From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war in Ukraine, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union—and later post-Soviet Russia—have followed a dangerous pattern: miscalculation and misadventure followed by blowback. Both sides have pursued strategies and have plunged into involvements that backfired, damaged their own national interests, and destabilized international security. Unless this history is faced honestly, there is a risk that the two nuclear superpowers will continue repeating mistakes with unintended catastrophic consequences.
Early in the Cold War, American policy often failed to adjust to important shifts in Moscow. After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, seasoned diplomats and analysts urged Washington to test whether the new Soviet leadership might pursue a less confrontational line. The father of U.S. containment policy, George F. Kennan, though no longer in government, warned against treating the Soviet Union as immutable and pointed to “evidence of flexibility, of experimentation, of responses to circumstance.” Charles E. Bohlen, who succeeded Kennan as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1957, reported that the Kremlin’s new collective leadership appeared intent on consolidating power at home and sought a breathing spell from confrontation.
Scholars such as the influential Sovietologist Philip Edward Mosely argued that Khrushchev’s language of “peaceful coexistence” reflected more than mere propaganda. Within the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harold Stassen, who served as the president’s special assistant for disarmament from 1955 to 1958, pressed for serious consideration of Soviet arms-control proposals. All of these voices were basically brushed aside by an increasingly hawkish and rigid national security establishment. The costs of that rigidity became clear in the confrontation that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, demonstrating the dangers of poor judgment and misperception and the terrifying reality of deterrence through Mutual Assured Destruction. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev misjudged U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s resolve, believing he could install nuclear missiles in Cuba without provoking confrontation. In Washington, officials failed to appreciate how threatening their deployment of 15 intermediate-range Jupiter ballistic missiles in Turkey and 30 more in Italy as part of NATO strategy appeared to Moscow. Khrushchev’s move was in part a direct response to this strategic imbalance.
The crisis ended when Moscow agreed to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in return for a public pledge by the U.S. not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy. What one side saw as deterrence, the other viewed as provocation—and the result was near catastrophe. Although Khrushchev won concessions, the perception of a humiliating retreat fatally weakened him, contributing to his removal from power in 1964.
In the U.S. the outcome was remembered mainly as a triumph. Kennedy’s public image as a tough leader capable of standing up to Soviet aggression was markedly enhanced following the earlier failed U.S. invasion of Cuba—the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle—which had raised doubts about his leadership capabilities. But the deeper lesson—that both sides had stumbled into a confrontation that could have destroyed humanity—was only partly appreciated. The crisis led to the establishment of a teletype “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin to prevent future miscommunications and to a series of arms control agreements. But Moscow embarked on a massive nuclear buildup over the next quarter-century. Moreover, Cuba’s security was strengthened, solidifying its position as a Soviet client state—just 90 miles from the U.S.—emboldened to eventually intervene militarily, overtly and covertly, in conflicts in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
Afghanistan, 9/11, and NATO’s Enlargement
Afghanistan was another defining episode. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981, later acknowledged that U.S. aid to Afghan rebels secretly began months before the Soviet invasion in 1979, with the deliberate aim of luring Moscow into a costly conflict. When Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in December of that year, the effort escalated dramatically. Billions in U.S. and Saudi funds flowed through Pakistan’s intelligence services to arm the mujahideen, and the introduction of Stinger missiles shifted the balance of the war. President Ronald Reagan expanded it into the largest-ever U.S. covert operation.
The conflict became what Mikhail Gorbachev called a “bleeding wound,” hastening the Soviet Union’s collapse. But the blowback was horrific. Afghanistan became a crucible of jihadist radicalization, producing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and ultimately drawing the U.S. into two decades of war following the terrorist group’s September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. homeland.
The Cold War’s end was expected to usher in a new era of peace and stability. Instead, decisions taken in the 1990s and 2000s deepened mistrust. As former Warsaw Pact states sought NATO membership, Washington viewed enlargement as stabilizing. Russian leaders, however, saw it as betrayal, claiming they had been given assurances during German reunification that NATO would not move eastward.
Boris Yeltsin protested, Vladimir Putin internalized the grievance, and resentment hardened. Washington assumed Russia was too weak to resist. But enlargement, intended to consolidate peace, became a seed of future confrontation.
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the most consequential blunder of the post–Cold War era. Putin underestimated Ukraine’s resilience and misjudged the resolve of the Western alliance. Far from fracturing, NATO was revitalized. Ukraine’s identity was strengthened, and severe Western sanctions isolated Russia from the West, making it heavily reliant on China for trade, technology, and diplomatic support.
The invasion also ended Europe’s longest tradition of neutrality. Finland joined NATO in 2023. Sweden, neutral since the Napoleonic era, followed in 2024–25. Instead of curbing NATO, Russia’s war of aggression produced NATO’s largest expansion in decades and transformed the Baltic Sea into what has frequently been called a “NATO lake” owing to control by the alliance of almost the entire Baltic coastline and key strategic islands.
Nearly eight years to the day before Russia’s invasion, Henry Kissinger had warned in a March 2014 op-ed article in the Washington Post that “Ukraine should not join NATO” and should instead become a neutral East-West bridge, while U.S. and European policy should avoid feeding Russia’s fears that its security or existence was under threat. That advice was ignored. Encouraged to believe it could partner with NATO and eventually be accepted as a member of the alliance, Ukraine became a flashpoint of confrontation and the stage for the largest and most devastating war in Europe since World War II.
In short, from the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the proxy war in Afghanistan, from NATO expansion to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, actions born of misjudgment have resulted in outcomes neither side intended—with each insisting the other is solely to blame.
Russia’s authoritarian rule suppresses serious discussion and debate. But in the U.S. and allied nations, the aversion to meaningful discourse is harder to excuse. Democracies owe their citizens an honest accounting of past errors to learn from them, not to justify or excuse Moscow’s behavior.
If policymakers keep turning from history, the dangerous dynamic of blunder and blowback will continue—with risks no generation should be asked to bear.