The Cuban Missile
Abstract
Missile refers to a guided airborne ranged weapon capable of self-propelled flight, usually by a jet engine or rocket motor. Bipolarity system is achieved where two states or unions are claiming of superpower. In other words, there exists no dominancy in the political realm of life. Therefore, political stability would be achieved with the existence of two states that claim to have equal powers, as demonstrated in World War II. The possibility of obtaining stability in two power world was reinforced by World War II were a chatter contemplation by the major contenders (the Soviet Union and the United States).
International politics is concerned with the Cuban crisis as a marvelous event. Even though it feels differently based on the professional point of view as it seems that we might have several crises in the near future (Blight, 1992:7). This event is deemed a litmus test to gauge whether international stability could be achieved in-terms of politics. There two aspects of the crisis as depicted from the Cuban event; carrying out the event in itself where though reconstruction of the events analysis he analyzes participants’ calculation, their successful and unsuccessful communication. The big question is whether the Cuban crisis help or will help to achieve international stability. The international situation is currently undergoing through a drastic change as the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union collapse (Jervis, 1998:86). In other words, the situation is still fluid simply because there exist unresolved questions in these regions, unsettling factors such as the Russian military forces and the development in North Korea. As a matter of fact, political stability cannot be achieved when states still scramble among other states for example, despite the challenges that Russia is facing. It still accumulates weapons more and more, indicating that they are in preparation for the very crisis that would befall the world soon. In particular, states that claims to be the superpower countries have rivalry among themselves. There may be no possibility of peace and political stability (Adler, 1997:363). Nations are however, busy making alignments on their strategies deployed from the postmodern world to secure their future. Inasmuch as there is proclamation of peace by the United States point of view, there is no peace at greater extent. Attempts have been made to ensure that some of the things, such as weapons, be directed from the same pool, but states have differed in this. Meaning that there is no co-existence mutual understanding among this member states. The bipolar superpowers have different countries that form allies, meaning that they are actually preparing for a crisis that is soon coming into existence.
The internationals present system is characterized by daily polycentrism, this event indicates that its latent bipolarity can come to the surface under some given circumstances. This event (crisis) was between two superpowers confronting each other out of their own interests and in according to its nature and outcome of different countries took sides and formed allies (Allison, 1969:701). After initial hesitation by the Soviet Union, the union attempted to reconcile directly with the United States and even went further agreeing to withdraw their missiles. They also made a proposal of conduction of inspection by America upon the destroyed or dismantled sites out of their own desire and not consulting from the Cuban government.
There is no existing proof or evidence showing that the Soviet Union consulted with any of its allies to put aside into Cuba. They agreed on how to respond to the America’s challenge and America’s evidence in consultation with its member state allies would rather mean that this was a proof of a pure bipolar confrontation (Krebs, 2015:809). When keenly observed, as the present international system is concerned, it looked like a universal system where each member can object to other members’ proposals that no state can change the international status quo by exertion of force. As a matter of fact, war is unthinkable. However, confrontation is the continuation of diplomacy (Elman, 1996:40). The use of force by threatening other nations that is out of none’s belief implies the use of international violence to bring about change in the environment that does not indicate positive political change.
Always crises tend to impose consequence which have course imposing effects on the international system. This can either be direct or indirect. However, the United States tried to maintain the status quo. Still, they failed in overthrowing the status quo by forcing a general of Soviet to detach from Cuba through deposition of Castro’s error Johnson et al., (2015:9). The largely anticipated effects of the unstable condition of the world may ultimately change the structure of the international system and may thus be of a great importance. The immediate and nominal outcome may points its importance as a result of the Soviet Union agreeing not to install weapons strategically in Cuba and the United states failing to accept to invade Cuba (Lebow, 2000:560). Repeating of the nominal outcome was to maintain the status quo, whereas this was to be made possible by a formal agreement between the two states in conflict without bragging off.
During this crisis, America gave the Soviet Union time to reconsider their moves in-order to focus on the advantages and disadvantages of their options. The advantage was on both sides through this pause as they would finally make a different choice (Laffey and Weldes, 2008:577). In the end, the move from both parties were a subject of unilateral control of each power. Even though the states of conflicting interests came to an agreement at some point, it was not a genuine agreement as they were not open to each other (Allison, 1969:718). There co-exist two schools of thought from this event, which is crisis participants and journalists and commentators. The professional, however, saw no need for a particular crisis to be explored or burst. Later there merged divergence in risk assessment where partial explanations were suggested out of the event (Adler, 2005:12). The participants had no political reason for exercising the risk of conflict in their communication.
