People of a certain age will be aware that the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis was, for the world as a whole, the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. The 1962 ‘Battle of Cuba’ was a ‘cold battle’ in the same sense that the Cold War was a ‘cold war’. (Only one actual shot was fired, by Cuba.) Nevertheless, it is appropriate to ask, “who won”?

In military events hot or cold – it is surprisingly difficult to answer such a question. But it’s actually quite easy in this case.

The cold Battle of Cuba was about three countries, and three charismatic leaders: Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet Union), John F Kennedy (United States), and Fidel Castro (Cuba). Following the disastrous American invasion of Cuba in 1961, Cuba had taken on the role of a Soviet Union ‘client state’ – hence a military proxy – of the Soviet Union. (Prior to the Bay of Pigs assault, Cuba, while a revolutionary country, was not a communist country; though at least one prominent revolutionary, the Argentinian doctor Che Guevara, was certainly of the communist faith and took every opportunity to convert Cuba into a polity that followed the Book of Marx. The actions of the United States facilitated Castro’s eventual conversion.)

The situation that Khrushchev faced in late 1961 was that NATO had an installation of American nuclear-armed missiles in Turkey (now Türkiye). While Turkey had a common border with the Soviet Union – Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia – the missiles were essentially facing north across the Black Sea, into Ukraine and Russia. This was a clear and open – though not widely publicised in ‘the west’ – security threat to the Soviet Union.

Taking advantage of the political fallout between Cuba and the United States, Khrushchev – in an act of bravado, indeed brinkmanship – negotiated with Castro to install nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, one of the few genuine security threats that the United States has ever faced.

The world trembled at the prospect of imminent (and possibly all-out) nuclear war. Castro looked forward to a hot battle which he was sure Khrushchev and Castro would together win. But Castro was doomed to disappointment. Khrushchev dismantled his missiles in Cuba, and Kennedy dismantled his missiles in Turkey.

So, compare, say, October 1963 with October 1961. The only real difference was that in 1961 there were American missiles in Turkey pointing in the direction of Moscow, and in 1963 there were not. Game, set, and match to Khrushchev. (And of course, the whole world was the winner, in that not a nuclear missile was fired in anger. Though the Cubans did shoot down an American reconnaissance aircraft.)

That’s not the narrative which the western world has taken on board though. In the West, it’s interpreted as a Soviet Union backdown, in the face of relentless diplomatic pressure from the Kennedy brothers (with Robert Kennedy playing a key negotiating role). Certainly, the world was on tenterhooks; brinkmanship can go disastrously wrong.

There are some analogies with the current Ukraine crisis. Though the Ukraine War is certainly a hot war.

Brinkmanship failed in 2021 and 2022. Nevertheless, Volodymyr Zelenskyy does pose as a good analogue to Fidel Castro (though not as an incipient communist!).

Donald Trump’s brinkmanship re China and the European Union

Trump’s war is a ‘trade war’, Winston Peters’ rejection of the ‘war analogy’ notwithstanding. This is a war that uses the language of war. Two longstanding mercantilist economic nations (China, European Union) and one mercantilist leader are slugging it out to see who can export more goods and services to the world; the prize being a mix of gold and virtual-gold, the proceeds of unbalanced trade.

(Historically the United States has also been a mercantilist nation, going right back to its origins as a ‘victim’ of British mercantilism in the eighteenth century. The United States has always been uneasy about its post World-War-Two role as global consumer-of-last-resort and its historical instincts towards mercantilism; an instinct that contributed substantially to the global Great Depression of 1930 to 1935. ‘Mercantilism’ is often confused by economists with ‘protectionism’, and indeed the American Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 were a mix of both.)

My reading of Donald Trump is that he is a mercantilist, but not a protectionist; that he’s not really a tariff-lover, just as Khrushchev was not really a missile lover. Instinctively, China and especially the European Union are protectionist as a way of supporting their ingrained mercantilism. But a country that is ‘great again’ – in this ‘making money’ context – can prevail in a trade war without tariffs. Indeed, that’s exactly why the United Kingdom moved sharply towards tree trade in the 1840s and 1850s. England had not lost its mercantilist spots. But at the heart of an English Empire within a British Empire, London had the power to win a ‘free trade’ trade war. It was the other would-be powers – the new kids on the global block; the USA, Germany’s Second Reich, and later Japan and Russia – which turned to tariff protection in order to stymie the United Kingdom.

