No need to get excited about Trump's rhetoric

WHEN yours truly was an undergraduate student majoring in international relations sometime at the end of the last century, one wouldn't be granted a bachelor of arts degree, not to mention a PhD, unless he or she had read, reread and scribbled many notes on the pages of Graham Allison's Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In what has become by now a classic analysis of foreign policy making, the renowned political scientist from Harvard University used the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as a case study in governmental decision-making and, more specifically, in the way former US president John F Kennedy (JFK) and his national security aides and Cabinet members succeeded in managing, and eventually resolving, the nuclear crisis with the then Soviet Union.

For the millennials among my readers who may not be familiar with the most dramatic post-World War II international crisis that followed the discovery by US intelligence agencies of Soviet nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island of Cuba, here is a reminder: The United States and the Soviet Union were ready at that time to go to war, to exchange nuclear weapons and in the process to destroy the entire planet.