18

Defeating Détente

By the mid-1970s it seemed as if the Cold War had become an entrenched international system, although at significantly lower levels of tension than before. Some people believed that détente would, over time, help end the conflict, through social and economic convergence or through the dismantling of iron curtains through trust building and human contact. But even those who thought that the Cold War was there to stay claimed that the conflict had been transformed. Instead of ever-higher global tension, the world seemed headed for some form of duopoly, in which the United States and the Soviet Union shared responsibility for limiting regional conflicts, making sure that nuclear weapons did not proliferate, and avoiding restlessness within their own ranks. Rivalry would continue, even precarious rivalry as that in the Middle East. But the Cold War was manageable and stable. Very few people believed that Leonid Brezhnev or Gerald Ford ultimately would set the world on fire because of their beliefs. Brezhnev, the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent reported in 1973, “has gained a reputation in the West for his taste for food, drink, hunting and fast cars, and problems with weight and smoking. A rising flow of Western visitors has found him gregarious and talkative and has come away… struck by his warm smile.”¹ A man, it seemed, who enjoyed life so much that ideology was of less consequence.

There were of course dissidents to this ameliorated view of the Cold War. In the Soviet Union and eastern Europe some people opposed the authoritarian rule of Communist bosses. The Chinese, set on their own course, cursed the prospect of a Soviet-US global condominium. The Islamists condemned the rule of infidel powers that tried to prevent the return of Muslims to God. In the United States neoconservatives raged against the compromises with evil that the Nixon Administration had carried out. America, they claimed, was selling its birthright for a short period of peace with the enemy. The Soviet Union, claimed Ronald Reagan in his race against Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, had its sights set on global hegemony. It was for the United States to resist it. “We did not seek world leadership,” Reagan said, “it was thrust upon us. It has been our destiny almost from the first moment this land was settled. If we fail to keep our rendezvous with destiny or, as John Winthrop said in 1630, ‘Deal falsely with our God,’ we shall be made ‘a story and byword throughout the world.’ Americans are hungry to feel once again a sense of mission and greatness.”²

Although the détente policies of Nixon and Brezhnev had their enemies in various places, it is difficult to imagine the collapse of détente without the changes in US politics that took place between 1973 and 1976. The Watergate affair convinced many Americans that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the country was governed. Nixon, Kissinger, and the secrecy with which the agreements with the Soviet Union had been carried out were part of the problem. Senator Henry Jackson, a Democrat from Washington State, attacked the Administration for not realizing that the Soviet Union consistently violated human rights and therefore could not be trusted in international affairs. Détente was one of the many ways in which Nixon and his successor had hoodwinked the American people, Jackson believed. In 1974 Jackson and a majority in the Senate forced through an amendment stipulating that the United States could not grant Most Favored Nation status in trade to countries that had a bad human rights record. This included the Soviet Union, which, however, was given an eighteen-month waiver to improve its practices, including the right to emigrate. The Soviets were furious, but Kissinger told them that the Administration would overcome these problems.

In the election campaign of 1976 Ford came under increasing pressure from fellow Republicans who wanted to repudiate détente. The problem with Nixon’s approach, they claimed, was that it made the United States into just another country in the world. Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California who ran against Ford for the nomination in 1976, claimed on the campaign trail that

under Messrs. Kissinger and Ford this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best.… Our nation is in danger. Peace does not come from weakness or from retreat. It comes from restoration of American military superiority.… Ask the people of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary all the others: East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania ask them what it’s like to live in a world where the Soviet Union is Number One. I don’t want to live in that kind of world; and I don’t think you do either.… I believe God had a divine purpose in placing this land between the two great oceans to be found by those who had a special love of freedom and the courage to leave the countries of their birth. From our forefathers to our modern-day immigrants, we’ve come from every corner of the earth, from every race and every ethnic background, and we’ve become a new breed in the world. We’re Americans and we have a rendezvous with destiny.³

Reagan’s rhetoric did not earn him his party’s presidential nomination in 1976. Ford was nominated, but then proceeded to lose the election to the Democratic neophyte Jimmy Carter, in part because of the damage the Republican Right had done to their own candidate. By the 1976 election, the neoconservative coalition had become a force to be reckoned with in American politics. They opposed domestic reforms to advantage women and ethnic minorities and felt that the upheavals of the 1960s had made the United States almost ungovernable. The country could therefore easily be taken advantage of by the Soviets or by Third World states that attacked America but were happy to receive US aid when needed.

This sense of being beleaguered from without and abandoned by their own leaders was shared by many Americans, even those who did not support Reagan in 1976. Economic growth was sluggish and inflation higher than it had been for three decades, reaching 13 percent toward the end of the decade. The Ford Administration’s critics started using the term “stagflation,” symbolizing all that was wrong with the US economy. Although almost all major economies experienced the same combination of low growth and high inflation during the 1970s, critics of the US Administration presented it as if it were a particular US phenomenon, and a telltale sign of Washington’s weakness vis-à-vis other countries. In reality, stagflation was a product of free-floating currencies, globalization of capital and investment, increasing raw material prices, and, over time, increasing international competition. Gradually, these developments would actually help the US economy recover faster than many others. But seen from the mid-1970s, it all seemed to be doom and gloom. The price and wage freezes that the Nixon Administration introduced did not help, either with the economy or the public mood.⁴