Trump’s super-tariffs against China and the European Union – trade weapons, economic ‘missiles’ – are designed to get those two economic nations to remove their various trade barriers that existed in 2024. Once they do that, then Trump may remove his tariff threats.

Trump is playing brinkmanship in the way of Khrushchev. Xi Jinping is Kennedy; so, in a way, is Ursula von der Leyen. Canada, in a sense, is Cuba. (Though Mark Carney may not like to think of himself as Castro!)

If Trump gets his way, the United States’ economy in 2026 will be as free as it was in 2024. The Chinese and European Union economies will have significantly fewer tariff and non-tariff import barriers than in 2024. Significantly fewer ‘trade weapons’ poised to ‘rip off’ the United States! Canada will be much the same in 2026 as in 2024, albeit with a newfound sense of national identity.

Implications for the Wider World, and the Global Monetary System

The wider world will probably not be better off with a mercantilist war, albeit a free-trade war. When hippopotamuses start dancing …!

We already see how free trade in ‘big guns’ is creating military instability in Africa and South Asia. And we must expect to see the United States’ special role as the fulcrum of the world’s monetary system dissipate if the United States significantly reduces its trade deficits; requiring some other deficit countries to take up that challenge. Canada? Australia? India? United Kingdom? A new anti-mercantilist British Empire? I don’t think so. Türkiye? Saudi Arabia? Brazil? Maybe not. Japan? Maybe. Russia? If the Ukraine war ends, Russia will struggle to import more than it exports; though I am sure that Donald Trump would like to see the United States exporting lots of stuff to Russia.

The International Monetary Fund? Maybe, but only if it changes some of its narratives. The challenge here will be for it to reform itself in line with John Maynard Keynes’ proposals at and after Bretton Woods, the 1944 conference which set itself the task of establishing the post-war global monetary order. Keynes envisaged a World Reserve Bank; though he didn’t envisage monetary policy – with New Zealand in 1989 acknowledged as the world’s lead ‘reformer’ – falling into the hands of the ‘monetarists’ and their false narratives about inflation.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Here is a scenario, but first a broad brush-painted historical parallel.

Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the Nazi pogroms unfolded in the late 1930s.

But Hitler never intended to confine himself to Germany and decided to attack his neighbours simultaneously, on multiple fronts East, West, North and South.

This came against the advice of his generals, who believed that his imperialistic war-mongering should happen sequentially and that Germany should not fight the USSR until it had conquered Europe first, replenished with pillaged resources, and then reorganised its forces for the move East. They also advised that Germany should also avoid tangling with the US, which had pro-Nazi sympathisers in high places (like Charles Lindbergh) and was leaning towards neutrality in spite of FDR’s support for the UK.

Hitler ignored the advice and attacked in every direction, got bogged down in the Soviet winter, drew in the US in by attacking US shipping ferrying supplies to the UK, and wound up stretching his forces in North Africa, the entire Eastern front into Ukraine and the North Mediterranean states, the Scandinavian Peninsula and the UK itself.

In other words, he bit off too much in one chew and wound up paying the price for his over-reach.

Hitler did what he did because he could, thanks in part to the 1933 Enabling Law that superseded all other German laws and allowed him carte blanche to pursue his delusions. That proved to be his undoing because his ambition was not matched by his strategic acumen and resources when confronted by an armed alliance of adversaries.

pic.twitter.com/95GzNiAaqs

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 15, 2025

A version of this in US?
A version of this may be what is unfolding in the US. Using the cover of broad Executive Powers, Musk, Trump and their minions are throwing everything at the kitchen wall in order to see what sticks.

They are breaking domestic and international norms and conventions pursuant to the neo-reactionary “disruptor” and “chaos” theories propelling the US techno-authoritarian Right. They want to dismantle the US federal State, including the systems of checks and balances embodied in the three branches of government, subordinating all policy to the dictates of an uber-powerful Executive Branch.

In this view the Legislature and Judiciary serve as rubber stamp legitimating devices for Executive rule. Many of those in the Musk-lead DOGE teams are subscribers to this ideology.

At the same time the new oligarchs want to re-make the International order as well as interfere in the domestic politics of other liberal democracies. Musk openly campaigns for the German far-Right AfD in this year’s elections, he and Trump both celebrate neo-fascists like Viktor Urban in Hungry and Javier Milei in Argentina.

