CHAPTER XII

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The Trend toward
Soviet-American Détente

ASIA is by no means at the top of the list of common concerns to the United States and the Soviet Union. This has been true at any rate since the Korean War, from which the Soviet Union learned that it is not wise to challenge American interests in Asia by force as long as the United States remains a significant military power in the region and in the Western Pacific. Accordingly, Asian affairs do not figure prominently in this chapter, which concerns itself more with such matters as the basic attitudes of the two elites on general East-West relations, the strategic arms race, Europe, and the Middle East. On the other hand, the overall state of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union at any given time permeates virtually all aspects of the foreign policies of the two superpowers, including their Asian policies.

The Nixonian View of the Soviet Union

President Nixon’s anti-Communist and anti-Soviet views during the years before 1968 are well known, and there are strong reasons for believing that he carried them with him, to a considerable extent at any rate, into the White House. He had no intention of being “pushed around” by the Communist powers, and still less of appearing in this light in the eyes of the American public, given the political harm suffered by the Truman administration on account of the widespread suspicion that it had been “soft” on Communism in China and Korea. President Nixon was certainly concerned over the Soviet Union’s growing military might, its occasional assertiveness in Europe and the Middle East, and its aid to North Vietnam.

On the other hand, he was aware that by 1968 anti-Communism no longer had the popular appeal in the United States that it had possessed a decade or two earlier. There were several reasons for this trend, including the social trends discussed briefly in the preceding chapter and the obvious fact that the United States had not been involved in a war with one of the major Communist powers since 1953; the war in Vietnam, by its duration and inconclusiveness, had generated great weariness and frustration and a feeling of “never again.” Increasing numbers of intellectuals and politicians proclaimed that the Cold War was “over.” Since much, although probably not all, of President Nixon’s earlier anti-Communism had been motivated by political expediency, he began to turn away from public anti-Communism as it ceased to be popular. In his 1968 campaign, he stressed his desire to improve relations with the Soviet Union, as well as to bring peace in Vietnam. Furthermore, he realized that the Soviet Union had attained approximate parity with the United States in strategic weapons and was too strong to be “pushed around.”

President Nixon’s idea was to proceed toward a détente with the Soviet Union on a broad front, rather than to have a “selective détente” (as he and Kissinger called it) under which Moscow could be difficult on some questions while enjoying the benefits of détente with respect to others. In other words, there was to be a “linkage” among all the major issues, so that in order to get what it wanted in such fields as trade the Soviet Union would have to be reasonable on such others as strategic arms, Vietnam, and the Middle East. As he indicated to the correspondent Howard K. Smith in an interview on July 1, 1970, he saw the Sino-Soviet dispute as a force to render Moscow more manageable from the American point of view, and improved Sino-American relations as an important means to the same end. He was in no particular hurry to move toward détente with the Soviet Union, partly because he wanted to approach China first, and partly because he was determined not to begin SALT talks under conditions that would inhibit the United States’ freedom to develop an ABM system and MIRVs.

Moscow’s Shift from Assertiveness to Détente

During the lifetime of the Johnson administration, the Soviet leadership tended to view the United States as being generally on the offensive and itself on the defensive, particularly with respect to Vietnam and the Third World in general. In Europe, the United States seemed to be beginning a military withdrawal on account of domestic (especially congressional) pressures, but this superficially favorable development (from the Soviet point of view) was more than counterbalanced by the prospect of greater freedom of action for West Germany, which was already embarked on a dynamic Ostpolitik designed among other things to weaken East Germany’s ties with its East European neighbors. To counter this Moscow began in 1967 to propose a vaguely defined arrangement for “European security,” whose main purposes presumably were to stabilize East Germany’s position (its separateness from West Germany in particular) and substitute Soviet for American influence in the continent as a whole.