THE AMERICAN SENSE of their country being poorly led and taken advantage of was also advanced by real developments in international affairs that made the United States look wayward and weak. In Indochina, after a brief lull in the fighting after the completion of the US withdrawal in 1973, the revolutionary armies went on the offensive. Although both of North Vietnam’s allies, the Soviet Union and China, had urged caution, the North Vietnamese armies started an all-out attack on South Vietnam in December 1974. The guarantee of increases in Soviet supplies were of critical importance in Hanoi’s decision-making. For the Soviets, expanding support for North Vietnam was not a break with the détente policy; indeed, as Brezhnev pointed out repeatedly, Moscow had never promised to reduce its aid to Vietnam. On the contrary, Soviet advisers in Hanoi increasingly agreed with their Vietnamese hosts that the South was ripe for picking. The Chinese also continued their assistance, in part to rival the Soviets. No wonder Le Duan and the other Vietnamese Communist leaders saw 1975 as a unique opportunity to reunify their country, one that might not come back soon, especially given the increasing political dissonance between them and leaders in Beijing.

The North Vietnamese offensive was in complete violation of the agreements that country had signed only a year earlier. Although the South Vietnamese armies on paper seemed well placed to defend their territory, the lack of coordination among their military units, the massive refugee problem that the offensive created, and the psychological blow of the US withdrawal combined to defeat South Vietnam fast. Although the North Vietnamese were aware of their strategic superiority, they were still surprised at how quickly resistance folded. By March 1975 the South Vietnamese forces had been driven out of the central highlands. Their enemies then proceeded to swallow up the coastal cities and bases one by one. In April the North Vietnamese leadership ordered all their forces to head straight for Saigon.

South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu resigned 21 April, accusing his former American backers of being “unfair… inhumane… irresponsible.” “You ran away and left us to do the job that you could not do,” Thieu said.⁵ Congress had already cut assistance for South Vietnam in half in 1974, and further US aid in 1975 probably would not have made much of a difference on the battlefield. South Vietnam’s calls for the United States to live up to Nixon’s unofficial promises of military support in case of a northern attack went unheeded in Washington. Just after Thieu’s bitter resignation, President Ford told university students that “America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.… The fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.”⁶

North Vietnamese forces, supported by the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, took Saigon 30 April 1975. Images of American helicopters airlifting out US personnel and as many terrified South Vietnamese officials as they could carry did no good for America’s standing in the world. Whatever way it was construed, the end of the Vietnam wars was a defeat for American power in Asia. At home, critics attacked the Administration for apathy and cowardice. And although their claims that US Cold War policies had fallen from omnipotence to impotence were certainly exaggerated, the flight from Saigon was undoubtedly the nadir of US foreign policy in the postwar era. Communists and Third World revolutionaries celebrated, as did many young people in the United States and Europe who had opposed the war. But for the two and a half million Americans who served in Vietnam, not to mention for the families of the fifty thousand who died and the seventy-five thousand who were left severely disabled, the fall of Saigon left a bitterness toward their own political leaders that never quite disappeared.

For the majority of Vietnamese who sympathized in one form or another with national liberation as outlined by the Communists, Hanoi’s victory proved a mixed blessing. Their country was reunified and at peace. But the northern leaders took complete control and left little to the southern Liberation Front. They wanted a quick reunification in social and political terms as well as militarily. The country was declared to be a Socialist Republic under the leadership of the Communist Party. Their form of socialism was distinctly Soviet. The economy was directed through centralized planning. Private ownership was abolished and agriculture collectivized. Trade and markets were all put under government control.⁷ At least a million people in the south—former military men, business people, and teachers—were sent to reeducation camps. As a result, the southern economy collapsed. Two million Vietnamese fled abroad, some out of fear but most out of economic necessity.

If many Vietnamese had an unhappy time after 1975, conditions were ten times worse across the border in Cambodia. There a fanatical group of Communists, inspired by the more extreme forms of Maoism and China’s Cultural Revolution, took power after the US-supported regime collapsed. Their leader, who called himself Pol Pot, believed that the combination of imperialist influence and rapacious neighbors threatened the Cambodian people with extinction. His was a form of Maoism that put exceptional emphasis on autarky, racial purity, and eugenics. On taking power, Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea (known by its French sobriquet, Khmer Rouge) emptied the cities and drove everyone into the countryside to engage in basic agricultural work. In spite of the assistance they had received from Hanoi during the war, they turned viciously on all national minorities in Cambodia, including the Vietnamese and the Chinese who lived there. It is estimated that almost two and half million people, a third of the population, died as a result of Khmer Rouge policies.⁸

It took time before Western public opinion began to realize the enormity of what was happening in Cambodia. So intense had the condemnation of the US war in Indochina been, that many did not want to believe the full extent of the Khmer Rouge’s genocides. But when the gruesome facts began to be known, they contributed significantly to the overall critique of Communism, not least in Europe. Still, Cambodia did not dominate the news pages the way it should have, in part because the events there were overshadowed by the crises in the Middle East and the seeming implosion of the US system of government after Watergate. And in the middle of all this, a revolution took place in Portugal, the consequences of which had more of an impact on the Cold War than even the end of the conflict in Indochina.

