Cuba and After
Strange, Susan. “Cuba and After.” In Year Book of World Affairs 1963, edited by George W. Keeton, Georg Schwarzenberger, 1-28. London: Stevens, 1963.
Resisting the prevailing ‘informed’ analysis that the Cuban Missile Crisis was more an apparent danger than a real one, Strange sides with the ‘man in the street’ to argue it was a very real moment of possible war and as such profoundly affected the US system of alliances. However, she also suggests that the immediate aftermath appears to have been a retreat into détente, rather than renewed confrontation. She then turns to survey the impact of the crisis on the various strands of the Western alliance(s), and concludes that the inability of Britain to choose between America and Europe is as much a product of an American inability to decide whether it is serious about an Atlantic Union or not. Interestingly as in her later work, Strange was concerned about the manner in which the US was a hegemonic power and the problem of political will when it was threatened outside its traditional regional sphere of domination, or by the needs of multilateralism in the international system.
Keywords: Hegemony; Security; United States; International Relations