From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (139 page)

Liberals' efforts to save their political skins added to Carter's difficulties. In September, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Frank Church of Idaho, facing a strong conservative challenge for reelection, announced the "discovery" in Cuba of a brigade of Soviet troops that in fact had been there since 1962. Already on the ropes over Iran, Carter sought to ease popular fears by affirming that the brigade had "evidently" been in Cuba "some time" and in any event did not threaten the United States. To show their toughness, he and Vance insisted that it could not stay and beefed up U.S. military capabilities in the Caribbean, thus stoking the very fears they had attempted to calm. This tempest in a Cuban teapot dragged on for weeks, doomed SALT, infuriated the Soviets, and left the administration more vulnerable to conservative attack.
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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, pushed Carter into the camp of the hard-liners and provoked him to escalate the Cold War into its climactic phase. During most of the Soviet-American conflict, that isolated, landlocked nation had remained non-aligned. A 1973 coup brought to power a pro-Western government, which, five years later, was overthrown by leftist army officers. Following firmly established
Cold War patterns, Moscow promptly sent aid and advisers to a potential client. Still in a detente frame of mind, the United States at first responded with remarkable equanimity, maintaining relations with the pro-Soviet regime and even sending limited assistance. United States policy changed in 1979. Allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia pushed Washington to do something. In January, Carter authorized a covert operation providing aid to Islamic rebels, even though Brzezinski warned it might prompt large-scale Soviet intervention. Both men saw advantages in luring the USSR into the "Afghan trap."
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By late 1979, Afghanistan's government was teetering from destructive internal rivalries and Islamic insurgents. Fearing its collapse, the Soviet Union intervened. The Kremlin acted reluctantly to protect what it viewed as a crucial buffer state. The Islamic revolution in nearby Iran seemed to endanger its own Muslim "republics." It especially feared China, which had close ties to Afghanistan's eastern neighbor, Pakistan. Perhaps more paranoid than their U.S. counterparts at this time, Soviet leaders took seriously alarmist KGB reports that the Afghan prime minister sought ties with the United States. Moscow thus sent a brigade of troops. Soon after, it overthrew the government and launched a costly and ultimately suicidal war against the insurgents.
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Viewing Soviet moves from a worst-case standpoint, Carter responded with a decisiveness quite out of character for his presidency. He was angered by the Kremlin's action, perhaps even took it personally since it seemed to prove that his original assessment of Soviet motives and goals had been wrongheaded. Already under fire at home from Cold Warriors and facing a tough campaign for renomination, he may have concluded that a hard-line policy was necessary to give him any chance for reelection. Whatever the precise reason, henceforth he was squarely in Brzezinski's camp. With the Middle East and crucial Persian Gulf region in turmoil, he viewed a Soviet takeover of Afghanistan as a dire threat to vital U.S. interests. In a notably alarmist speech on January 4, 1980, he condemned Soviet "aggression" and warned of the danger to Persian Gulf oil fields.
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To combat the Soviet intervention, he took a dazzling variety of steps. He drastically stepped up U.S. covert aid to the mujahideen rebels, laying

the basis for an assistance program that, as he and Brzezinski hoped, would in fact help make Afghanistan the Soviet Union's Vietnam.
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He tabled the long-delayed SALT II agreement. Without giving much thought to their possible effectiveness, implications, or consequences, he instituted an array of punitive sanctions, embargoing the shipment of new technology to the Soviet Union and, over the loud protest of farm states, banning further grain sales. He later boycotted the Olympic Games scheduled for Moscow that summer. In his State of the Union address, he proclaimed what came to be called the Carter Doctrine, sternly warning that any attempt by an "outside force" to gain control of the Persian Gulf
region would be "regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States" and would be "repelled by force." To back up his warnings, he initiated registration for the draft, asked for a 5 percent increase in military spending, proposed major aid for Pakistan, and beefed up the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
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Much like Truman at the onset of the Korean War, he set out to shore up U.S. alliances, even in cases like the Western Hemisphere and South Asia where his actions compromised established policy on human rights and nuclear non-proliferation.