Although crisis and war are unexpected disasters across the world since to a greater extent it affects the lives of many and ultimately leads to the death of innocent personalities, Cuba missile crisis, however, to a broader sense, has quite a number of advantages, which intern becomes our lessons to learn.
We can say that the world has changed in the decade from the time we experienced the cold war, thereby the old system can be termed gone. It is not easy to clearly say from our perspective that new system has taken over (Snyder and Borghard, 2011:445). However, Cuba’s missile crisis has led the entire globe to the realization of how to offer conflict resolution in a changing world leading to an end of bipolar era to an era of democratization. The rapid increasing globalization in terms of information dissemination and claim of human rights finally redefined sovereignty, thereby imposing states on new responsibilities (Winter, 2007:920). Cuban missile war was actually lethal as this marked the first venture of lethal warfare weapons that ever existed. In as much as we are in a new era, international conflicts still take or rather depict the old system of war where nation-states are acting through their own armed forces. The greatest deal here is that new strategies are developed to help curb the crisis that might befall us in the near future. Conflict resolution is a term that is broadly used to refer to the relevant efforts used to prevent or mitigate violence that might result from intergroup the conflict involving states and, to an extent, help reduce disagreements that are still underlying with us (Whyte and Levi, 1994:243). We highly hope and fully believe that conflicts from social setups are usually of on and off nature. The key goal is to ensure that conflicts are channeled in accepted norms fostering peaceful discussion and establishing rules and by-laws to help in problem-solving limiting all kinds of violence.
The new conditions’ are actually to validate some past resolution strategies that are more appealing, conceptualized while bringing to prominence new trending techniques that were not existing in the past. Negotiation is one of the major tool depicted from the Cuban missile crisis where the two conflicting parties ( United States and the Soviet Union ) came down to settle their controversial issues amicably gaining mutual understanding (Vasquez, 2000:13). In real sense, this focuses on searching of common interest aimed at prevention of brutal bloodshed reducing the risk of confrontation that might lead nuclear warfare. This is one resolution method that can be carried forward to the new era since it focuses on the point of interest shared among the conflicting parties.
Strategies and developments in the military sector allow for new interventions of enhancing new resolution methods whereby armed forces are directly used for the interventions daily. Another strategy is creating structural prevention, which involves creation of organizations or institutionalized systems of laws and rules, establishing non-violent channels while accommodating their interests and transforming conflicts at hand by finding a common ground (Lieber and Press, 2006:30). Typically, this structural method of problem solving focuses on problems experienced such as weak democratic grounds, deep ethnic divisions and other challenges. Within this structure, there exist numerous tools that make the system reliable or effective to its task. This includes; laws and policies, truth-telling and reconciliation, religious differences, and trained law officials, among others (Mueller, 2007: 17). In this structure, there are rules and regulations which must be followed to the latter, hence making their judgments worthwhile.
Equally, the world was totally different in post-cold war since the practitioner did not know about conflict and its management. Today’s is actually full of constitutions and electoral systems that states their consequences in times of conflicts and conflicts management in their respective states. When the Soviet Union accepted to be inferior, they actually stroke a new balance (Marfleet, 2000:21). Risk and stability played a major role in being responsible since the crisis only involved two parties still, if one of the parties had an international influence, then it ought to have affected other states as well. However, it’s seemed impossible for the Soviet Union to improve its relation with America and China.
China has no interest in becoming an ally with these two parties or forming any ally. This act led to mercilessly ridicule of the entire Soviet Union operations, and it was rationalization. However, it is not easy for the United States to vividly reassure the European countries on both points (Adler, 1997:324). For its success, the United States needs the involvement of the European nation. Americas response proved to be ambiguous in the first place as this exposes her to lots of risks to secure its areas of interest. The ideology here is tactics and strategies employed by the conflicting parties. As much as there was a crisis between these two antagonists, this crisis brought them to a better understanding (Elman, 1996:50). In a way, it opened dialogue between two leaders which, would help them prevent such a crisis from happening. It is true that the topic of the study does not promote international stability in any way but rather promotes instability.
Towards the end of this crisis, however, the environment was not favorable to the other parties that allied with the two conflicting parties. China, among others whose opinions were not to surrender before reaching the point of agreement to bring to an end to the crisis (Blight, 1992:17). Hence they are today not in good terms to come up together and form allies in the future for whatever reason. Out of the act it seems that in any state, each state will stand on its own to safeguard its areas of interest (Krebs, 2015:811). Lives of many very innocent people were lost; hence there was less observance of the law in regard to human rights.