Portugal had been a fascist-style dictatorship since 1933. Running the poorest country in Europe, the regime clung on to its colonies, which it believed gave it status and a hope for economic expansion in the future. Even after the other European states were forced to decolonize, Portugal insisted on keeping its African possessions (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe) as well as East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. The regime told its people, and the United States and its NATO allies, that the liberation movements fighting in these countries were Communists, directed by Moscow. But patience with what seemed expensive, unwinnable colonial wars was wearing thin among the population and in the military. The event that broke the regime’s back was the 1973 oil crisis. Portugal could simply not afford to keep its population with subsidized gas as well as provide for its forces fighting in Africa.

On 25 April 1974 a group of younger officers, all of whom had served overseas, acted against the regime. In a bloodless coup, later called the Carnation Revolution, they removed the government and set up a National Salvation Junta of leading generals to rule the country. The colonies were promised independence. But General António de Spínola and the moderates who headed the new administration were soon confronted by some of the junior officers who had put them in place. The younger men wanted more rapid change in Portuguese society. Some of them allied themselves with the Portuguese Communist Party, a pro-Moscow party that preached revolution without much of a plan for taking power. Portugal went through a period of continuous political instability, during which confrontations between the Left and the Right made the country almost ungovernable.

Meanwhile the Portuguese colonies in Africa seceded one by one. In Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde the transition was smooth. The united liberation front took power and transformed itself into a Marxist regime, closely linked to Cuba and the Soviet Union. The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) took power there and declared a People’s Republic. Though aligned with the Soviet bloc, its leaders guarded their independence. In Angola, however, a civil war had been underway between competing liberation movements even before the Portuguese revolution. In 1974, as the Portuguese were preparing to withdraw, this war became a conflagration that threatened to engulf neighboring African countries as well as the Superpowers.

Angola was by far the richest of Portugal’s former African colonies in terms of resources. The population, however, was poor, and the colonizers had done their best to stimulate rivalry among its main ethnic groups. The only liberation movement that had support among all groups, including the white and mixed-race elite in the capital, Luanda, was the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The MPLA was a front led by Marxist intellectuals with close connections to the Portuguese Communist Party. It had received Soviet, Cuban, and Yugoslav support since the early 1960s but had seen its fair share of infighting and splits. Just after the Soviets had begun increasing their support for the movement, in 1970, the MPLA went through one of its ruptures. When the Carnation Revolution took place, the movement was therefore at a disadvantage compared with its opponents, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), a nativist group that was supported by Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko, and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which drew most of its support from the Ovimbundu tribe.

When the Angolan civil war broke out among these groups in 1974, the MPLA soon improved its position. It controlled the capital and the areas around it, and it was able to work smoothly with the Portuguese officers representing the new government in Lisbon. By the summer of 1975 it dominated eleven out of fifteen Angolan provinces. But the governments in Zaire and South Africa intervened, with covert US support, sending troops into Angola to fight against the MPLA. Neither wanted a Communist-led country on their borders. The Soviets and the Cubans scrambled to get support in to their allies. When the MPLA’s leader Aghostino Neto declared his People’s Republic of Angola on 11 November 1975, the Cubans began airlifting troops and weapons to Luanda.

The South Africans almost reached the Angolan capital before the Cubans counterattacked. But helped by the Soviets who supplied aircraft and artillery, the Cuban and MPLA response was decisive. The South Africans withdrew southward, feeling betrayed by the United States. There, Congress had prohibited further military support for the Angolan opposition, in spite of White House protests. By spring 1976 the MPLA was in control of the country, supported by almost thirty thousand Cubans and an increasing number of Soviet and eastern European advisers. The Ford Administration was incensed. They saw Angola as a new form of Soviet intervention, carried out across thousands of miles, with the Cubans as proxies. “It is an awful situation,” Kissinger told the South African ambassador, “and ultimately the Russians will be able to ride the momentum of the victory in Angola to defeat the powerful leaders in Africa, resulting in total victory in Africa.… The American people in certain situations become divided, like with Vietnam, and then there will be no action taken by them. We therefore cannot count on them.”⁹

The Americans were right in seeing Angola as a new form of Soviet intervention, although in Moscow it had happened almost as an afterthought. The Cubans had been the driving force, not the Soviets.¹⁰ The Angolan intervention, Karen Brutents, the deputy head of the CPSU’s International Department, explained later, “became a fact without any master plan.”¹¹ The main point from Moscow’s perspective was the need to back up the Cubans, and not let them down “a second time,” as Brutents said.¹² The Cuban missile crisis still rankled in Moscow, as did the 1973 October War. Even though Brezhnev was skeptical to begin with about putting too much emphasis on Angola, the Cuban and MPLA success on the ground made him and many in Moscow feel that this was “payback time.” The United States had intervened globally for a generation or more. Now the Soviets had shown that they could do so, too, in support of their strategic and ideological interests.

Along with the fall of Indochina, the intervention in Angola helped the powerful backlash against détente already underway in Washington. President Ford, running for the presidency, banned the use of the term “détente” in his campaign. His opponent, the Democratic governor Jimmy Carter, who had no foreign policy experience, castigated the Administration’s policies. “We’ve become fearful to compete with the Soviet Union on an equal basis,” Carter claimed in the televised debates with Ford. “We talk about détente. The Soviet Union knows what they want in détente, and they’ve been getting it. We have not known what we’ve wanted and we’ve been out-traded in almost every instance.”¹³ Carter wanted to do away with the secrecy of the Kissinger years. He wanted the United States to emphasize its own values in foreign affairs: human rights, freedom of religion and emigration, self-determination. American principles, not “balance of power politics,” would restore the respect the United States had lost in the world, Carter believed.