From this phase of defensive uncertainty the Soviet Union moved suddenly but briefly in 1968 into one of self-confidence and assertiveness. Its attainment of strategic parity with the United States at about that time was probably the major cause of this shift, which was more or less global in scope. One of its manifestations was that the Soviet military began for the first time to talk as though a major conventional war in Europe, one in which each side would be deterred from using nuclear weapons and Soviet conventional superiority would therefore prevail, was a realistic possibility from the purely military point of view. Soviet consciousness of parity helped to increase Moscow’s interest in beginning the SALT talks, which accordingly started in November 1969. Another manifestation, as well as a source of considerable additional assertiveness, was the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was designed to squash the liberal, reformist tendencies then operating in that unhappy country, prevent their emergence in other Communist countries (including the Soviet Union itself), and establish Soviet psychological ascendancy in Europe generally and over West Germany in particular. These aims were achieved; the West German Social Democratic government under Willy Brandt, which came into office in 1969, eliminated the anti-East German thrust of the Ostpolitik, accepted the territorial losses suffered in 1945, and signed a treaty to that effect with the Soviet Union in August 1970. In the Middle East, Soviet assertiveness during this period took the form of very active support, with equipment and in other ways, for Egyptian military pressures on Israel (in the Sinai area) and for Syrian military pressures on Jordan.

During the second half of 1970, the self-confidence of the previous two years began to be replaced by a consciousness of problems and setbacks. The Soviet economy was limping, partly on account of the successful effort to achieve strategic parity; Moscow’s interest in a successful outcome of the SALT negotiations and increased trade and technological contact with the Western countries and Japan accordingly grew greater. The West German Bundestag withheld ratification of the August 1970 treaty until May 1972. The United States gave strong support in 1970 to Israel and Jordan against Egypt and Syria, respectively. The Soviet relationship with Egypt was weakened by the death of President Nasser shortly afterward. The fairly rapid American disengagement from Vietnam gave the United States increased maneuverability to cope with Soviet challenges; in the autumn of 1970, the United States compelled Moscow to abandon what was apparently a plan to establish a nuclear submarine base in Cuba. Closer to home, serious unrest among Polish workers brought about a change in the top leadership in December 1970 and reminded the Kremlin that its own immunity from such disturbances could not be taken for granted indefinitely.

But most important of all was probably the appearance of signs, such as the visit of President Ceausescu of Romania to the United States in October 1970 with a message from Peking, that a détente between China and the United States was in the making. To Moscow’s way of thinking, its interests could not help being adversely, and seriously, affected by any sort of “collusion” between the strongest and the bitterest of its adversaries. It was essential to do something to minimize the development of this relationship. In January 1971 secret contacts began between Brezhnev and Nixon with the aim of getting momentum into the SALT negotiations, which were then deadlocked. Probably without much hope of success, Brezhnev made a secret offer to Peking of a nonaggression pact in February 1971 but was rebuffed. At the end of March, in his report to the Twenty-Fourth Soviet Party Congress, he indicated an interest in improved relations with the United States, even though he loaded his remarks—perhaps out of conviction, perhaps for effect on Communist fundamentalists and abroad, perhaps for both reasons—with the usual denunciations of “imperialism.” In spite of the importance that Moscow evidently intended to be attached to his remarks, they had no obvious immediate effect, unless one so interprets the fact that Peking proceeded to accelerate its movement toward détente with the United States, a trend that the United States was happy to reciprocate.

The converse was also true: The greater the progress toward Sino-American détente, the better the outlook for significant improvement in Soviet-American relations. It would be hard to interpret in any other way the fact that the announcement on October 5, 1971 that Kissinger would visit Peking for a second time before the end of the month—an announcement that eliminated any reasonable doubt that President Nixon would go to China as scheduled—was followed a week later by a statement that the President would also visit the Soviet Union in late May 1972. He denied of course that he was trying to exploit the differences between the two Communist powers, but the fact remained that those differences made it virtually impossible for either of the adversaries to be willingly left as odd man out while the other improved its relations with the United States. In the Soviet case, the imperative was all the stronger because a sharp turn for the worse in Soviet-American relations would jeopardize the pending ratification of the Soviet treaty with West Germany, which at that time was the keystone of Moscow’s European policy.

Accordingly, Moscow gritted its teeth in comparative silence during the Peking summit and the American bombing of North Vietnam in retaliation for Hanoi’s Easter offensive. It did not follow, however, that the Soviet leadership was prepared to accept the Nixon administration’s views on “linkage,” or in other words to cease all activities that the United States regarded as trouble-making. When Kissinger visited Moscow on April 20-24, 1972 to prepare for the summit, he met with a refusal to stop the flow of arms to Hanoi, although the Soviet leadership claimed to be unhappy about the Easter offensive and not merely about the American bombing. On the other hand, the Soviet side made a concession regarding the SALT negotiations, by agreeing at last that Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) should be counted as strategic weapons and should therefore be subject to limitation.

