Masculinity and the Cuban Missile Crisis: gender as pre-emptive deterrent

Abstract

Abstract Sixty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, academics and policy-makers still pore over the details for lessons in foreign policy. In those details, participants and observers regularly remark on the gendered dynamics of the crisis. Despite such observations and the vastness of the missile crisis literature, there remains little explicitly gendered research. This study takes up the feminist IR question ‘What work is gender doing here?’ by comparing the masculine performances of Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy. It finds that the three leaders embraced similar masculine traits in themselves that they denied in each other and that gender operated as a preemptive deterrent to mindsets and approaches considered feminine, such as diplomacy and negotiation. The ongoing pursuit of masculinity, particularly toughness and cool-headed rationality, were powerful though underappreciated motivations that introduced biases and counterproductive decisions, whereas purportedly feminine options—cooperation and negotiation—were rejected out of hand, never arose, or were concealed from the public. Gender analysis of security events challenges claims to rationally-driven brinkmanship and the counterproductive limitation of options. As crisis unfolds, awareness of how gender can operate as a preemptive deterrent can serve to keep more options and negotiable details on the table.