Almost 60 years ago in 1962, between October 16th to November 20th the United States was involved in the Cuban missile crisis. I am certainly old enough to remember this although I’m sure, at the ripe old age of 11, I was not fully aware of the magnitude of the issue at the time. I do, however, remember the drills we had to crawl under our desks in the case of a nuclear attack.
The United States had tried to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba which led to the infamous Bay of Pigs disaster. Subsequent to that, and to thwart any future invasions, Nikita Krushev, in a secret agreement with Fidel Castro, agreed to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. U.S. intelligence discovered the Soviet military buildup and on October 14th, a US U-2 aircraft (a program I worked on for years!) took pictures that showed missile sites under construction in Cuba. After discussing various options with his advisors, President Kennedy authorized a naval blockade of Cuba. Nikita Krushev vowed that the Soviet ships would push through the blockade and thus began a very, high-stakes game of chicken being played with nuclear weapons. In the end, the Soviet ships turned back from the blockade and due to significant backchannel communications, an agreement was finally reached to preclude the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles to Cuba.1
Why do I bring that up now? Because we are once again involved in a high stakes game of chicken, except this time, in the famous words of the comic strip character ‘Pogo’, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” The Republicans and Democrats are involved in a game of chicken that is almost every bit as dangerous as the nuclear standoff in the Cuban missile crisis. The threat during the Cold War game of chicken was for the physical annihilation of both the United States and the Soviet Union whereas the threat now is for a major economic disruption to the United States and the world economies. The consequences of both would be devastating.
One would hope that politicians are elected and sent to Washington to try to solve problems rather than use their positions to create problems but, given the radicalization of the political environment over the last few years, nothing could be further from the truth. The current crisis is a self-inflicted wound because words like ‘compromise’ have lost their meaning in the hallowed halls of our Capitol.
The national debt increased $7 trillion under the Trump administration due in large part to the tax cuts that were pushed through by the Republicans on a partisan basis. And during the Trump administration, the Democrats helped the Republicans raise the debt ceiling three times. Now that Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues have lost their majorities in both the Senate and House, they have all of a sudden rediscovered fiscal responsibility and are refusing to cooperate at all with the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling or getting anything accomplished. This is the same strategy McConnell employed when Obama was president. He is on the record saying that he was basically going to block anything Obama tried to do so that he would become a one term president.
McConnell wants to force the Democrats to use the process of reconciliation to raise the debt ceiling because they will not be able to then use it to pass the infrastructure bill. The Republicans will then filibuster the infrastructure bill to death. Meanwhile, the rest of us, are just pawns in this game. The American people deserve much better than this.
One of the things that averted a war between the United States and the Soviet Union was a lot of backchannel communications between the White House and the Kremlin. We can only hope that there is a similar level of backchannel communications between the Democratic and Republican leadership that will avoid this economic catastrophe. Although given the polarization and extremism that permeates today’s political environment, it is not much of a stretch to believe that there are those who would be willing to watch the US default on its debts in spite of the negative global ramifications that would follow.
Don’t forget that the same group of Republicans that are playing brinksmanship with our economy are the same group that are continuing to propagate ‘the Big Lie’, refused to support a bipartisan effort to look into the events leading up to the insurrection of Jan. 6th, and have become a major impediment to getting this insidious pandemic under control by undermining and blocking basic public health care measures.
Given all that, anything is possible, in today’s environment. So, just like during the Cuban missile crisis when we were on the verge of nuclear war, I guess we should all start practicing crawling under our desks and hope that we survive this self-inflicted insanity.