Out of this, Cuba benefited a lot since there were many promises made to her by America once they entered into an agreement of which they did. Bipolarity stability is achieved once there is the distribution of power, stabilization of individual economy (Lebow, 2000:561). Once a county can stand alone and solve its problems without leaning on another country or state, we can say that is independence. We can see that Cuba achieved this when it opened up for a forum with the American government. Once a country/state is so dependent on another state for help, then it means that it is enslaved to that country, and therefore, it has no say or decision in anything. Stable governments can be categorized by government capacity, legitimacy, rational state democracy, human rights, development, and economic integration (Jervis, 1998:90). There are factors that undermine stability, and these are, indebtedness and environment degradation. The measures of a stable government or state includes good governance despite lower income level and presence of democracy.
This, therefore means that any government so stated to be stable must have enough resources proportionate to its citizens and therefore be able to provide for its citizens. Once the state is capable of working its way out for its people then it is a stable state politically. (Mercer, 2005:19). The greatest challenge that is encountered by most countries is the aspect of corruption where public resources are not spent on the people; rather, leaders deprive the citizens of their rights. The provision of public goods and infrastructure is always the central aspect and always used as a measure of the country’s effectiveness.
A well-resourced state can be mismanaged and become ineffective. Public funds and taxes should be effectively used to support the people’s lifestyle but not siphoned off in corruption. The level of corruption in a given state becomes an indicator of general performance as most corrupt state therefore becomes ineffective. When it is found to be less in performance good governance measured will thereby be associated by state stability (Whyte and Levi, 1994:250). Also, the rule of law, property rights, judicial independence, and the secular state will always contribute greatly to commercial relationships, protection of property, and other rights and enforcement of contracts. By this we realize that strong legal institutions play a very vital role in economic development which intern leads to stability.
A well-structured government where each structured is focused on its task proves at all cost to be stable, and this intern enhances its preparedness for the future outcomes. Having an independent ideology and stand also is a measure of a state being stable politically. Another aspect of it is about armory and weapons. For a state to be contented of security, this is a major aspect that a country should and must put into consideration because security of its citizens fully depends on it. Therefore it should be prepared by all means to protect the rights of its members (Trachtenberg, 1985:160). Once all our governments develop a motive of stand-alone in almost all aspects of life, then there is an assurance of international stability, and to an extent making a confined globe. The major challenge in the recent past has been the dependence of some countries on other countries and the issue of corruption where public funds are not used wisely, thereby increasing the level of dependency.
The moment a state understands its political rights and its economically fit, then the Cuban missile crisis is therefore proven fit for international stability as each member state will be in a position to safeguard itself and be aware of the relevant ways and means of solving problems amicably from within to without. When each member state effectively equips itself, its task becomes so easy (Vasquez, 2000:24). An international stability system means all states collectively have a sense of responsibility when on a joint basis, each playing its individual role forming part and parcel of the global system. With the idea of self-dependence, it is effortless and possible for the attain international stability politically, economically, and socially (Winter, 2007:920). When the Soviet Union accepted to be inferior, they actually stroke a new balance between risk and stability, playing a major role of being responsible since the crisis only involved two parties. Still if one of the parties had an international influence, then it ought to have affected other states as well (Trachtenberg, 1985:15). However, it was seemingly impossible for the Soviet Union to improve its relation with America and China.
China finally opted to develop their own machine guns and weapons and ensured that they could do their staff independently, thereby gaining respect from other nations. It is indeed developing in terms of infrastructure through the current technology and trained personnel. (Laffey, M. and Weldes, 2008:567). This intern boosts their economy and enables them to become more stable economically. When the Soviet Union accepted to be inferior, they actually striking a new balance by the way between risk and stability, playing a major role of being responsible since the crisis only involved two parties, but if one of the parties had an international influence, that ought to have affected other states as well. However, it seemed impossible for the Soviet Union to improve on its relation with America and China.
Inasmuch as the economic empowerment strategies differ from country to another, it is so importation to ensure that we empower our people, equip ourselves, and ensure that our peoples living standard are uplifted. Finally, the country to focuses on its defense forces availing the relevant machineries and firearms (Laffey and Weldes, 2008:570). The most important lesson however, that we learn is that stability cannot come where there are crisis and war. Therefore, we need to create peace at all times with our neighbors, even if it means showing some sense of inferiority, let it be so. We also need to articulate proper communication and problem-solving techniques as this will ensure that we achieve the intended international stability.
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