Trump utters delusional desires to “make” Canada the 51st State, forcibly regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, turn Gaza into a breach resort complex and eliminate international institutions like the World Trade Organisation and even NATO if it does not do what he says.

He imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, slaps sanctions on South Africa for land take-overs and because it took a case of genocide against Israel in the ICC, doubles down on his support for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians and is poised to sell-out Ukraine by using the threat of an aid cut-off to force the Ukrainians to cede sovereignty to Russia over all of their territory east of the Donbas River (and Crimea).

He even unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a teenaged display of symbolic posturing that ignores the fact that renaming the Gulf has no standing in international law and “America” is a term that refers to the North, Central and South land masses of the Western Hemisphere — i.e., it is not exclusive to or propriety of the United States.

Dismantling the globalised trade system
Trump wants to dismantle the globalised system of trade by using tariffs as a weapon as well as leverage, “punishing” nations for non-trade as well as trade issues because of their perceived dependence on the US market. This is evident in the tariffs (briefly) imposed on Canada, Mexico and Colombia over issues of immigration and re-patriation of US deportees.

In other words, Trump 2.0 is about redoing the World Order in his preferred image, doing everything more or less at once. It is as if Trump, Musk and their Project 2025 foot soldiers believe in a reinterpreted version of “shock and awe:” the audacity and speed of the multipronged attack on everything will cause opponents to be paralysed by the move and therefore will be unable to resist it.

That includes extending cultural wars by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Arts (a global institution) because he does not like the type of “culture” (read: African American) that is presented there and he wants to replace the Center’s repertoire with more “appropriate” (read: Anglo-Saxon) offerings. The assault on the liberal institutional order (at home and abroad), in other words, is holistic and universal in nature.

Trump’s advisers are even talking about ignoring court orders barring some of their actions, setting up a constitutional crisis scenario that they believe they will win in the current Supreme Court.

I am sure that Musk/Trump can get away with a fair few of these disruptions, but I am not certain that they can get away with all of them. They may have more success on the domestic rather than the international front given the power dynamics in each arena. In any event they do not seem to have thought much about the ripple effect responses to their moves, specifically the blowback that might ensue.

This is where the Nazi analogy applies. It could be that Musk and Trump have also bitten more than they can chew. They may have Project 2025 as their road map, but even maps do not always get the weather right, or accurately predict the mood of locals encountered along the way to wherever one proposes to go. That could well be–and it is my hope that it is–the cause of their undoing.

Overreach, egos, hubris and the unexpected detours around and obstacles presented by foreign and domestic actors just might upset their best laid plans.

Dotage is on daily public display
That brings up another possibility. Trump’s remarks in recent weeks are descending into senescence and caducity. His dotage is on daily public display. Only his medications have changed. He is more subdued than during the campaign but no less mad. He leaves the ranting and raving to Musk, who only truly listens to the fairies in his ear.

But it is possible that there are ghost whisperers in Trump’s ear as well (Stephen Miller, perhaps), who deliberately plant preposterous ideas in his feeble head and egg him on to pursue them. In the measure that he does so and begins to approach the red-line of obvious derangement, then perhaps the stage is being set from within by Musk and other oligarchs for a 25th Amendment move to unseat him in favour of JD Vance, a far more dangerous member of the techbro puppet masters’ cabal.

Remember that most of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires and millionaires and only Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment.

Vance has incentive to support this play because Trump (foolishly, IMO) has publicly stated that he does not see Vance as his successor and may even run for a third term. That is not want the techbro overlords wanted to hear, so they may have to move against Trump sooner rather than later if they want to impose their oligarchical vision on the US and world.

An impeachment would be futile given Congress’s make-up and Trump’s two-time wins over his Congressional opponents. A third try is a non-starter and would take too long anyway. Short of death (that has been suggested) the 25th Amendment is the only way to remove him.

It is at that point that I hope that things will start to unravel for them. It is hard to say what the MAGA-dominated Congress will do if laws are flouted on a wholesale basis and constituents begin to complain about the negative impact of DOGE cost-cutting on federal programmes. But one thing is certain, chaos begets chaos (because chaos is not synonymous with techbro libertarians’ dreams of anarchy) and disruption for disruption’s sake may not result in an improved socio-economic and political order.

