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Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Jutta Weldes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 316p. $47.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
The Cuban missile crisis may be one of the most studied (overstudied?) cases in the literature on international relations. Theorists of almost every stripe have turned to it for evidence, and a brief search through the University of California's on-line library catalog indicates 83 books and 103 journal articles on the case. Despite the abundance of scholarship, however, Jutta Weldes has written a fresh and compelling book, one that no scholar of foreign policy crises should skip.
Weldes begins with an interesting question (pp. 2-3): "How do we get from the Soviet missile deployment in Cuba to the Cuban missile crisis?" After the Kennedy administration discovered Nikita Khrushchev's attempts to sneak medium-range ballistic missiles into Cuba, the American interest in getting rid of them was self-evident, and the White House never considered inaction to be a viable response. Although theorists have spent millions of foundation dollars investigating Soviet motives, no one has asked why the administration believed it could not ignore the situation. The answer is nonobvious and essential, Weldes suggests, for understanding the origins of the crisis.
Why did American national interest require removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba? Weldes argues that the unthinkability of ignoring the deployment resulted from "the constant, numbing repetition of the same stock phrases and descriptions," repetitions that "contributed to the reception of these representations as common sense" (pp. 226-7). These stock phrases (e.g., "the Soviet Union is bent on world domination") were the linguistic effects of...