{In the vein of Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, this week I will be providing additional background concerning the United States' Cold War policy (the foreground of the U.S.'s military buildup, including increased nuclear capabilities) by examining the failed Bay of Pigs operation in closer detail.}
Background:
The overall context for the Bay of Pigs case ultimately rests on NSC-68 (1950), the document in which the United States re-articulated its foreign policy via advocation of rearmament in response to a perceived Soviet plot of world domination (and thus the concurrent spread of communism) in the midst of the Cold War. Arguably, NSC-68 adopts a very realist view of the international system in acknowledging the uncertainty the United States had about the international aspirations of the Soviet Union. It is in this vein that the Kennedy administration considered carrying out Eisenhower’s CIA-developed amphibious invasion of Cuba (dubbed Operation Zapata) to topple the Communist-sympathizing regime of Fidel Castro. Going hand-in hand with NSC-68 and rearmament was the domino theory (which heavily influenced the realist foreign policy thinking expressed in NSC-68) in which if one country fell to communism at the hands of the Soviets, then more countries would inevitably fall, jeopardizing America’s hegemonic interests in the world. Seemingly demonstrative of this was the establishment of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), which seemed to confirm NSC-68’s predictions in that Asia seemed to have been compromised. Thus, America turned towards Latin America.
Cuba was perceived as an even greater threat because it was in America’s backyard and thus strategically compromised the United States’ ability to maintain a defensive buffer between it and the Soviet sphere of influence. Complicating matters further was the possible Soviet buildup of nuclear weapons in particular predicted by NSC-68 and the possibility of Cuba being a symptom of further breakdown of the United States’ defensive buffer in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple Latin American regimes potentially sympathetic to the communist cause.
Thus, President Kennedy and his administration faced pressures from multiple fronts politically in regards to the rise of the Castro regime in Cuba in 1961, a country that had previously enjoyed regular diplomatic relations with the United States under the Batista regime. Meanwhile on the home front, Kennedy’s campaign had capitalized on domestic fears of communism and could not renege on its promises to stand up to the Soviets. The Democratic president faced considerable political pressure from a vocal Republican coalition in Congress as well as from his own party to not be “soft” regarding the spread of communism. Seen in this context, Operation Zapata becomes a potentially plausible and very effective counter-political demonstration against critics in sending the message that the administration was not afraid to use military force to secure United States interests, even when possibly provoking an opposing great power like the Soviet Union into war. Up until this point, the United States and the Soviet Union had largely fought each other in proxy conflicts within various allied regions of the world and fought diplomatically through institutions like the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where they wielded veto power that was often used to send political messages to the other party. In the end, the prospect of a direct confrontation between the two great world powers in the bipolar international system became that much more of a possibility with Kennedy’s decision-making in the Bay of Pigs case (and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis).
Outcomes:
In understanding Bay of Pigs case, I turned to the homo psychologicus and realist theoretical perspectives to analyze how the administration acted before and during Operation Zapata. Insofar as the external environmental conditions at the time were important, I argue that it is essential to understand how key foreign policy events at the time and in the past were assimilated into the existing mental schema and other cognitive structures of the Kennedy administration. Therefore, I argue that analogical reasoning and cognitive errors along with realist thinking heavily influenced the decision-making of Kennedy’s administration to go ahead with the ultimately flawed operation. To summarize, Operation Zapata was a catastrophic failure, with the US-backed resistance forces ultimately routed by Castro’s military because of a failure of a second air strike by U.S. planes (an order that the CIA assumed President Kennedy would make, lest he ultimately betray the resistance fighters). A retreat of the fighters to the Escambray Mountains was essentially nullified because of the geographical location chosen for the operation allowed Castro’s forces to easily flank and capture the resistance fighters.
Starting with the analogical reasoning that the administration used, I wish to highlight the following foreign policy analogies espoused by the administration: Munich, China (Eisenhower’s domino theory), and Guatemala. The Munich case goes hand in hand with the domino theory idea coined by the Eisenhower administration in that the Soviet Union and its allies were representative of a dictatorial and expansionary adversary that would not be open to a strategy of diplomacy or appeasement. This closely follows the line of realist theory in which states will often use force to provide for their security rather than diplomatic cooperation. In the case of the United States, the Kennedy administration felt that Operation Zapata would perhaps deter the spread of communism better in Latin America, in particular El Salvador and Nicaragua, than a similar Chamberlain-esque appeasement strategy of Castro, and thus showcase U.S. leadership in halting the spread of communism in the process (and perhaps make up for the losses the U.S. suffered in Asia).
Following this line of realist reasoning, the administration thus had the perfect justification for the use of American military force (albeit covertly, as was planned) in Cuba, essentially portraying Castro as another potentially expansionist dictator. However, the fateful analogy that doomed the operation was the 1951 case of Operation PB Success in Guatemala, in which the U.S. was successful in deposing communist sympathizer Jacobo Arbenz. In the end, Arbenz was ultimately cowed by the threat of US military force and fundamental logistical flaws in the operation that would ultimately pass to Operation Zapata were hidden because the plan did not need to be fully executed. Despite any similarities that could be drawn from Operation PB Success to Cuba in terms of the operational plans (a US-trained force of exiles and a strike against government forces under guise of a popular uprising), the one difference involved the fact that Operation Zapata was an amphibious operation. Therefore, its potential success was very uncertain.
Tying together these commonly-shared worldviews and accompanying foreign policy analogies is the concept of cognitive consistency. The Kennedy administration ultimately succumbed to this cognitive error in rejecting any contrary intelligence that did not necessarily conform to their preconceived realist worldviews and analogies, such as the operational differences between the Cuba and Guatemala cases. Especially relevant to this case is the CIA’s reliance on Kennedy’s use of military force to support the exiles if anything went awry and the assumption that the success of a revolt would be assured because of Castro’s unpopularity. Their intelligence proved contrary. Ultimately, the mission’s further infeasibility was ignored as key mission plans were published in the New York Times beforehand, ruining the intended covert nature of the operation.
In the end, the Kennedy administration failed to overcome cognitive consistency and foreign policy analogies in the Bay of Pigs case, which ended in catastrophic failure and perhaps ultimately countered U.S. security interests in Latin America and elsewhere.
{Foreign policy is always filled with uncertainty, which undoubtedly is magnified when one takes into account the people in charge during everyday or crisis situations who may not have all the information needed to make informed decisions. It is further complicated when an idea turns into a mindset that puts blinders on foreign policy-makers (like that a certain country/countries/religious group is/are out to achieve world domination). Does the United States have the ability to minimize these latter risks inherent in the conduct of today's foreign policy, especially in the present age of more powerful nuclear weapons, a proposed Cold War-like military build-up, and toxic anti-immigrant populism? We shall see.}
Sources Cited:
Ikenberry, G. John, and Peter L. Trubowitz. (2015). American Foreign Policy: Theoretical
Essays. 7th Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Houghton, David Patrick. (2013). The Decision Point: Six Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy
Decision Making. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
United States State Department: Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. (2015, July 21). “U.S. Relations with Cuba”. Retrieved September 28, 2016, from http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2886.htm.
United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “A Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations, By Country, Since 1776: Cuba.” Retrieved September 24, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/countries/cuba.
United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “Milestones: 1945–1952: NSC-68.” Retrieved September 23, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/NSC68.
United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “Milestones: 1945–1952: The Chinese Revolution of 1949.” Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/chinese-rev.
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