A foreign policy driven by the will for dialogue and cooperation

There are at least two lessons that can be drawn from the foreign policy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States from January 20, 1961, to November 22, 1963. The first concerns the use of intelligence, a topic of current relevance given the debate on the inability of Western defence forces to predict the conflicts they are currently grappling with — Gaza and Ukraine are prominent examples. Kennedy’s experience tells a story of both failure and success. On one hand, there was the Bay of Pigs invasion, initiated on April 15, 1961, with a bombardment carried out by American planes disguised as Cuban aircraft and piloted by exiles. Washington’s objective was to prevent a Latin American country from joining the communist bloc. According to experts from the cia and the Pentagon, the Cuban peasant population was hostile to ...