were these risks? On October 27, 1962, just after Soviet forces in Cuba shot down a US surveillance plane (killing the pilot), a similar plane taking routine air samples near Alaska inadvertently violated Soviet air space in Siberia. Fortunately, it was not shot down. But, even more serious, unbeknownst to the Americans, Soviet forces in Cuba had been instructed to repel a US invasion, and had been authorised to use their tactical nuclear weapons to do so.

It is hard to imagine that such a nuclear attack would have remained merely tactical. Kenneth Waltz, an American scholar, recently published an article entitled "Why Iran Should Get the Bomb". In a rational, predictable world, such an outcome might produce stability. In the real world, the Cuban missile crisis suggests that it might not. As McNamara put it: "We lucked out."

Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard, is the author of The Future of Power

Justice Still Eludes Communist Coup Massacre Victims Michael Vatikiotis - Straits Times | October 08, 2012

Justice Still Eludes Communist Coup Massacre Victims
Michael Vatikiotis - Straits Times | October 08, 2012

Modern Indonesian history is a long tableau of violent struggle, first for freedom, then for power and, over much of the past 40 years, over faith and identity. Most of the victims of this struggle have been ordinary people. Neither a true account of all their suffering, nor justice of any kind, has been granted to any of them.

Yet the victims of the atrocities, relatives or survivors never forget the trauma. All too often, politics is blind to their suffering or the law imposes limits on liability. So when, for instance, survivors of a massacre perpetrated by Dutch colonial soldiers in a Javanese village in 1947 recently brought their case to The Hague, which by coincidence is home to the International Criminal Court, Dutch public prosecutors ruled that the statute of limitations on the atrocity had run out in 1971.

Local villagers allege that 450 people were killed by Dutch colonial troops in the village of Rawagede during the war of independence — the Dutch authorities challenge this and say at most 150 died. All the same, even though a lower court in The Hague ruled in favor of the victims, there will be no justice.

If memories of Indonesia's trauma under Dutch colonial rule can still stir the quest for justice, what about those who went on to suffer after Indonesia gained independence? At long last, there is some hope on the horizon.

A report issued at the end of July by the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) of Jakarta analyses the aftermath of the attempted coup in September 1965 that unleashed a ferocious backlash against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The report recommends that the government launch a national reconciliation process and that the attorney-general prosecute those found to be responsible.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono swiftly lent support to the call for justice and urged the attorney-general to follow up. Yudhoyono is reportedly considering framing a formal national apology for all human rights abuses since 1965 to be announced before he leaves office in 2014.

As many as half a million and possibly up to one million people were killed as the army, supported by local militias, rampaged across the country, torturing and slaughtering anyone identified as even faintly associated with the PKI. Almost half a century later, it is still hard to uncover the truth and despite the country's democratic transition, a culture of silence prevails.

Of course, it is scarcely credible that so many souls are extinguished and no one wants justice for their murder. For more than three decades, the victims suffered in silence under an authoritarian government that was still executing alleged members of the communist party two decades after the coup. Sadly, the quest for justice has not been much easier under democratic rule.

Six years after the downfall of president Suharto, a law was passed on truth and reconciliation. The law fell well short of ensuring either truth or reconciliation because, according to the Bill's provisions, only when the government grants the perpetrators an amnesty can the victims be given compensation. And amnesty is given only after the victims grant forgiveness.

It's hard to forgive when you don't know what happened. Democracy has made little difference to what children are taught in school about the events of 1965, which still focuses on the six generals murdered on the night of Sept 30; nothing is said about the bloody aftermath. Communism may no longer be an ideological force to reckon with, but it remains banned in Indonesia. Attempts to honour some of the dead exhumed from mass graves have been disrupted and human rights activists intimidated.

One would think that with the military stripped of its political power, there would be little impediment to the truth about how special army units distributed weapons and encouraged militia groups and ordinary villagers to bludgeon their neighbors to death.

Not so. The military may be technically relegated to the barracks, but the current president is a former general whose father-in-law, General Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, led the special forces units ordered to eliminate the PKI across Java and Bali in 1966. Moves towards addressing the 1965 killings have already galvanized some groups of retired officers to lobby against any move towards prosecution.

Perhaps with more at stake in hiding the truth than the army are some of the country's largest Muslim organizations, which lent a well-documented hand in the slaughter. Such is the nature of power and politics in Indonesia today that it would be a foolish politician who demands they be held accountable - especially as elections approach in 2014.

So even with this latest call for reconciliation and justice, the victims will likely have a long wait. They will most likely die before either truth or justice can be delivered. Move on, let bygones be bygones, they will be told. Nothing has been said or done for so long, why open up old wounds?

So if justice won't be forthcoming at the national level, what are the victims to do? Perhaps they could learn from their neighbors in Timor Leste, where the newly independent government has been similarly reluctant to delve too far into the truth behind more than a quarter century of violence before and during Indonesian rule. There are more than 60 million Javanese, but Timor Leste lost more than 200,000 people, as much as half of its natural population over those years.

Frustrated that a government-backed truth commission led only to whitewash and a meek and muted apology from Indonesia, Timorese communities have developed their own mechanisms for coping with their loss, drawing on local memories and building local memorials. It doesn't compensate them very much or amount to accountability, but it does remind surviving generations of their loss, and hopefully acts as a deterrent.

If only the victims of Java could be permitted even this small gesture of memory. Given prevailing political trends and realities, and recalling recent aborted attempts to recognize those who died, it doesn't seem likely.

The writer is the Asia regional director of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue. His new novel, "The Painter Of Lost Souls," dwells on the victims of the PKI killings in 1965.

Reprinted courtesy of The Straits Times