In a move that sent shock waves all the way to Moscow, Carter in January 1980 dispatched Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to Beijing to discuss the establishment of military ties. The United States to this point had scrupulously—and sensibly—avoided such steps. Some Americans hesitated to bolster Chinese military power while the status of Taiwan remained unresolved. Vance also correctly warned that, instead of forcing Moscow to be cooperative, cozying up to China would make working with the Soviet Union much more difficult.
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Egged on by Brzezinski, Carter after Afghanistan threw caution to the winds. Brown made clear on arrival that he hoped to deal with "complementary actions in the field of defense as well as diplomacy." He arranged for the sale of non-lethal military equipment including radar and other high-tech electronic items long sought by the Chinese and denied the Soviets. He proposed that the two nations cooperate in sending arms to the Afghan insurgents and take joint action should Vietnam invade Thailand. The Chinese happily accepted U.S. electronic equipment but stopped well short of the de facto alliance Brown advocated, agreeing only to step up covert aid to the Afghan rebels. Later in the year, the United States opened preliminary discussions for the sale of military equipment. Disguised with a mustache grown especially for the occasion, CIA director Stansfield Turner secretly traveled to Beijing to discuss the sharing of intelligence. The 1980 tilt toward China ended any semblance of balance in U.S. relations with the two Communist powers.
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In July 1980, Carter approved Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59), a fundamental reassessment of U.S. nuclear strategy. The doctrine of mutual assured destruction had provided a measure of deterrence through the grim certainty that each nation could destroy the other's primary population centers. Nervous U.S. strategists increasingly feared, however, that
an apparent Soviet lead in conventional weapons as well as qualitative and quantitative improvements in their nuclear arsenal gave them the means to target U.S. military installations and wage nuclear war short of annihilation. Their conclusion, outlined in PD-59, was equally disturbing but to them unavoidable: The United States must develop a strategy and the instruments to strike military as well as civilian targets. It must be able to fight and win a nuclear war. As significant for its era as NSC-68 for the 1950s, PD-59 also called for a huge boost in military spending and for the largest buildup of conventional and nuclear arms since the Truman years.
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The U.S. response to Afghanistan marked yet another major turning point in the Cold War. Carter's early 1980 initiatives constituted a clean break with policies pursued since the mid-1960s. The United States relegated detente to the scrap heap, sharply reescalated its Cold War rhetoric, and reinstituted policies of global containment reminiscent of the early days of the Soviet-American struggle. The sanctions initiated in haste took on a life of their own. Along with the scrapping of SALT II, the development of new missile systems, and the U.S. deployment of missiles to Europe, PD-59 appeared to Moscow to represent a menacing U.S. quest for nuclear superiority—"madness,"
Tass
screamed; "nuclear blackmail," according to
Pravda
—reigniting the arms race and sending it to its most fearful level.
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As with the Korean War and other Cold War crises, the flare-up of 1979–80 stemmed at least in part from misperception and miscalculations on both sides. The Soviets saw themselves acting defensively in Afghanistan. The last thing they wanted was to spur a major U.S. rearmament program and drive Washington further into the arms of Beijing. Their move into Afghanistan thus took the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy, making a reality of the Sino-American collaboration that in their imagination had aroused grave concern about Afghanistan. The Soviet incursion deserved to be condemned and opposed. But at least in the beginning it was not truly an "invasion," as U.S. officials repeatedly charged. Nor did it represent the "greatest threat to world peace" since World War II, as Carter often affirmed, or the first step in a drive to the Persian Gulf. Americans seem to have found in Afghanistan an outlet for the frustrations that had built up in recent months. They were more comfortable with the clarity
and certitude of a new era of confrontation than with the confused and uncertain state of detente. Whatever the cause, the Soviet move into Afghanistan and the U.S. overreaction provoked a new and especially dangerous phase of the Cold War.

Carter's political fortunes got no more than a short-term boost from his decisive moves. As in the first stages of the hostage crisis, the public initially rallied to their president. His poll numbers shot up. Although the grain embargo threatened to hurt farmers, Iowans overwhelmingly voted for Carter over Kennedy in that state's Democratic caucuses. But the president could never really overcome his reputation for indecisiveness. Indeed, Republicans and conservative Democrats insisted that his weakness and naïveté had brought about the situation he was forced to respond to.
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More important, during Carter's last months in office, everything seemed to fall apart. A crippling recession proved impervious to the numerous countermeasures attempted by Ford and Carter. In the summer of 1980, corporate profits dropped by almost 20 percent, one of the biggest downturns in the postwar period. Unemployment rose to almost 8 percent with forecasts that it might hit 10 percent by the end of the year. A sagging economy sparked racial violence from Boston to Miami. Eight years of hard times with no end in view left the nation in a surly and angry mood.
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There were more foreign policy setbacks. The European nations questioned Carter's hawkish response to Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, opening new rifts in the Western alliance. The Camp David Accords, one of the president's major achievements, came apart at the seams. Israeli prime minister Begin defined Palestinian autonomy as narrowly as possible, stopping far short of the self-determination to which Sadat was committed. During 1980, Carter made several futile efforts to salvage his handiwork only to recognize that the agreements whose negotiation he had so painstakingly overseen were fundamentally flawed.
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Closer to home, the administration's efforts to channel the Nicaraguan revolution in a moderate direction failed badly. The United States was no more successful using carrot and stick with embattled dictator Anastasio Somoza than it had been with the shah. Wisely, it refused to bail out his despicable regime when it crumbled, but its attempts to control the revolution through an unwieldy electoral device that would have limited the power of leftist rebels had no chance of success. The president at first tried to work with and even secure assistance for a new government headed by the
Sandinistas, the dominant group whose choice of name (for rebel leader Augusto Sandino) made clear its political orientation and attitude toward the United States. While Congress dawdled with Carter's request for aid, the new government shifted to the left, secured assistance from Cuba and the Soviet Union, and established ties with leftist groups elsewhere in Central America. Carter came under fire from conservatives for allowing another Cuba in the hemisphere.
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The hostage crisis that at first worked in Carter's favor by the spring of 1980 had also turned against him. The crisis became the media event of its time. For months, it dominated the headlines and filled television screens, even late-night viewing, where ABC's new
Nightline
news program sometimes outdrew popular variety shows. Television especially played the story for maximum dramatic effect. Images of young Iranian women in strange clothing and bearded young men shouting anti-American slogans and burning U.S. flags piqued the emotions of an already frustrated and angry public. The loud demands of Iranian students in the United States that the shah be returned to Iran provoked from Americans counterdemands that all Iranians be deported. In time, the crisis became a rallying point for a bitterly divided people. It inspired popular songs such as "Go to Hell Ayatollah" and the more somber "Hostage Prayer." To show solidarity with the hostages, Americans kept their car lights on, rang church bells, and, following the example of another popular song, tied yellow ribbons around trees and light poles. In the early months, the solidarity extended to Carter, whose approval ratings soared. The president was the first to appreciate that American patience was limited, however, and by late March, with no end to the crisis in sight, he was in trouble again. It was in this context that he approved the ill-fated hostage rescue mission.
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