The recent escalation in tensions with North Korea have some drawing comparisons between the current showdown with Pyongyang and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
North Korea upped its threats against the U.S. on Tuesday, warning that “packs of wolves are coming in attack to strangle a nation.” The statement issued by the state-run Korean Central News Agency earned strong condemnation from President Trump.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Trump told reporters Tuesday during an event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
The comments from Trump and North Korea — which followed Saturday’s unanimous UN Security Council vote to sanction North Korea — marked an escalation in tensions between the U.S. and Pyongyang, and some elected officials are warning the current situation bears similarities to the Cuban missile crisis.
“It represents the greatest crisis probably since — let me rephrase that — undoubtedly since the Cuban missile crisis,” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told CNN on Tuesday. “The correlation is very similar. This is something that can hit us and our allies, and it’s a rogue nation that we suspect would use it.”
Like Issa, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., called the current situation with Pyongyang a “modern day Cuban missile crisis.”
“If this is not handled properly and it escalates out of control, we could trip a crosswire that we can’t even see right now, and begin an entanglement that turns military and then escalates out of our control very quickly,” Markey, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told MSNBC.
Even inside the White House, aides are comparing the showdown with North Korea to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Trump, urged Republicans and Democrats to back the president just as the public supported former President John F. Kennedy more than 50 years ago.
“These are trying times. During the Cuban missile crisis, we stood behind JFK,” Gorka told Fox News on Wednesday. “This is analogous to the Cuban missile crisis. We need to come together.”
Some experts, too, believe there are parallels between the threat posed by North Korea and the Cuban missile crisis.
“The biggest one is obvious: the very real danger that another nation could attack our homeland with a nuclear weapon — and that shock and angst that creates,” Harry J. Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, told the Washington Examiner. “There is one big comparison that gets missed — both incidents have some intense shock factor — that we did not see either situation coming.”
Kazianis said, in 1962, Americans were surprised Soviet Russia would send nuclear weapons to Cuba, a country so close to the U.S. Today, he said, people are expressing a similar shock that a country like North Korea is capable of building and attacking the U.S. with nuclear weapons.
Despite the warnings from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, others are pushing back on the suggestion that the threat posed by North Korea is similar to what the U.S. faced in 1962.
“Where do we stand with the threat from the North Korean nuclear program, and what are our options?” Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College wrote Wednesday. “We’re nowhere near a Cold War scenario like the Cuban missile crisis, or an ongoing mutual assured destruction standoff. (For one thing, the North Koreans do not have the ability, nor will they even, to obliterate the United States).”