Jimmy Carter won a close election in 1976. From the beginning of his presidency, he sought to set relations with the Soviet Union on what he considered a safer ground. In his first letters to Brezhnev, Carter expressed a wish to move beyond the Cold War. There was, the US president said, much that the two countries could cooperate on: “development, better nutrition, and a more meaningful life for the less fortunate portions of mankind.”¹⁴ As to the SALT negotiations, Carter felt they did not go far enough. He preferred, he told Brezhnev, deep cuts in nuclear arsenals on both sides. Carter’s new proposals horrified the Soviets. They believed basic agreement had already been reached on a new SALT treaty. And they were fearful that the new proposals were a ruse. They knew full well that Soviet nuclear missiles were much less accurate in targeting than US missiles. Having a lot of missiles therefore made the Soviets feel safer. Brezhnev was angry with Carter’s moving away from the status quo, as he saw it. Carter’s secretary of state, the experienced diplomat Cyrus Vance, recalled that when he tried to bring up the issue in Moscow, he “got a wet rag in the face and was told to go home.”¹⁵

But things were going to get much worse between Carter and the Soviets. In order to emphasize his human rights policy, the new president chose to send a message to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, in which he underlined his “firm commitment to promote respect for human rights not only in our own country but also abroad. We shall use our good offices,” Carter said, “to seek the release of prisoners of conscience.”¹⁶ The Kremlin was livid. It was an “an attempt to harass us, to embarrass us,” their US ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin said later.¹⁷ All preparations for an early meeting between the two presidents were put on hold by Moscow.

Some of the early problems in Carter’s Soviet policy came out of inexperience. Nobody in Carter’s inner team of advisers had any background on foreign affairs or, worse, on thinking about foreign affairs in terms of domestic politics. The growing power and influence of the US Jewish lobby seems, for instance, to have taken the new Administration by surprise. “It is something that was not a part of our Georgia and Southern political experience and consequently not well understood,” Carter’s chief of staff admitted to the Georgia-born president.¹⁸ Both in his Soviet and his Middle East policy, Carter quickly learned that he needed allies from special interest groups, but he was not always good at winning them over.

Carter’s difficulties grew because from day one of his Administration he was getting conflicting advice from his key foreign policy aides. Cyrus Vance believed that a lot had been achieved through détente and that Carter had to be very careful not to throw it away for little gain. An old-school diplomat, the secretary of state presumed that antagonizing the Soviets unless absolutely necessary would not be in America’s interest. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Harvard professor who became Carter’s national security adviser, had a different view and temperament. Of Polish origin, Brzezinski was closer to the president’s conviction that the Soviet Union, like any other country, had to be confronted when it behaved in ways that were contrary to the international norms that the United States was promoting. Brzezinski encouraged what he deemed a tough, realistic foreign policy because, as he explained to Carter, the Soviet Union needed détente even more than the United States did.

From the very beginning, the Carter Administration was under pressure from a growing public opinion at home that thought the Soviet Union was taking advantage of America’s weakness. Although a majority was still in favor of arms limitation talks with the Soviets, almost 70 percent of Americans in 1978 thought that the Soviet Union could not be trusted to live up to its agreements.¹⁹ In many ways the fear and distrust of the Soviet Union was a reflection of the worries many Americans had about conflict, decline, and powerlessness in their own society. But it took activist groups to give voice to these frustrations. One such group, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), included both Republicans and Democrats who believed that the Soviet Union was on the offensive worldwide. Led by Paul Nitze, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and President Johnson’s former undersecretary of state Eugene Rostow, the CPD became a powerful lobbying group critical of the SALT negotiations and Soviet human rights violations, and supportive of increased military expenditure and links with Israel.

Carter had hoped to spend time dealing with the broader issues on his foreign policy agenda, first and foremost US energy security, peace in the Middle East, and human rights on a global scale. Instead, with his ratings slipping in the polls, he was forced back to national security issues dealing with the Soviet Union. With SALT negotiations near a standstill, the Soviets, on their side, were losing hope that much could be achieved under this president. This realization, in turn, provided incentive for those in Moscow who wanted a more assertive Soviet policy, especially with regard to Africa and Asia. The world, some of them claimed, was turning toward socialism, and the USSR had to be there to help the process.

Seen from a Soviet perspective, the global situation in the mid-1970s could indeed seem hopeful. There had been setbacks in the Middle East, but these, it was explained to Brezhnev, were because of imperialist perfidy, not because of the class-struggle in Arab countries. Syria and Iraq were working more closely with the Soviets. South Yemen was a People’s Republic. All the freshly independent African countries were governed by Marxist-Leninists. Vietnam was reunified under Communist rule. India had become a Soviet ally. In Somalia, across from Yemen on the Horn of Africa, the Revolutionary Socialist Party held power and invited the Soviet navy to station ships at the port of Berbera. Internationally things looked good for the Soviet Union. For some younger Communists there, these global advances made up for an increasing disillusionment with the practice of socialism in the Soviet Union itself.

