John McCain tested Obama's youth and supposed inexperience. McCain lost.
The GOP tested Obama's youth and supposed inexperience. The GOP lost.
Nikita Khrushchev tested John F. Kennedy's youth and supposed inexperience. Khrushchev lost.
Joe Biden predicts* that some foreign aggressor will test Obama's youth and supposed inexperience.
And Ross Douthat (God love him) argues that Biden's prediction is a gaffe because, well, because he "specifically highlighted Obama's youth...and specifically compared him to John F. Kennedy."
I guess I just don't understand politics.
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* I can't imagine what history Biden might be drawing upon in making that prediction.
UPDATES under the fold.
UPDATE I: Pejman Yousefzadeh disputes that Khrushchev "lost," citing the disastrous early meetings between Khrushchev and Kennedy and Kennedy's later concession on the Jupiter and Thor missiles in Turkey, and arguing that but for Kennedy's wet-behind-the-earsness, the Soviets might not have aggressed in the first place.
First, the issue isn't who was the more aggressive or dominating figure in a series of preliminary tête-à-têtes. The issue is who played the better game. The consensus among historians is that Kennedy clearly comes out ahead here. Strategically, the Soviet missiles removed from Cuba had far greater value than the American missiles subsequently removed from Turkey (advances on ICBMs by Americans had rendered MRBMs like those deployed in Turkey effectively obsolete). Reputationally, the whole affair was a huge loss of face to Khrushchev and the Soviets because the American concession on the MRBMs were never publicized.
Second, while it is "possible that the Cuban Missile Crisis would have never happened if someone like, say, Eisenhower was President," I see no reason to think it likely. We know for certain Eisenhower's relative maturity and eight years of executive experience was no bar to Soviet aggression. So while it seems true that Khrushchev thought Kennedy was weak because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, it's hard to see how that alone would justify a belief that Khrushchev would have steered a substantially different course had it been Eisenhower rather than Kennedy who'd deployed the MRBMs in Turkey.
Finally, and of course where I really take issue with Pejman's post, there is this "all-around nice guy" rhetoric. WTF?
UPDATE II: Pejman responds in an update of his own. His main point is that Kennedy sacrificed tactical flexibility by giving up land-based MRBMs. I think it's a fair point as far as it goes, but I still don't think it counters Kennedy's choice given the cost-benefit profile he faced. (Which leaves Pej's point about later foreign policy challenges this choice might have engendered even less proximate.)
As to Pej's citation of New York Times columnist James Reston's assessment of Kennedy's assessment of Khrushchev's assessment of Kennedy, I would simply say that the degrees of epistemic separation involved locate Reston's surmise of Khrushchev's psychology at considerable distance from the sort of evidence one would need to believe Khrushchev would've responded to the Jupiter and Thor deployments significantly differently had Eisenhower been president. (Besides which, the only historically viable counterfactual here would be Nixon -- who would have been just as young, new and "untested" a president as Kennedy.)
