On the night of the Michigan and Arizona primaries, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made an appearance in a completely different state, where he said that President John F. Kennedy’s last-minute nuclear compromise with the Soviet Union was an example of how U.S. foreign policy should be pursued.
In a speech at the rally in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Springfield, Va. — a state where only he and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will appear on the ballot for the state’s March 6 primary — Texas Rep. Paul made the comments while elaborating on the case that he had been consistently making for years — that the U.S. should explore diplomacy before intervening militarily. (RELATED: Full coverage of the Ron Paul campaign)
“They keep saying — the previous administration, this administration — ‘Take nothing off the table when it has to dealing with our enemies,’” Paul said. “Well, what about — why should we take off negotiations? Why not diplomacy? Should we take that off?”
Paul cited the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — when the world was taken to the brink of nuclear war right before an agreement was hatched out and war was averted — as an example of how foreign policy should be conducted.
“I remember very well after being drafted in 1962 during the Cuban crisis,” Paul said. “The Cuban crisis was dissipated rather rapidly precisely because John Kennedy called up [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev and said, ‘We have a problem here.’ And Khrushchev [said], ‘Well, we have a problem over here. You have missiles over in Turkey.’ So they made a deal. We took the missiles out of Turkey, he took the missiles out of Cuba, and we didn’t have to fight a nuclear war. Why can’t we talk to people who have weapons of mass destruction?”
Paul deemed he outcomes a success and said it is how U.S. foreign policy should be conducted when it comes to the situation surrounding Iran and its potential to acquire a nuclear weapon.
“Now, of course, they’re talking about attacking another country — Iran. They’re far from — and there’s no evidence they even have a weapon. They haven’t even proved — our CIA hasn’t proved to us or tell us they are building one. And yet the war drums are beating and beating. So, we have to be heard about this. This country does not need another war at all.”