The election of Jimmy Carter imparted some fresh momentum to the beleaguered détente process, but it soon dissipated. The former governor of Georgia ran for the presidency as the candidate who would restore idealism to American foreign policy; he made human rights a key plank of his campaign and a central goal of his presidency. Yet Carter foundered, from the outset, in his dealings with the Soviet Union, pursuing contradictory goals and sending conflicting signals. Only one month into his presidency, Carter wrote a warm letter to Andrei Sakharov, the renowned physicist and the Soviet Union’s leading dissident—much to the discomfiture of the Kremlin hierarchy. Shortly thereafter, he sent his secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance, to Moscow with a poorly formulated proposal for making deeper cuts in offensive nuclear weapons than those previously worked out at the November 1974 meeting at Vladivostok. The new American president also signalled his intention to check the expanding Soviet involvement in Africa, as the political right within the United States was insisting. Yet in his first major foreign policy address, in May 1977, Carter gestured toward an incipient post-Cold War agenda, declaring that the time had come to move beyond the belief ‘that Soviet expansion was almost inevitable but that it must be contained’, beyond ‘that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear’.
From the Kremlin’s perspective, the new administration’s approach to Soviet–American relations appeared at once confusing and threatening. Brezhnev denounced Carter’s correspondence with the ‘renegade’ Sakharov, proclaiming that he would not ‘allow interference in our internal affairs, whatever pseudo-humane pretense is used for the purpose’. Soviet policy-makers also cast a wary eye on Carter’s proposal for more radical cuts in the already agreed upon SALT II arms control formula. Brezhnev considered it a ‘personal affront’, Ambassador Dobrynin a ‘rude violation of our previous understanding’. As the latter subsequently remembered: ‘We thought it wasn’t serious, but an attempt to harass us, embarrass us.’ Ever vigilant for any slights to their nation’s status as a superpower of equal standing, Russian leaders worried that the United States was attempting to denigrate and delegitimize the Soviet state internationally while undermining it at home. Satisfied with the original framework of détente, they suspected Americans of seeking to overturn that framework in order to gain a strategic advantage.
Curiously, the ageing Kremlin rulers seemed incapable of grasping how provocative some of their actions appeared from Washington’s perspective, or of recognizing how those actions were playing into the hands of détente’s critics and thus speeding its demise. Soviet activism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East certainly was of a much greater magnitude in the 1970s than in the past, a fact that Americans simply could not ignore. Flushed with its success in Angola, which led to the establishment of an MPLA government in February 1976, Moscow began supplying a new leftist regime in Ethiopia with arms the next year. In early 1978, Cuban troops, supplied and transported by the Soviets, routed US-backed Somali forces in fighting over the strategic Ogaden peninsula. The Soviets considered it not just their ‘international duty’ to ‘assist the new revolutionary regimes which pledged their allegiance to socialism and the Soviet model’, according to historian Odd Arne Westad, but also sensed ‘an opportunity to hasten the internal contradictions and thereby the ultimate collapse of the capitalist world’. Reconciling such ambitions and actions with their parallel desire for productive, mutually beneficial relations with Washington, however, proved impossible.
Americans already sceptical of Moscow’s intentions, such as Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, were convinced that they were witnessing a concerted geopolitical offensive against the West. The Brezhnev Politburo’s decision to deploy new, intermediate-range nuclear missiles, the technologically sophisticated SS-20s, beginning in 1977, further discomfited American observers, as well as Western Europeans, whose cities they were targeted at. To regain the strategic initiative, the United States and its NATO partners began consideration of a counter-deployment of a new generation of American intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Brezinski also convinced Carter that it was time to play the ‘China card’. The president agreed, moving to a formal opening of diplomatic ties with China on 1 January 1979, in large part to solidify a burgeoning strategic partnership with the Soviet Union’s most feared rival and thus shore up the containment wall.
In the face of those mounting problems, on 18 June 1979, Carter and the increasingly infirm Brezhnev met in Vienna to sign the much-delayed SALT II agreement. The meeting was a subdued affair, possessing none of the soaring rhetoric of the Moscow summit seven years earlier. ‘It was a mere instant of good feeling,’ notes historian Gaddis Smith, ‘evanescent as a soap bubble, the slightest of pauses in a deteriorating relationship.’ Tension over Third World conflicts, the SS-20 deployments, America’s human rights campaign, and deepening Sino-American ties had plainly taken their toll. Carter returned home to find the anti-détente forces in the ascendancy. Senator Jackson, from the opening bell of the ratification fight, registered his unequivocal opposition to SALT II. ‘To enter a treaty which favors the Soviets as this one does on the ground that we will be in a worse position without it is appeasement in its purest form.’
