In 1962, the world came closer to nuclear war than either before or since. In October of that year, the U.S. discovered that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba that could be used to launch attacks, including nuclear strikes on the United States. This was a redline for the U.S. and a great debate ensued within the corridors of power in Washington D.C. as to how to respond to this provocation. 

There were some in Washington, particularly among the Pentagon brass and State Department officials, who urged an immediate attack on Cuba to destroy the Soviet missiles — a move that could very well have led to a counterattack by the USSR and a full-scale exchange of nuclear weapons. However, it was just such a risk that President John F. Kennedy and his brother, then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to avoid, with President Kennedy famously declaring to the American public, "We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth . . . .”

In the end, while President Kennedy took a hard line against the Soviet Union’s actions in Cuba by setting up a naval quarantine of the island and insisting that any missiles launched against the U.S. from Cuba would be seen as a direct attack by the USSR and thus elicit a response in kind, the two young Kennedy brothers were, at the same time, seeking backchannels to negotiate a peaceful solution with the Soviet Union to end the crisis. As luck would have it, within 13 days, the crisis came to an end by way of negotiations, with Moscow agreeing to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in return for the U.S. agreeing to refrain from any invasion of the island and to quietly withdraw its own missiles from Turkey within six months. 

Fast forward to today. The U.S. has created what some experts have called “a reverse Cuban missile crisis” by threatening Moscow with nuclear-capable missiles on the borders of Russia, while admitting former Soviet Republics, on Russia’s immediate periphery, into NATO. Moscow has reluctantly tolerated such provocations over the years, in part because it felt too powerless to do anything about them. But President Putin made two things clear: first, that the admission of nearby Ukraine into NATO was a redline that he would not allow to be crossed; second, that Kiev’s continued assaults on the ethnic Russian population in the Donbas region of Ukraine were also provocations that he would not let stand, for those attacks had played a significant part in the 14,000 deaths in the Ukrainian conflict between 2014 and late February in 2022 when Russia directly intervened.

Throughout 2021, and into 2022, Putin demanded assurances from the U.S. and NATO that Ukraine would not be admitted as a NATO member — something which a number of U.S. officials had acknowledged over the years was a redline for Russia — and that Ukraine would abide by the two Minsk agreements, which required, among other things, that Ukraine halt its attacks on the Donbas. 

Unlike the Kennedy brothers and Soviet Premier Khruschev in 1962 who quickly negotiated a solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Biden showed no interest in averting a conflict. Rather, he seemed to want to provoke a further crisis, and even a war in Ukraine that, he hoped, might weaken if not destroy Russia, which, of course, is still a nuclear power. While seemingly in pursuit of these ends, Biden refused to give any assurances about NATO’s possible future admission of Ukraine, and, at best, he ignored Ukraine’s escalation of its shelling of the Donbas in early 2022. As for the latter, former Swiss intelligence officer and former NATO consultant, Jacques Baud, explains: 

In fact, as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun shelling the civilian population of Donbas, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to help Donbas militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbas being crushed. 

If he decided to intervene, Putin could invoke the international obligation of “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P). But he knew that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention would trigger a storm of sanctions. Therefore, whether Russian intervention was limited to the Donbas or went further to put pressure on the West for the status of the Ukraine, the price to pay would be the same. This is what he explained in his speech on February 21. 

On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbas Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them. 

The Ukrainian artillery bombardment of the Donbas population continued, and, on 23 February, the two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance. 

In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbas as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware. Jurists will judge. 

As could have been predicted, and as Biden was himself predicting, the Russian Federation, in response to these provocations, intervened militarily in Ukraine beginning on February 24, 2022. This same war continues to this day, with the world edging closer and closer to a nuclear confrontation. Indeed, President Biden recently acknowledged this, stating that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is greater now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, even while admitting this, President Biden has taken no steps to avert the crisis and, instead, it seems, has done everything that he can to prevent peace between Russia and Ukraine, even going so far as to help torpedo a peace deal, with a little help from the UK’s Boris Johnson, an accord that Russia and Ukraine had hammered out in principle in April of 2022.

In short, while President Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy saw their U.S. leadership task as that of sparing the world from the threat of nuclear war, President Biden now seems all too willing to take the world to the brink of this terrible fate. 

But Biden is not the only choice that we have for President, even within the Democratic Party. Thus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of JFK, has already thrown his hat into the ring. Until now, RFK Jr. is one of the few American leaders to honestly acknowledge that the U.S. and NATO acted in senseless ways to provoke the current crisis in Ukraine. He has made it clear that, in the spirit of his father and uncle, his priority, if he were to become our president, would be to seek a negotiated settlement of the crisis to spare Ukraine and Russia further bloodshed and to avert the nuclear war that President Biden acknowledges we are currently risking. This is the type of rational and sensible leadership we need, and it’s the type of leadership we had not long ago. For this reason, I support Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for president.

Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer living in Pittsburgh, PA. He served as in-house counsel for the United Steelworkers Union for 26 years, taught International Human Rights for 11 years at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and is the author of seven books, including The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017).