Nixon was afraid, however, that American public acceptance of the SALT treaty that he hoped to sign while in Moscow would be jeopardized unless the Soviet Union were more helpful on Vietnam. It was to a large extent in order to promote such helpfulness, as well as to gain general leverage that might be useful at the summit through a display of resolution, that on May 8 he ordered the mining of Haiphong harbor, a step that the Johnson administration had flinched from taking because of the Soviet shipping and supplies that passed through the port. The shock in Moscow was real, but not great enough to produce behavior likely to threaten the holding of the summit or the ratification of the treaty by the West German Bundestag (parliament). One member of the Politburo, Pyotr Shelest, who advocated cancelling or at least postponing the summit, and had had serious differences with Brezhnev on other grounds, was outvoted and purged.

The Moscow Summit and SALT I

The most conspicuous, and probably also the most important, achievement of the Moscow Summit (May 22-28, 1972) was the completion and signing of the two agreements worked out in part during the first round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I). The talks and the agreements flowed from a considerable background of Soviet-American interaction since the Second World War in the field of arms control and disarmament, which it may be useful to summarize.

Probably the most important feature of the various American proposals on arms control and disarmament since the war has been their insistence that any agreement must be capable of verification as to compliance. For about two decades, verification required the ability to inspect the territory of each signatory, something that the security mania of the Soviet leadership would not permit. Moscow insisted on its sovereignty and made mostly propagandistic proposals for unverifiable measures, such as Khrushchev’s advocacy in 1959 of “general and complete disarmament.” The only important agreement on arms control and disarmament reached during this period was the limited nuclear test ban treaty of 1963, which was made possible by the alarm created by the Cuban missile crisis and which applied only to media where testing was fairly readily detectable (the atmosphere and underwater, not underground). In the absence of more comprehensive agreements, the Soviet Union maintained a blackmail capability against Western Europe through conventional forces and MRBMs and built up its strategic forces. The United States maintained strategic superiority (until the late 1960s) and did its best to foster Western European unity in the face of actual and possible Soviet threats, for example by taking the important step of admitting West Germany to NATO in 1955. With the rapid development of “overhead reconnaissance” (reconnaissance satellites), however, the issue of on-site inspection, which the Soviet Union still opposed, became less important. Since the late 1960s, accordingly, the United States and the Soviet Union have concluded or adhered to agreements banning the deployment of nuclear weapons in space and on the seabed, the transfer of nuclear weapons to currently non-nuclear states (the Nonproliferation Treaty), and the use of chemical weapons. Moscow continues to make disarmament proposals, for example, for a general nuclear summit conference and a cut in all defense budgets, that the United States regards as unhelpful and propagandistic.

Soviet willingness to engage in talks on possible agreements more substantial than the ones just mentioned—in the sense that they might actually limit the existing race in major offensive weapons systems—began to make itself known in 1968, for several probable reasons. Moscow would no longer have to negotiate from a position of strategic inferiority, since it had attained approximate parity in this field with the United States; it was rapidly passing the United States in the number of ICBMs, as it had done earlier in the megatonnage of its warheads and the thrust of (and hence the “throw-weight” deliverable by) its missiles, and it had an apparently not-very-effective antiballistic missile system around Moscow. On the other hand, the United States was making or about to make important technical advances; it was starting a “thin” (supposedly anti-Chinese) antiballistic missile system that could be upgraded into a “thick” (anti-Soviet) system in order to protect its land-based ICBMs, it was qualitatively ahead in SLBMs and antisubmarine warfare, and above all, it was beginning to develop MIRVs (multiple warheads, mainly for the Minuteman III ICBM), in addition to retaining its marked advantage in bombers and overseas bases, but it was not increasing the numbers of its ICBMs (1,054) and SLBMs (656).

The possibility that SALT talks might begin in 1968 was eliminated by the atmosphere resulting from the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The situation in 1969 was complicated, among other things, by the Sino-Soviet border crisis, which not only placed some strains on Soviet-American relations but put Moscow in a bad light in the eyes of a number of Communist Parties. Accordingly, it was only after the beginning of the Sino-Soviet border talks that the SALT negotiations finally began (in November 1969). They promptly witnessed a major difference which has not yet been resolved, over the definition of a strategic weapon. The Soviet side wanted so to describe, and to bring within the scope of SALT, any weapon capable of hitting the territory of the other party; this criterion would cover many of the United States’ bases overseas, but not the Soviet MRBMs targeted on Western Europe. The American side successfully resisted this argument as well as the Soviet claim for compensation in the form of a higher ceiling on Soviet ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers; accordingly, both the American forward bases and the Soviet MRBM force were excluded from SALT I. As the result of differences over what kind of controls on MIRV would be best and military objections on both sides to restrictions on research and development, it was decided to seek no qualitative limitations on offensive weapons during SALT I, so that both sides were free to proceed with the development of MIRV and other technical innovations. The Soviet side attained its goal of including antiballistic missiles in SALT I, but abandoned (at the time of Kissinger’s April 19, 1972 visit to Moscow) its insistence that SLBMs be excluded.

