Exclusive: NATO is putting an anti-missile base in Romania and brushing aside Russia’s fears, but – over the decades – the U.S. has reacted furiously to the possibility of nearby foreign military bases, recalls James W Carden.
By James W Carden
In April 1970, at what was roughly the halfway point in the 40-year Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon’s Nation Security Adviser Henry Kissinger thought he smelled a rat. Kissinger told an incredulous Nixon that the Soviets were stirring up trouble in the Middle East, attempting to provoke a war between the Israelis, Syrians and Jordanians in order to distract the United States from what it was really up to: building a naval base at Cienfuegos Bay in Cuba.
Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, recounts in his diaries that: “On September 18 we had received word that the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cienfuegos Bay, Cuba.” By Sept. 24 word had leaked to the press and that same day Nixon and Kissinger, according to Haldeman, “gave [Soviet Ambassador Anatoly] Dobrynin an ultimatum and over the next few weeks…the Soviets backed down and abandoned the base.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)
Well, not quite. As NYU historian and Nation contributor Greg Grandin expertly lays out in his groundbreaking account of Kissinger’s legacy, Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cienfuegos affair was little more than a figment of Kissinger’s fevered imagination. According to Grandin, “The Soviets didn’t back down because there was nothing to back down from.” Indeed, “Reconnaissance flights photographed every inch of Cienfuegos and couldn’t find one piece of heavy equipment that could be put to building such a port.”
If various accounts of the Nixon era – by among others, Haldeman, Grandin, Robert Dallek and Richard Reeves – are anything to go by, Kissinger was more than a touch unsound. But the basic premise behind his imaginary Cienfuegos threat was not altogether baseless (even if there never was to be a Soviet base): the U.S. did have definable security interests…