February 25, 2023
Biden Denies the Russians a Choice
By James Soriano
It is said that President John F. Kennedy gave the most important speech of his presidency before the graduating class at the American University in Washington, D.C., in June 1963. The occasion was five months before his death and eight months after he had confronted Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev over the deployment of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis would later be seen as a defining moment in U.S.-Russian relations. It was the closest approach of the two Cold War antagonists to a nuclear confrontation.
After the crisis subsided, Kennedy thought deeply about how to avoid a situation like that again and how the two great nuclear powers could find a way to live together. He wanted to say something about it publicly. In his speech, Kennedy signaled U.S. readiness to join with Russia in banning the future tests of nuclear weapons and he opened the prospect for peaceful coexistence. The speech is admired for Kennedy’s eloquence and for the initiative he took in conceiving it, but there is a passage in it that is relevant today as we look at the war unfolding in Ukraine.
Nuclear powers, Kennedy said, “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.”
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/biden_denies_the_russians_a_choice.html
