Yet the brush with Armageddon that was the Cuban Missile Crisis does not lessen the fact that respecting Cold War spheres of influence played a large role in averting World War III. Demanding the liberation of Eastern European “captive nations” formed a staple of U.S. Cold War propaganda. The Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the “Prague Spring” of 1968 offered U.S. presidents an opportunity to translate rhetoric into action. Yet Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon Baines Johnson each in turn passed on the opportunity, tacitly acknowledging that the far side of the East-West divide fell within the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. This was bad news for Hungarians and Czechoslovaks, of course. But arguably it was good news for the survival of humankind.
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