Those are some of the “unknown unknowns” that the neo-con Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about.

In other words, vamos a ver–we shall see.

Dr Paul G Buchanan is the director of 36th-Parallel Assessments, a geopolitical and strategic analysis consultancy. This article is republished from Kiwipolitico with the permission of the author.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Dr Philip Cass

There was an American entrepreneur who claimed he was being pursued by the CIA and an Australian bookmaker whose racing career could best be described as colourful.

There were Libyans with money to spare and political ambitions in the Pacific and Russians after oil and a fishing port in Tonga.

The Australian and New Zealand governments were concerned. The US embassy in Fiji appears to have been slightly frantic.

READ MORE: Quixotic ruler who brought education, health and agricutural reform to his South Pacific kingdom

It was 1977 and as a major diplomatic crisis brewed in Nuku’alofa, in the midst of it all was King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, who was convinced that the way to prosperity for the kingdom was to build an airport that could handle 747 jumbo jets.

The king believed his dreams would be financed by the Bank of the South Pacific, a financial institution whose existence he had allowed and placed in the hands of John Meier.

The late King Tupou IV of Tonga (left) and fraudster John Meier … colourful dreams. Image: Kaniva News

Meier, an American financial adventurer, once claimed he had once seen the body of his former boss, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, in a deep freeze in Florida.

According to a US diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, other ambitious projects being floated included establishing a Tongan flag airline, establishing aircraft and boat construction industries, funding a pharmaceutical distribution centre and building an industrial park.

Diamonds in the Sky
Speaking to BBC reporter Julian Pettifer for the 1979 television series Diamonds in the Sky, the king said he planned to build a 3657.6 metre long runway that would turn Tonga into “an anchored aircraft carrier in mid-Pacific.”

At the time of the interview Fuaʻamotu International Airport, which started life as an American bomber base during the Second World War, could only take twin engine BAC1-11s (then operated by Air Pacific) and Boeing 737s.

He wanted to upgrade it to be able to take 747 jumbo jets which then stopped at Nadi in Fiji on their way to New Zealand and Australia. He believed that if the runway was available then the bigger airlines would want to use it.

He told Pettifer a dozen airlines had told him that they wanted to put Tonga on their flight schedules.

Pettifer was sceptical, noting the enormous cost of building and maintaining such a facility and remarking that “unfortunately, His Majesty may be unaware that in a world where there are not too many kings remaining, there may be a tendency among commoners to tell royalty what they imagine royalty want to hear.”

Regardless, the king saw a future in which Tonga was the base for an electronics industry, with parts being flown in and assembled by cheap labour. Looking at neighbouring Fiji, he also saw it as a boost for tourism in the kingdom.

All of this would, he believed, be funded by the BSP. Perhaps unknown to the king, Meier was wanted on charges of swindling his employer out of tens of millions of dollars and had fled to Canada before arriving on Tonga.

US government radar
Meier had persuaded the king to establish the Bank of the South Pacific, whose operations would be essentially controlled by Meier rather than the king or the Tongan government. Alongside Meier was a group of people with no apparent banking experience, but all of whom were on the US government’s radar.

Bridging the gap between the Americans and the king was Tonga’s honorary consul general in Sydney and Melbourne, Australian bookie and racehorse trainer Bill Waterhouse. Waterhouse would gain as much notoriety as wins on the track during his career.

Meier’s presence in the kingdom seriously alarmed Washington, Wellington and Canberra, which kept a close eye on proceedings. On September 16, 1977, the US Embassy in Suva sent a cable US diplomatic cable outlining its concerns.

It described the BSP as a merchant bank, but quite how it would work remained the subject of “considerable puzzlement”.

“Main office will apparently remain Vancouver, with Nuku’alofa branch handling offshore activities free of taxes according to charter approved by Privy Council,” the cable said.

The funding for the bank would come from Canadian, Japanese and Arab sources. The bank would be permitted to receive a cut of a head tax on passengers arriving in Tonga and would be involved in buying new aircraft.

The US report said the king had his heart set on an airport extension and had dismissed what it called “the fishy odour” surrounding the operation. It described King Tupou as “bright and determined,” although it said he was often “heedless of practical considerations”.

No truth to rumour
It said he had “smilingly” told the Commander-in-Chief of the US Navy’s Pacific Headquarters in Hawai’i that there was no truth to a rumour that the Soviet Union had approached him about building the airport, claiming the money would come from Canada.

