Historical analogies are never exact, and some can be misleading. With the announcement by President Trump of a naval blockade or quarantine of the Strait of Hormuz, the specter of another Cuban Missile Crisis comes to mind. In October 1962, President John F. Kennedy ordered the U.S. Navy to institute a blockade of Cuba to prevent more offensive weapons from being supplied to the Castro regime in Cuba by the Soviet Union. Kennedy used a blockade instead of air strikes on missile installations in Cuba to give maximum flexibility for diplomacy to end the crisis. Kennedy’s blockade worked, a deal was struck, but it was, to quote the Duke of Wellington about Waterloo, a “close run thing.”
The Persian Missile Crisis
Why Trump’s Hormuz gamble looks less like 1962.