The Ethiopian revolution had its origin in the changes that were sweeping all of Africa in the 1970s. Younger leaders, especially in the military, were impatient with the lack of social and economic progress and frustrated by their own lack of status. For some of these, Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism was more attractive than vaguer forms of African socialism. Cuba was a great inspiration, both as a multiracial society and as a planned economy. The idea of forcing through necessary social change rapidly and efficiently was inspiring for these leaders. Ethiopia, which had been an orthodox Christian monarchy for centuries, with little social and economic change, seemed to them to be ripe for such a reshaping.

Ethiopia’s 1974 revolution overthrew the emperor Haile Selassie and replaced him with a group of younger officers who called themselves the Dergue, or Committee. The aging emperor was murdered in prison a year later and buried beneath the latrines in his former palace. Mengistu Haile Mariam, a thirty-seven-year-old major, made himself the leader of the new government. He sought close relations with the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and Cuba. Moscow was unenthusiastic to begin with. The Soviet leaders doubted the Ethiopians’ dedication to Marxism-Leninism and feared that too-close links with Ethiopia would create problems for their existing alliance with neighboring Somalia, with whom the Dergue was increasingly at odds. By 1977, however, the Soviets had begun to supply weapons and military training to the Ethiopians, and the Cubans were sending advisers.

Concerned by the increasing closeness between Addis Ababa and Moscow, the Somalians decided to act. They wanted to unite Ogaden, a mainly Somali region in southern Ethiopia, with their own country, and thought the chaos created by the Ethiopian revolution would give them the chance to do so. The Soviets and the Cubans warned Somalian president Siad Barre against such an attack and hoped to mediate a solution. But by July 1977 it was clear that Ethiopia was facing an all-out Somalian invasion.

The Soviets decided to help save the Ethiopian revolution. They broke off relations with Siad Barre and began freighting advanced weapons to Addis Ababa by an air-bridge, the biggest such operation since the 1973 assistance to Egypt. At least fifteen thousand Cuban soldiers arrived, and Soviet officers were commanding Ethiopian and Cuban troops. The Somalians resisted fiercely, but by early 1978 they were being driven back across the border. Meanwhile, the Soviet relationship with Ethiopia widened into support for all parts of the Ethiopian government. Some Soviet leaders, especially in the International Department of the Communist Party, believed that Ethiopia could become a showcase for Soviet-inspired modernization in the Third World. Although they had misgivings about Mengistu’s brutality and his constant warfare against minority groups, the head of the International Department, Boris Ponomarev, agreed to send “a group of experienced comrades of the CPSU” to help build the Dergue into a Communist Party in the future.²⁰

As could be expected, the Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa set off alarm bells in Washington. Brzezinski told the president that he saw a pattern of behavior on the Soviet side that pushed in the direction of more aggression worldwide. Carter agreed. Even though he was eager to move forward in bilateral relations with the Soviet Union, he worried about Soviet behavior in the Third World. The president believed that détente included principles of nonintervention in regional conflicts. “The Soviets’ violating of these principles,” he told the press, “would be a cause of concern to me, would lessen the confidence of the American people in the word and peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union, would make it more difficult to ratify a SALT agreement or comprehensive test ban agreement if concluded, and therefore, the two are linked because of actions by the Soviets. We don’t initiate the linkage.”²¹

The Horn of Africa crisis highlighted the conflicts within Carter’s own Administration. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance simply could not understand why Brzezinski and the president threatened to let the Horn overshadow other developments that were much more important to the United States. Linking Soviet interventions and SALT would be disastrous, Vance told them. “We will end up losing SALT and that will be the worst thing that could happen. If we do not get a SALT treaty in the President’s first four years, that will be a blemish on his record forever.”²² But Vance’s voice counted for less and less in the Administration.

One way in which the United States could pay the Soviets back for their perceived Third World activism was through improving relations with China. Carter at first wanted to go slow with the issue of full recognition of the People’s Republic. He was concerned about the Chinese Communists’ human rights record and understood that working more closely with the Chinese would be a red rag to Brezhnev. The new Chinese leaders who came to power after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 were keen to extend their contacts with the Americans. While Mao had thought of links with the United States first and foremost in terms of security for China, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, wanted US technology and trade. Deng needed US help to make China rich and strong. A more extensive relationship with the United States would assist in China’s modernization, Deng concluded.

After Ethiopia, US preparations for a full recognition of the People’s Republic of China moved into high gear. Even though recognition did not change much in practical terms between the two countries, it was a powerful symbolic act and it opened new possibilities. Deng told his closest advisers that he wanted to dramatically expand cooperation with the Americans, if they were willing to reciprocate. The Chinese leader feared the massive strengthening of Soviet power that he saw on a global scale. He was particularly preoccupied with the increasing closeness of the Soviet-Vietnamese relationship, and suspected it was part of a Soviet master plan for surrounding China.

Relations between Vietnam and China had been in free fall since 1975. To the astonishment of US leaders who had fought their war in Vietnam to a large extent to contain Chinese Communist expansionism, this falling out got increasingly militarized. By 1978 the two sides were trading insults and sending troops to their border. Then, in what must have been the most harebrained strategic plan of the century, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia followed up the expulsion of people of Vietnamese ancestry with military incursions into Vietnam. The Vietnamese military, ten times stronger, fought back. As their forces penetrated into Cambodia, they were horrified by the levels of Khmer Rouge violence against its own people. By the end of 1978 the leadership in Hanoi had decided to remove Pol Pot’s regime, both because it was a security threat to Vietnam and because of its genocidal policies. In just two weeks the war was over. The remnants of the Khmer Rouge fled to the borders with Thailand, and a new pro-Vietnam regime was put in place in Cambodia.