The diplomatic cable warned that if the BSP collapsed the king could well turn to the Russians to improve the airport in return for fishing bases in Tonga. In 1976, Soviet oil companies had expressed interest in prospecting in Tonga and there were negotiations between Tonga and the Soviet Union about a loan to develop Tonga’s airport and make it 11,000 feet long, more than the required length for a fully laden 747.

In March 1978, King Tupou IV visited Libya to talk with President Muammar Gaddafi about a loan for the airport project.

Meier later claimed that in 1978 he had been offered financial assistance with the runway project by a Soviet Embassy official in Wellington. He also claimed that on the flight back to Nuku’alofa he had been warned by an American naval officer that Washington would block the runway project.

What also exercised Washington was that the king had given Meier a diplomatic passport, making him immune to extradition or arrest. Meier was wanted not just for allegedly defrauding the Hughes Corporation, but also for his alleged role in a murder.

Meier would always maintain his innocence and would claim that he had long been targeted by the US government for his role in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon.

Meier travelled extensively trying to sell bonds in the BSP, but as any substantial investment failed to materialise, there was intense pressure to find a way to have him arrested and brought back to the US.

Difficult to judge
How much of this was due to a desire by US authorities to bring Meier to justice and how much was an attempt to make sure the Russians and Libyans did not gain a foothold in the South Pacific is difficult to judge 40 years after the events.

Unfortunately, much of what has been written about John Meier since then often reads more like a conspiracy theory than sound analysis.

In July 1978 Meier was arrested in Sydney on an extradition warrant from the United States alleging fraud and tax evasion. Using his diplomatic passport, which had been endorsed by the Australian High Commission in Suva, Meier walked free, but the US, Australia and New Zealand were anxious to bring the matter to a head

Later that month the Australian High Commissioner in Suva and senior US diplomatic staff flew to Nuku’alofa to meet with King Tupou IV.

Before the meeting, the Tongan Supreme Court had ruled that the charter ordinance on which the BSP was based had been issued extra-constitutionally and would have to be resubmitted to Parliament in statutory bill form.

According to a US diplomatic report on the meeting between the Western diplomats and the king released by Wikileaks, the US Embassy in Wellington reported that the charter of the Bank of the South Pacific would not now be submitted to Parliament for confirmation.

The diplomatic cable said Meier’s associated with Tonga would be ended and he would have to deal with criminal charges as a private citizen. Police were ordered to confiscate his diplomatic passport if he returned to Tonga.

‘Not disturbed’
“The king indicated that he was not disturbed by the actions of the government of Australia or the US government,” the cable said.

The report continued: “The king’s face-saving comment at the end of the audience was that the Tongan government had used Meier as far as it could and that at least he had interested ‘others’ who were now willing to take up the airport project.

“The ‘others’ are apparently Japanese or Arab commercial interests, both of which the king has mentioned recently. We remain sceptics about the possibility of anyone picking up the project at this stage.”

Back in Australia, Meier sent his family to Canada and then – according to one highly colourful account – used a fake New Zealand passport supplied by the Cuban embassy to flee Australia. He reached Canada later that year, but was arrested and extradited to the United States where he was tried and convicted the following year of obstruction of justice.

He later claimed that while in jail the CIA tried to force him to sign a confession that he had deposited large sums of money from Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi into King Tupou’s bank account.

Soon after his release from prison he was indicted for murder, but after a tortuous legal process the case collapsed and he was freed after agreeing to a lesser charge, but did not serve any jail time.

Timelines:

Born in 1933, John Meier is believed to be still alive.

King Tupou IV died in September 2006.

Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered during a coup on October 20, 2011.

The Russians never did explore for oil or establish a fishing port in Tonga.

The Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991.

Today, the United States, Australia and New Zealand worry about Chinese expansion in the Pacific instead.

Fuaʻamotu airport’s main tarmac runway is now 2681 metres long, just enough for a 747. However, no jumbo jet has ever landed or taken off there because the runway is not strong enough to support its weight.

Dr Philip Cass is a media academic, associate editor of Pacific Journalism Review and editorial adviser to Kaniva Tonga. This article was first published by Kaniva Tonga which has a content sharing arrangement with the Pacific Media Centre.

References:

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz