President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  Brzezinski remembered Rosalynn once asking what Jimmy was doing about outrageous Soviet behavior, and he replied that the president had authorized sending a formal protest note to Brezhnev. He continued: “She kind of looked at me and smiled sweetly, and in her soft voice said, ‘Well, by now Brezhnev must have a cabinet full of Jimmy’s protests’—which I think is a wonderful put-down.”110

  By 1978 the Soviets’ actions in the Third World were creating intense political pressure on the administration to take a tougher stance against the USSR, and the push to link the SALT negotiations to other issues was impossible to overlook. Although Carter remained adamant that the talks should move forward without hesitation, others in the administration were more preoccupied with sending a clear message that Soviet aggression would not be tolerated. The contradictory opinions gave the impression that Carter’s approach to Moscow was indecisive, disjointed, and ineffective; as with most such issues involving the Soviet Union, the major point of contention lay between Vance and Brzezinski.

  Vance believed that the relationship with the Soviets had taken a wrong turn, but could still be salvaged through cooperation that would lead to a new arms treaty. But Brzezinski believed that the Soviets should be kept on a short leash and that their foreign incursions should be condemned even at the cost of a new SALT treaty; failure could then be blamed on Soviet expansionism. He later told me: “Brezhnev and company thought that they had us by the balls, And they were going to write world domination. And I felt that we first had to stop them, and then we could bargain with them. But we had to credibly stop them. And I think Vance felt we could separate these issues … and that striking a bargain in the strategic area would help deal with other issues.… It goes further than linkage. I felt that we had to stop them in order to really negotiate and then eventually accommodate with them. I frankly never thought SALT was the central issue.”111

  Vance, of course, took a very different view of Soviet adventurism. For him Soviet actions were not part of a grand scheme but opportunities being exploited by them abroad, and the United States should consider each one on a case-by-case basis and deal with it outside of the framework of the East-West conflict. In the long run, he argued, this would lead to cooperation that ultimately benefited U.S. interests.

  This conflicting advice, so vigorously expressed and pursued by Zbig, contributed to the widespread sense that the only thing on which the two rival advisers concurred was a lack of clarity in Carter’s foreign policies. Recognizing this divergence, the president tried to deal with it in a speech to graduating midshipmen at his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy, on June 7, 1978. But it only made matters worse. He took competing drafts written by Brzezinski and Vance and combined them in one speech, without coming down clearly on one side or the other. The first half focused on cooperation and peace between the superpowers, and the second outlined America’s strategic superiority and condemned the Soviet view of détente as “a continuing aggressive struggle for political advantage and increased influence in a variety of ways.” Robert Hunter, a member of the NSC staff who reviewed both drafts, said that Carter simply stapled them together: “And I could see where the shift was. I could tell where he had gone from one draft to another.”112 My view was that Carter felt so strongly about reducing nuclear arms that he would let no obstacle get in the way.

  DENG XIAOPING ADDS PEPPER TO SALT

  The internal rivalry intensified as far afield as China. Building on Nixon’s opening to Beijing, Carter had decided during his presidential campaign that he wanted to normalize relations with China in order to integrate one-quarter of the world’s population into the international order and create a mutual dependency between the two countries. He achieved his goal, pursuing it over the fierce opposition of the American Taiwan lobby and his potential Republican opponent Ronald Reagan—to say nothing of the suspicions of the Soviet Union. The key issue was maintaining relations with Taiwan and selling it weapons.

  Normalizing relations with China was pushed by Brzezinski and his China expert, Michael Oksenberg, from start to finish. Brzezinski saw the move as a way to counter Soviet strategy to achieve superiority from Western Europe and the Middle East to Southern Asia and the Indian Ocean, and also to “counter the image of the Carter administration as being soft vis-à-vis the Soviet Union,” even at the expense of delaying SALT II. He did so provocatively, going on Meet the Press after his first visit to China and blasting Soviet conduct around the world, while Vance was negotiating arms control with them.113

  Carter himself concluded the China deal completely in secret lest it anger the Russians enough to stop SALT; by his own admission, he never permitted a single message between the White House and Beijing on normalizing diplomatic relations to pass through the State Department.114 All of this deeply angered Vance, as he was negotiating SALT II.

  While preparing for the next round of SALT talks and traveling to the Middle East, Vance obtained Carter’s agreement that when negotiations on normalization with China were completed, the announcement would be made on January 1, a week after his next round of SALT negotiations in Geneva. But when the China talks were completed, Carter told him that the agreement with China might unravel, and he would announce it on December 15.115 Vance did not want it to delay a SALT treaty or intentionally to offend the Soviets, although Brzezinski insists Vance supported the early announcement.116 Nevertheless it did both.

  The announcement referred to mutual opposition by China and the United States to “hegemony”—an incendiary Chinese code word for Soviet global ambitions, which Brzezinski had happily agreed should be included as a signal to the Soviets. Vance would certainly have objected to the language as an unnecessary provocation just as he was about to finalize the SALT treaty with Gromyko—who, in fact, was upset when he saw it.

  China’s diminutive leader, Deng Xiaoping, took the country by storm when he arrived first in Texas late January 1979 and donned a ten-gallon hat that seemed to consume his whole small face. On January 30 I participated in the meeting in the Cabinet Room, with Deng and the Chinese delegation, the president, Vance, Brzezinski, and other cabinet officials. One of the key points in that meeting for Deng was to obtain the same low tariffs we levied on our traditional trading partners, called “most favored nation” status, which would have been denied to Chinese goods because the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, while directed at the Soviet Union, barred such treatment to all totalitarian countries that limited travel by their citizens. So, disarmingly, he pushed a White House notepad and pencil across the table to Carter and said: “Mr. President, please write on here how many Chinese you would like us to send you each year, one million, two million, ten million?” Everyone laughed. The president quickly replied: “If you want me to receive ten million Chinese to come to the United States, I’d be glad to do so.” But in return Carter offered to send Deng 10,000 American journalists!117

  But Carter had to also satisfy our longtime ally Taiwan that it would not be abandoned to its stronger neighbor across the Taiwan Strait. In a tough battle Carter persuaded Congress to pass the Taiwan Relations Act, which to this day remains the basis of our relationship with that country, providing sophisticated arms and guaranteeing its people U.S. protection from any Chinese military attack;118 the act also set the Taiwanese on a course from a one-party, authoritarian state to a thriving democracy now for more than 35 years.119

  For all the jollity in the White House, the timing and content of the announcement was one factor in delaying the conclusion of the SALT II Treaty, as Carter later admitted.120 That eventually proved fatal, contrary to Zbig’s belief that formal recognition of China would stop Soviet stalling on SALT and provide strategic leverage in obtaining a better deal for the United States.121

  Moscow’s annoyance contributed to delaying completion of the SALT II negotiations by six months, which—with Carter’s foreign policy already buckling under Soviet assertiveness—added more weight than the treaty could bear. Given proper timing, the president m
ight have won approval for the SALT treaty, while waiting a few months to normalize relations with China. Once again the compartmentalization of decisions, however historic, blurred the president’s accomplishments. Our White House staff was operating without a fully engaged and experienced chief of staff to keep decisions in a proper order for their effect on diplomacy and domestic politics, and to sequence decisions so they did not conflict. Not only was the message muddled, but policy itself was often adrift. The Vance-Brzezinski rivalry became more incendiary, and was not clarified until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan forced it, in the most dramatic fashion.

  THE SERPENT’S KISS

  Despite all the bumps in the road, SALT II was finally signed at a summit with Brezhnev in Vienna on June 18, 1979, a huge step forward in stabilizing U.S.-USSR relations, although not for long. The Soviets gave up more than we did. The limits of missiles for each side were capped at 2,400, but significant constraints were placed on modernizing intercontinental ballistic missiles, the heart of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, while the United States could modernize in every area of our strength; and limits were placed on the number of MIRV missiles.122 But even then, Carter paid a personal price.

  The night before the signing ceremony, the social side of the summit concluded at the Vienna State Opera with a gala performance of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio. As Carter and his daughter, Amy, studiously followed an English translation of the libretto, Brezhnev, Gromyko, and several aides could be seen in a neighboring box paying far more attention to the continuing flow of champagne than the opera onstage. Rafshoon took note of this raffish behavior and passed a word of advice to Carter during the intermission. He warned that Russian men have a habit of kissing other males on both cheeks at important occasions or when welcoming them—so he must be careful to avoid a bear hug during the signing ceremony lest it play badly at home, while he was trying to have the treaty ratified by the Senate. The president assured him, “Don’t worry, Jerry, it won’t happen.”

  But it did. Brezhnev, a bear of a man, embraced Carter after they both signed the treaty and exchanged pens, and then gave him the traditional Russian kiss. As Rafshoon remembered to his chagrin, it was prominently featured by the Reagan campaign in their ads against Carter. Diplomacy has its uses, but politeness does not always pay: Carter, with his Southern good manners, could not disentangle himself in time from the serpent’s kiss seen around the world.123 But worse was to come.

  * * *

  The treaty was submitted to the Senate on June 22, 1979, four days after it was signed in Vienna. But with the lengthy delay in reaching an agreement, the atmosphere could not have been more foreboding. Carter’s popularity was low. The Soviets remained active through their Cuban proxies in Africa. The treaty did not provide the deep Soviet cuts demanded by Jackson and the defense hawks, and Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker had exhausted his political capital with Republican conservatives by supporting the Panama Canal Treaty.

  With SALT II already on a knife edge, it received an almost fatal blow from a gross misunderstanding about a routine but callous activity in a supersensitive spot, Cuba. Since the end of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, some 2,300 Soviet military advisers had remained there with the acquiescence of the Kennedy administration. Over the years the Soviets gradually added a fully equipped defensive brigade with artillery and tank battalions, but no airlift capacity.124

  Frank Church of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, up for reelection in conservative Idaho, received a confidential State Department briefing, and then held a shameless news conference in Boise, making it appear that a new security threat existed, and that SALT ratification would be virtually impossible if the brigade was not removed.125 Carter was livid at Church, but he faced a dilemma. He first declared the Russian presence “unacceptable.” Then, after an independent investigation, it was established that the CIA had simply lost track of this small remnant of Russian soldiers, and nothing had changed their lack of offensive capability.

  Adm. Stansfield Turner, Carter’s Annapolis classmate, appointed to lead the CIA and clean up its dirty-tricks department, later admitted that “we made a terrible mistake on the Soviet brigade in overacting and seeming to give credence to a red herring.”126 In the end Turner’s sound assessment prevailed. But whatever momentum remained for SALT was stopped in a surge of public hostility to the Soviet Union. Committee votes made it evident that the treaty did not have sufficient Senate support. Carter asked Byrd to defer action, later describing the withdrawal as his presidency’s “most profound disappointment.”127

  Moscow’s next move in a faraway country made Senate ratification impossible.128 Yet SALT II remained another unheralded Carter legacy, because even after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan put the final nail into the coffin, Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leadership both complied with SALT II throughout its term, as if it had been ratified into law.

  23

  AFGHANISTAN

  Just six months after the triumph of détente in Vienna, Moscow betrayed Carter’s hard-won diplomacy by invading Afghanistan. At Christmastime 1979, Soviet special forces parachuted into the capital city of Kabul, assassinated the prime minister and his family, and put their own man in charge. He was a new and more reliable Afghan leader, supported by 85,000 Soviet troops that had been sent across the border in a massive airlift and ground movement completed in a few weeks.

  Carter immediately and correctly saw the Soviet invasion as one of the most difficult challenges of his administration, and it could not have come at a worse time—only weeks after the American hostages were seized in Tehran, and weeks before his first reelection test in the Iowa primary. His bold response ended his straddle between Vance’s view of handling the Soviet Union and Brzezinski’s: the invasion pushed him firmly across Zbig’s hard line.