Though it had acted for its own reasons, Vietnam had saved Cambodia from one of the most murderous regimes in the twentieth century. Deng Xiaoping, however, was furious. The Khmer Rouge had been China’s allies, of a sort, and Deng was convinced the Soviets were behind the Vietnamese invasion. He decided, in his own words, to teach Vietnam “an appropriate limited lesson.”²³ On the US side, Zbigniew Brzezinski also worried that if Vietnam got away with its occupation of Cambodia, then it could also attack other countries. It was, in a sense, a revival of domino theories, only this time China and the United States were on the same side, and Vietnam was to be punished for having removed a murderous Maoist dictatorship.

When Deng Xiaoping came to Washington to inaugurate the new relationship with the United States in January 1979, the Chinese leader straightforwardly informed his hosts that China would attack Vietnam to teach it a lesson. It would be a limited attack with limited objectives, and China would withdraw before the Soviet Union could act in the north. Commenting on the overall situation with regard to the Soviets, Deng said that he saw “no possibility of détente. We can say that the situation is becoming more tense year by year.… We believe the Soviet Union will launch a war. But if we act well and properly, it is possible to postpone it. China hopes to postpone a war for twenty-two years.”²⁴

President Carter could not condone an outright Chinese attack on Vietnam. But he also told Deng that he understood that China “cannot allow Vietnam to pursue aggression with impunity.”²⁵ The United States ended up publicly deploring China’s attack the following month, but in private Carter shared intelligence with the Chinese and assured them that the United States would back them up if the Soviets threatened them from the north. The Chinese invasion turned out to be a disaster for Beijing, however. Over the course of a month of fighting, China lost almost half as many soldiers as the United States did in all of its war in Vietnam. There is little doubt that if Deng had not decided that the “lesson” for Vietnam was complete, the Chinese losses would have increased even further. China’s war in Vietnam not only showed how woefully unprepared for actual fighting the People’s Liberation Army was. It also set Sino-Vietnamese relations on a course of intense hostility that has lasted ever since.

With tension mounting both in Washington and Moscow, negotiators were still able to finish a SALT II agreement that both sides would sign. In June 1979 Carter and Brezhnev traveled to Vienna for the signing ceremony and the first summit in almost five years. Their meetings did not work well. Brezhnev, aging, tired, emotional, was deeply suspicious of Carter’s commitment to détente. “It had not been a simple thing to start restructuring Soviet-American relations which had been burdened by the inertia of the Cold War,” Brezhnev said at their first meeting.²⁶ He accused the Americans of neglecting the principles of détente, as he saw them: “complete equality, equal security, respect for each other’s legitimate interests, and non-interference in each other’s affairs.” Carter responded that it was equally important that “we exercise restraint in regional political competition, that we restrict our military intervention in trouble spots in the world, either directly or by proxy. It was important that we take care not to deprive either of our countries or, for that matter, any other country, of access to crucial natural resources.”²⁷ SALT II was signed, but—perhaps not surprisingly, given the public mood in the United States—the US Senate held up ratification.

Carter’s reference to natural resources signaled his increasing preoccupation with political turbulence in the Middle East. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, had broken with the other Arab countries in November 1977 and traveled to Israel to begin direct negotiations with Prime Minister Begin. This brave act made Egypt an outcast in the Arab world, but it also secured US assistance in negotiating a separate peace accord with Israel. Egypt got the Sinai peninsula back. It also got massive increases in US assistance after the accords were signed at Camp David in March 1979. But by then another Middle East country, Iran, was ablaze with revolt. The Shah, in power since the US-sponsored coup that overthrew Mossadegh in 1953, had been facing massive demonstrations against his autocratic regime. In September 1978 he had declared martial law. But with even the support of the Iranian army in doubt, the Shah had fled the country in January 1979.

The Iranian revolution led to another massive increase in oil prices. The Americans worried that the powerful Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, would take power in the chaos that followed the Shah’s departure. But instead Shia Islamist organizations were in the driver’s seat. Their focal point was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a seventy-seven-year-old Shia cleric who believed that Iran should be made into an Islamic republic under his charismatic leadership. Khomeini saw himself as the guardian of Islam in Iran. In his sermons, spread illegally in Iran through audio and videotape, he condemned both the United States and the Soviet Union as devils who were out to destroy all Muslims. Khomeini’s slogan was “neither Left, nor Right, but Islam!” His triumphant return to Tehran from exile in February 1979 immediately made him the country’s de facto leader.

The Islamic revolution in Iran was a deliberate attempt at breaking with the Cold War order. Khomeini appealed to all Muslims to help defend the new regime: “We have turned our backs on East and West, on the Soviet Union and America, in order to run our country ourselves,” Khomeini declared. “The position we have attained is a historical exception, given the current conditions in the world, but our goal will certainly not be lost if we are to die, martyred and defeated.”²⁸ To begin with, neither Washington nor Moscow thought that Khomeini’s regime would last. Many, in both capitals, thought that he would do like Muslim conservatives in the past and eventually turn to the United States for support. But they were wrong. Khomeini saw himself as the real revolutionary against a world of falseness. In November 1979 some of his supporters occupied the US embassy in Tehran and took its diplomats hostage. Khomeini supported the occupation, in part to make sure that any reconciliation with Carter would be as difficult as possible.