The overthrow of Nicaragua’s authoritarian Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a long-standing US ally, by the Sandinistas, a Marxist-Leninist-led liberation movement with close ties to Cuba, further unsettled those who feared that anti-Western revolutionary forces were surging—as did events in Iran (Box 7).
Box 7 The Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis
In February 1979, an Islamic revolutionary movement, under the leadership of the Shi’ite religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, gained power in Iran. Iran’s new rulers viewed the United States with deep mistrust and suspicion, largely because it had been the principal backer of the shah, the long-serving monarch they had despised and deposed. On 4 November 1979, shortly after the shah was admitted into the United States for medical treatment, militants seized the US Embassy in Tehran, with the tacit support of Khomeini, and held fifty-two Americans hostage. The ensuing drama frustrated and humiliated Carter and the American people, contributing to the image of the United States as a nation in decline—a kind of impotent giant.
Then, at the end of December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, sounding détente’s final death knell. Carter phoned Brezhnev on the hot line and told him that Washington considered the Soviet invasion ‘a clear threat to peace’ which ‘could mark a fundamental and long-lasting turning point in our relations’. With uncharacteristic hyperbole, the president declared publicly: ‘The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.’ The US leader responded to the Soviet move forcefully. He withdrew SALT II from Senate consideration, imposed economic sanctions on the Soviet Union, took a series of steps to reinvigorate containment, and called for a substantial increase in US defence spending. The Cold War was back—with a vengeance.
What killed détente? ‘All in all’, observed Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin in his memoirs, ‘one could say that detente was to a certain extent buried in the fields of Soviet–American rivalry in the Third World.’ It is difficult to dispute that assessment. The Soviets and Americans, from its inception, held different understandings of détente’s meaning. For the Americans, it meant a Soviet Union bound to the existing world order; a Soviet Union that would act as a global stabilizing force. For the Russians, détente heralded their arrival and recognition as a co-equal power in a bipolar world, but did not preclude their continued support for revolutionary insurgencies and regimes across the global South. In the mid-1960s, intelligence chief and future Soviet ruler Yuri Andropov forecast these tensions when he expressed the view that nothing should prevent the Soviets from exploiting the opportunities afforded them by any anti-capitalist, anti-Western movement. He predicted that ‘the future competition with the United States will take place
not in Europe, and not in the Atlantic Ocean. It will take place in Africa, and in Latin America.’ And, Andropov insisted: ‘We will compete for every piece of land, for every country.’ That conception of détente proved incompatible with the conception popularized by Nixon and Kissinger of a new age of superpower cooperation. When added to the resurgence of conservative, virulently anti-communist political forces in the United States in the mid- and late 1970s, such fundamental incompatibilities ensured that the era of détente would be short-lived.
Chapter 8
The final phase, 1980–90
The late 1980s witnessed the most momentous changes in the overall structure of world politics since the 1940s, culminating with the sudden and wholly unexpected end of the ideological and geopolitical struggle that had defined international relations for forty-five years. Those remarkable developments occurred in a manner and at a speed that almost no one expected, or even thought possible. Why did the Cold War end when it did? How does one make sense of a decade that opens with a rapidly intensifying Cold War and closes with a historic Soviet–American rapprochement, unprecedented arms control agreements, the withdrawal of Soviet power from Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and the peaceful reunification of Germany? This chapter addresses those questions by examining the wild oscillations of the Cold War’s final phase.
Cold War redux
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan completed Jimmy Carter’s improbable conversion to Cold War hardliner. Although the Russians considered their military intervention a defensive action aimed at preventing the emergence of a hostile regime on their border, the president and most of his leading foreign policy experts viewed it, instead, as part of a bold geopolitical offensive. They were convinced that a confident, expansive-minded Soviet state was vying to seize the strategic initiative from an America weakened by Vietnam, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, and various economic shocks, with the ultimate goal of dominating the Persian Gulf region and denying its oil to the West. In response, Carter authorized a massive increase in US defence spending; he called for $1.2 trillion in military-related expenditures over the next five years. He also instituted a grain embargo against the Soviet Union, ordered a symbolic boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics scheduled to be held in Moscow, re-established military draft registration, and proclaimed a new ‘Carter Doctrine’ that promised to repel any effort by an outside power to gain control over the Persian Gulf ‘by any means necessary, including military force’. The Carter administration applied additional pressure on the Soviets by strengthening the burgeoning US strategic partnership with China via the sale of advanced military hardware and technology. With vigorous American support, NATO also moved to implement a December 1979 decision to deploy new intermediate-range Pershing II and Cruise nuclear missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviet SS-20s.