  Afghanistan is less a stable nation than a collection of tribes in constant conflict, which from time to time have served as gravediggers of empires. For three centuries Afghanistan continued to be the chessboard for the “Great Game” of imperialism between Russia and Britain, and was deliberately left to its own devices as a powerless buffer state; the country never conducted a census or built a railroad. By the time Afghanistan became the last battlefield in the Cold War, it had been informally partitioned into spheres of influence, with the Soviet Union dominant in the north, where it extracted natural gas, and in the west in Kabul and the south, where it operated agricultural and civil aid missions, mainly through the United Nations.

  In 1973 King Zahir Shah was dethroned in a coup led by his cousin, Mohammed Daoud Khan, who was himself assassinated in another coup on April 27, 1978, led by local Communists of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. This Marxist uprising took Moscow completely by surprise, but the Soviet leaders now had a stake in the stability of a Muslim country on their border, which was itself lined with Soviet provinces that were predominantly Muslim. Afghanistan’s new leader, President Nur Mohammad Taraki, remained general secretary of the Communist Party, while Hafizullah Amin became foreign minister and the public face of the new regime, because he spoke fluent English from his days as a student at Columbia University in New York City.

  Moscow kept them at arm’s length by refusing a mutual defense treaty and full integration into the Soviet economic system. The government was composed of the party’s two rival factions: Khalq (masses), which was socialist and tribal, and Parcham (flag), which was urban, Leninist, and closer to the Soviet Union. Sharing power only intensified their bitter internal rivalry, leading to the execution or exile of countless Parcham members, one of whom was the Parcham leader, Babrak Karmal. He was appointed Afghan ambassador to Prague, but never showed up, sheltered by the Soviet Union until its invasion forces put him in power.

  Along with violent purges, the regime carried out a series of social and economic reforms that were viewed by the public as opposing Islam, particularly changes in marriage laws and dowries that were the foundation of agricultural credit
. Islamic insurgents adopted the mantle of mujahideen—holy warriors—opposing secular reforms. Only a few months after the April revolution of 1978, religious and tribal strife began spreading across the nation. From that time until the Soviet intervention, more than twenty thousand political prisoners were executed.

  Amid the chaos, in February 1979 the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped as he was being driven to work, and held in a Kabul hotel. The Afghan government refused to negotiate, and its forces stormed the hotel room backed by their Soviet advisers, despite impassioned pleas by the U.S. government and its diplomats on the scene. Dubs was killed in the crossfire. This incident led to a further deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations. A month later Taraki met with Brezhnev in Moscow to ask for further military aid, but received only token support and a warning to unify his party and prevent an all-out civil war that would inevitably draw in the Soviets.

  At the summit to sign SALT II in June 1979, Brzezinski warned Brezhnev about the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. The Soviet leader responded by raising the ruse that the United States was extending its frontiers to the Soviet border.1 Since the spring Brzezinski had been pressing the president to start a covert program to help the mujahideen. In July, in a decision almost unknown to this day, Carter approved the supply of communications devices and medical and other nonlethal supplies. Fully six months before the Soviet invasion, Washington began helping the rebels in the hope of improving their chances of holding Soviet proxy forces at bay.2

  Several leading Soviet officials, including Foreign Minister Gromyko, opposed intervention, while Soviet advisers in Kabul were urging the regime to move more prudently with its reforms, especially in the countryside. Muslim nations, particularly Pakistan, worried that Soviet intervention might mean further expansion into their territory, and the nervous Saudi government was preparing to formally ask the United States to intervene on behalf of the rebels and block the Soviets.3 Events escalated rapidly. On September 11 Taraki went to Moscow to discuss replacing Amin. Two days later Amin preempted his dismissal by having Taraki murdered. The Soviets became increasingly suspicious of Amin’s motives and loyalty, and suspected him of seeking alliances with Pakistan, China, and even the United States.