The hostage crisis undid Carter’s presidency. He was seen as weak and indecisive because he did not respond by attacking Iranian territory or forcing some kind of showdown with Ayatollah Khomeini, as if that would have helped the hostages. Instead, Carter struggled to understand what was going on in Iran. He did not want to drive the Iranians into the arms of the Soviets. The Cold War was still uppermost in his mind. In the end he settled on a military rescue operation, which failed spectacularly when two US aircraft collided in the Iranian desert. The botched effort in April 1980 led to Vance’s resignation as secretary of state and probably doomed Carter’s chances for reelection. A month later Ronald Reagan, vowing to break with détente and make America great again, won the Republican nomination for president.

But if the Americans had trouble with Islamism in Iran, the Soviets faced such trouble of their own farther north. In Afghanistan a Marxist party had come to power through a military coup in April 1978. The new regime started to work closely with the Soviets, who advised them to go slow on implementing substantial reform in the countryside. The Soviet advisers believed that the Afghan people were not ready for large-scale secular initiatives such as land reform, education for women, and outlawing child marriages. But the Afghan Communists persisted. By early 1979 they faced a growing Islamist rebellion, organized from neighboring Pakistan and Iran. The Afghan Islamists believed in an Islamic revolution, like what had happened in Iran (even though they regarded the Shia as sectarians). They were mostly educated in the Middle East, in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and they wanted to shake up Afghan society as much as the Communists did—though in the direction of more Islam, not less.

As Islamist attacks against government installations in Afghanistan intensified, more Soviet advisers arrived to help the Afghan Communists out. Even though the political haste of Mohammad Taraki, the Afghan president, exasperated the Soviets, they were committed to supporting the regime. They saw opportunity as well as danger. “Angola, in combination with Ethiopia, was the way to Afghanistan,” Karen Brutents, the deputy head of the CPSU’s International Department, observed later.²⁹ But when Taraki himself was killed in factional infighting with his deputy, Hafizullah Amin, in September 1979, Soviet advisers on the spot sounded the alarm. Amin claimed to pursue an even more extreme Marxist-Leninist policy than Taraki, but the KGB suspected him of contacts with the Americans and of planning to “do a Sadat” on the Soviet Union. With Islamist guerrillas advancing, the Soviets began preparing to remove Amin by force and put in place a new Afghan Communist leadership more loyal to the Soviet Union and more effective in fighting the Islamist rebellion.

The Soviet intervention began on Christmas Eve 1979. The Carter Administration had been able to follow the troop buildup on the Soviet side of the border through its new spy satellites, so the invasion came as no surprise. The president was still horrified at the Soviet action. Brzezinski had been describing to him what he called an “arc of crisis,” in which the Soviets were hoping to insert their power, stretching from the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea, to the shores of the Indian Ocean. The Afghanistan invasion seemed to prove such Soviet intentions. Some US analysts believed that the real objectives of the Red Army operation were ports on the Indian Ocean and control of the Gulf’s oil. However far-fetched such suggestions were, they had an effect in the frenzied White House atmosphere during the hostage crisis.

Carter addressed the American people in a television address on the evening of 4 January 1980. He called the Soviet invasion “an extremely serious threat to peace.” The reason for this, he said, was not just the events in Afghanistan themselves. It was

because of the threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia and also because such an aggressive military policy is unsettling to other peoples throughout the world. This is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people. We must recognize the strategic importance of Afghanistan to stability and peace. A Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a steppingstone to possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies.³⁰

Two weeks later, in his state of the union address, Carter underlined that “the implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War.”³¹ The president asked his advisers for actions that could be taken to punish the Soviets, and when proposals came in, he signed off on every one of them, so that even Brzezinski was taken aback at the president’s fury. He stopped trade and cultural exchanges, barred exports of grain, technology, and transport equipment, halted space cooperation, banned Soviet fishing boats in US waters, and threatened to boycott the Moscow Olympics. He also withdrew the SALT II treaty from consideration in the Senate. “History,” Carter said, “teaches… very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease.”³²

If it were not for previous events, starting with the Soviet Angola operation in 1975, Carter’s reaction could have been seen as exaggerated and hyperbolic. The Soviet Union had had broad influence in Afghanistan for two generations, and the Afghan Islamists, whom the United States had started supporting even before the Soviet invasion, were not necessarily a better alternative for Afghanistan than Communist rule. But none of that mattered within the overall Cold War framework that Carter applied. Ever since he became president, he had suspected that the Soviets were mounting an outright challenge to the US position in the world. By the time of the Ethiopian crisis, détente, from the US perspective, had already been in deep trouble. US military expenditure, in decline since the beginning of détente, had started to rise again. In Carter’s fourth budget it rose by almost 12 percent adjusted for inflation, an increase unprecedented in peacetime.³³ Zbigniew Brzezinski’s summing up in his memoirs, that “détente lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden,” might seem outrageous, especially to those who have visited that bleak part of the world. But in describing President Carter’s view at the time it may hold more than a grain of truth.