The Cold War mindset had returned to Washington policy circles with a vengeance, veritably burying any lingering memories of détente. ‘Never since World War II has there been so far-reaching a militarization of thought and discourse in the capital,’ observed an alarmed George F. Kennan in February 1980. ‘An unsuspecting stranger, plunged into its midst, could only conclude that the last hope of peaceful, non-military solutions had been exhausted—that from now on only weapons, however used, could count.’
Ronald Reagan, who overwhelmed the vulnerable Carter in the November 1980 presidential election, certainly stood four-square with those who believed that only military strength mattered in the ongoing superpower competition. During the campaign, the former screen actor and California governor insisted that the United States must rebuild its defences in order to close a ‘window of vulnerability’ opened by the Soviet military build-up of the 1970s.
The most conservative and most ideological of America’s post-Second World War presidents, Reagan remained a diehard anti-communist with a visceral hatred for a regime that he considered as immoral as it was treacherous and untrustworthy. ‘Let’s not delude ourselves,’ Reagan declared during one campaign stop. ‘The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren’t engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn’t be any hot spots in the world.’ He rejected out of hand the treat-the-Soviet-Union-as-an-ordinary-power ethos of the Nixon, Ford, and early Carter years. At his very first presidential press conference, Reagan set the tone for his first term by accusing Moscow of using détente as ‘a one-way street … to pursue its own aims’, including ‘the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state’. Soviet leaders, the new American chief executive charged, ‘reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that’.
Such inflammatory rhetoric became a hallmark of the renewed Cold War waged by the Reagan administration. Along with a huge military build-up and a concerted effort to roll back Soviet power through increased support and encouragement for anti-communist insurgencies across the globe, it constituted a central element of America’s reinvigorated containment strategy. Employing language that hearkened back to the Truman years, Reagan regularly berated both the Soviet state and the ideology that undergirded it. In 1982, he confidently proclaimed in a speech to the British Parliament that Marxism-Leninism was doomed ‘to the ash heap of history’. The next year, before the National Association of Evangelicals, in Orlando, Florida, Reagan described the Soviet Union as ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’. He implored his audience to resist ‘the aggressive impulses of an evil Empire’, emphasizing that the struggle against communism was at root a moral one ‘between right and wrong and good and evil’. That Manichean reformulation of the Cold War as a righteous battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness suggested that no quarter could be given, no détente era compromises risked.
Reagan was determined to expand the nation’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities before engaging in any serious negotiations with the Soviets. ‘Peace through strength’ became a favourite catchphrase of the president and his defence planners; that oft-repeated slogan also served to rationalize the administration’s initially desultory approach to arms control negotiations. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the Republican president and his top foreign policy advisers were convinced that, over the previous decade, American power had declined relative to that of the Soviet Union. Alexander M. Haig, Jr, Reagan’s first secretary of state, claimed that when he assumed office in January 1981 the Soviet Union ‘possessed greater military power than the United States, which had gone into a truly alarming military decline even before the withdrawal from Vietnam accelerated the weakening trend’.
To reverse that supposed weakening trend, Reagan set a five-year defence spending target of $1.6 trillion, more than $400 billion over the already substantial increase projected by Carter during his final year in the White House. It was the largest peacetime arms build-up in US history. ‘Defense is not a budget item,’ Reagan told the Pentagon. ‘Spend what you need.’ Among other priorities, he revived the expensive B-1 bomber programme, approved development of the B-2 (Stealth) bomber, accelerated deployment of the controversial MX (Missile Experimental) and the sophisticated Trident submarine missile system, expanded the Navy from 450 to 600 ships, and pumped substantial new funds into the CIA to support an enhanced covert arm. Although Reagan presented his military expansion as a drive simply to regain America’s ‘margin of safety’, it actually represented a bid to re-establish US strategic superiority—a status that Reagan and many fellow conservatives had never been willing to surrender in the first place.
Not surprisingly, Russia’s rulers grew progressively more alarmed at the belligerent rhetoric and assertive behaviour of the most hostile US administration they had faced in at least two decades. Just as vigilant as the Americans in gauging both the capabilities and intentions of their principal adversary, Soviet defence officials worried that the United States might be seeking to develop the potential for a devastating first strike against Soviet missile si
los and industrial centres. Those suspicions multiplied after Reagan’s unveiling of his Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983. The president announced in a public speech that he was ordering ‘a comprehensive and intensive effort’ to ‘search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear war’ through the development of a defensive missile shield. Reagan sketched a Utopian vision of a future free from nuclear danger: ‘What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?’
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