For 13 days back in October 1962, the world was one minute from midnight, one wrong move away from nuclear annihilation. John F. Kennedy, the American president, and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, squared off and stared each other down over the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from American soil.

Ultimately, the Soviets blinked, offering to remove the missiles in exchange for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba. But it was the closest the world had ever come to nuclear Armageddon.

Today, though, with the Red Chinese and the communist Cubans in discussions to build a multibillion-dollar spy base and joint military training facility on the Caribbean island, the world elicits a collective yawn.

Such is the Biden Effect, with the once-dominant American superpower now refusing to hold China accountable for its myriad abuses, now paralyzed by weakness at the prospect of Chinese troops on our nation’s doorstep, now reduced to feebly saying of this latest encroachment, “We’ve seen the report. It’s not accurate.”

As The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday: “Discussions for the facility on Cuba’s northern coast are at an advanced stage but not concluded, U.S. intelligence reports suggest. The Biden administration has contacted Cuban officials to try to forestall the deal, seeking to tap in to what it thinks might be Cuban concerns about ceding sovereignty. Beijing’s effort to establish a military training facility in Cuba hasn’t been previously reported.”

Then there’s this: “The White House declined to comment.”

Disgraceful. How about: Any effort by the Chinese to establish a military presence in Cuba will be met with a military response by the United States, something like that?

That’s pretty much the advice of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a House Republican and one of Joe Biden’s staunchest critics. (We know, the line is long.) During a House Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday, he said, “I support an Authorization for Use of Military Force to take out the Chinese assets in Cuba.”

Not that Biden will listen.

While the House Armed Services Committee was debating changes to the Defense Authorization Act, Gaetz was otherwise preoccupied: “We should be a lot more concerned that China is functionally turning Cuba into a stationary aircraft carrier right off the coast of Florida.”

Instead, we learn that Biden’s weak-kneed secretary of state, Antony Blinken, fresh off a bootlicking trip to Beijing after having been gaffed off by the Chinese for months, had failed to get the ChiComs to agree to a resumption by the two nations of their customary military-to-military communications, which had been in place to head off potential misunderstandings. Blinken, as the Journal reports, “also raised U.S. concerns about Chinese intelligence activities in Cuba, according to a State Department statement.”

“We’ve been taking steps over the past couple of years, diplomatically, wherever we’ve seen China trying to create that kind of presence,” said Blinken. “It is something of real concern. I was very clear about our concerns with China.”

Yep, we’re sure he got Xi Jinping’s attention by raising those concerns.

Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, has a different take. “The CCP seeks to paint any competitive action that does not further its authoritarian vision as a provocation,” he said. “The Biden administration must push back against this insidious framing, and not-so-veiled threat. Only one party seeks to upend the peaceful status quo in the Taiwan Strait, only one party is committing genocide, only one party is militarizing islands in the South China Sea — the Chinese Communist Party.”

During an interview earlier this week on Fox News, another House Republican, Florida’s Mike Waltz, who’s a retired Green Beret, provided this instructive contrast between what’s happening with Joe Biden as president versus what happened with Donald Trump as president: “Iran hits our embassy and kills an American? Soleimani, their field general, dead. ISIS gets out of control, continues to attack us in Europe? Baghdadi dead. The Russians cross a red line in Syria? 300 Russian Wagner mercenaries dead. And deterrence was restored. That’s how you keep the peace. That’s how you prevent wars. But you have a bunch of academics right now like Blinken, like Austin and others … and it could not be more dangerous.”

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Weakness is provocative. And Joe Biden is nothing if not weak.