And still Carter’s emphasis on the Cold War did him so little good in US political terms. In the presidential election he got clobbered by Ronald Reagan, who claimed that inflation, the rise of Soviet power, and the oil shocks all were due to the president’s incompetence. But worse, Reagan insisted, Carter did not really believe in America.

They say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems, that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities.… The time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it into our own hands.… Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free? Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain; the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba, and of Haiti; the victims of drought and famine in Africa; the freedom fighters in Afghanistan; and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.³⁴

Reagan’s rhetoric was a throwback to an earlier time, but for many Americans it captured the moment perfectly. They wanted to be brought back to a world of more certainty and away from foreign and domestic challenges that were transforming the country they lived in. Never mind that Reagan had very few concrete solutions to offer for America’s ills. Like Margaret Thatcher in Britain, he stood for a kind of conservative rebellion against those, he claimed, who had been holding the country back. In that sense Reagan’s first cabinet was the most radical American Administration since the New Deal. It promised to dramatically lower taxes, eliminate the public deficit, abolish all price controls, and do away with most government regulations of the economy. Both his supporters and his opponents spoke of the Reagan Revolution, although in reality much less happened than had been promised.

Reagan from the very beginning of his presidency believed that the United States had to strengthen its defense and its international prestige in order to negotiate with the Soviet Union from an advantageous position. Supremely self-confident, he thought that he would succeed where, in his view, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had failed. He did not take into consideration the effect his rhetoric had on the other side. Reagan’s tough talk really frightened the aging leadership in Moscow, who, for the first time, started believing that the world might be heading toward a total war between the Superpowers. When Reagan said, at the start of his presidency, that Americans should “begin planning for a world where our adversaries are remembered only for their role in a sad and rather bizarre chapter in human history,” Soviet leaders took him very seriously.³⁵

Part of the reason for the Soviet fear of Reagan’s policies was their own failure in Afghanistan. Instead of a short intervention that would set things right in that country, as he had been promised by his advisers, Brezhnev got a long and deepening war. The brutality of Soviet warfare created a massive refugee problem, which the Islamists could make use of to get adherents for their cause. The Soviet problems widened in 1982 and ’83, when Reagan stepped up the support for the Afghan Islamists, the mujahedin, and their backers in Pakistan. Although the Reagan Administration was aware that some of these Islamists were at least as anti-American as they were anti-Soviet, they had concluded that assisting them was essential in pushing back Soviet power. “Here is the beauty of the Afghan operation,” said William Casey, Reagan’s head of the CIA, to his colleagues. “Usually it looks like the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys. We don’t make it our war. The mujahedin have all the motivation they need. All we have to do is to give them help, only more of it.”³⁶

Afghanistan was not the only place where Reagan wanted to push back against Left-wing revolutions. In Nicaragua, one of Latin America’s poorest countries, a group of Marxist-inspired rebels had taken power in 1979 after ousting a deeply unpopular dictator who had been supported by the United States. The Sandinista Front, as Nicaragua’s new leaders called themselves, had a radical program of nationalizations and land reform. They wanted close relations with Cuba and the Soviet bloc, even though Fidel Castro warned them against moving so fast that the United States would intervene.³⁷ The Sandinistas tried to avoid a direct confrontation with Washington, but the Reagan Administration had them in their gun sights from the moment they took office. Reagan’s point of attack was the Nicaraguan support for a rebel movement in neighboring El Salvador. The president claimed that he had evidence of the involvement of “the Soviet Union, of Cuba, of the PLO, of, even Qadhafi in Libya, and others in the Communist bloc nations to bring about this terrorism down there.”³⁸ But his main culprits were the Sandinistas.

By late 1981 the United States had helped organize a counterrevolutionary force in Nicaragua, the so-called Contras, and was beginning to supply them with weapons and training. The immediate aim was to put pressure on the Sandinista government to stop its involvement in El Salvador, but soon the goal shifted to the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government itself. The Sandinistas were helped by revolutionary volunteers from the rest of Latin America, by the Cubans, and, to a very limited extent, by the Soviets. Though not all Sandinista reforms were equally popular with the Nicaraguans, most of the population seems to have believed, at least to begin with, that their new leadership was standing up to US bullying. The underlying reason for the support of the Left in Central America was of course the immense poverty that most people lived under. More than half of all Nicaraguan children were malnourished in the 1970s. The contrast with life a few hundred miles farther north was striking. In a world where the average person in Central America consumed less meat than what the average American fed to his pet, protesting social injustice easily became a protest against US hegemony.

Détente was defeated by a number of circumstances, some of which were outside of Superpower control. Revolutions in the Third World unsettled the process of rapprochement, and rapid economic change helped undermine it. It is also clear that from the very beginning, leaders in the United States and the USSR had read somewhat different things into détente. The Soviets believed that they had got acceptance for true equality between the two powers. Most leaders in the United States thought that the Soviets had signed up to cooperate with a world-system that was led by the Americans. But the Soviets were also consciously willing to take great risks in their relations with Washington for the sake of assisting revolutions elsewhere and expanding their own power.

Ultimately, though, détente was defeated by politics in the United States. Nixon and Kissinger had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept. After Watergate the American distrust of its government, allgovernment, reached fever pitch. Détente was a victim of this process, although it seems likely that rapprochement would have come to a standstill at some point even without Nixon’s disgrace. Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in the 1970s or ever. And they elected Ronald Reagan president to make sure that such a devaluation of the American purpose would not happen again.