By the time President Nixon came to Moscow, the two sides had come very close to reaching agreement on both antiballistic missiles and offensive weapons (subject to the exclusions already mentioned). But a few remaining disagreements had to be dealt with at the highest level, notably one over the numbers (actual or estimated) that were to be accepted in each offensive category as indicating the size of the current inventories and that therefore were to serve as the basis for the permissible ceilings. The disagreements were resolved hastily in time for agreements on antiballistic missiles and offensive missiles to be signed on May 26, during the Moscow summit. The first of these, which was a formal treaty, limited each party to two antiballistic missile “deployment areas” of not more than 100 missiles each, one to protect the capital area and the other to protect its main ICBM force. The other was an interim five-year agreement covering (land-based) ICBMs and SLBMs. In principle, the maximum numbers in both categories were fixed at the level of existing missile launchers plus (in the case of the Soviet Union) missile launchers actually or allegedly under construction. These figures were 1,054 ICBMs and 656 SLBMs (on 41 submarines) for the United States, and 1,618 ICBMs and 740 SLBMs (on 56 submarines) for the Soviet Union. Within these quantitative limits, qualitative changes such as the deployment of MIRV were permitted, with two main qualifications: no additional “heavy” ICBMs such as the Soviet SS-9 could be deployed, even as substitutes for older “light” ICBMs; and no ICBMs could be substituted for SLBMs, although the reverse substitution was permitted on a one-for-one basis, up to a limit of 54 (and a grand total of 44 submarines) for the United States and 210 (and a grand total of 62 submarines) for the Soviet Union. The reason for the latter restriction was that SLBMs were regarded as more nearly invulnerable to pre-emptive attack than land-based ICBMs, and hence less destabilizing; in other words, given the comparative pointlessness of such an attack on the other side’s SLBM force, there would be little incentive to launch one.

It is obvious that the agreement conceded a considerable numerical superiority in ICBMs and SLBMs to the Soviet Union, a superiority enhanced to an indeterminate degree by Soviet superiority in the “throw-weight” of its missiles and the megatonnage of its warheads. On the other hand, the Nixon administration argued, with much plausibility, that these advantages were at least offset by American technical advantages (in the MIRV program, in antiballistic missiles, in SLBMs, and in antisubmarine warfare), by the greater size of the American strategic bomber force (450 as compared to 100, approximately), and by the vastly superior American network of overseas bases; furthermore, it was argued that without the agreement the Soviet quantitative edge in ICBMs and SLBMs would have grown even greater. On the whole, these arguments appear to have enough validity so that there is no convincing basis for any other verdict than that effective parity still exists between the two sides, in the sense that the strategic forces of either could survive a first strike by the other to a sufficient degree to launch an “unacceptable” retaliatory strike.

The other public agreements that emerged from the Moscow summit were largely agreements in principle to cooperate in such fields as trade expansion, space exploration, and environmental protection. The joint communique contained passages welcoming the trend toward détente in Europe and expressing hope for peace in the Middle East and Indochina (in the latter case, there were differences reflecting the Soviet commitment to Hanoi). In addition, the two sides endorsed a set of “Basic Principles of Relations” stressing avoidance of war, “peaceful coexistence,” further efforts toward disarmament, and continuing high level contacts, and insisting that “the development of United States-Soviet relations is not directed against third countries and their interests.”

Although the Moscow summit lacked many of the flamboyant atmospherics of its predecessor in Peking, it too was obviously intended by President Nixon to make a major impact on American opinion and promote his prospects for re-election. On the Soviet side, there were strong expressions of anti-Chinese feeling in the course of the negotiations, combined with an unwillingness to make commitments adverse to Hanoi; nevertheless, it appears that the Soviet Union like China began to reduce its arms shipments to North Vietnam after mid-1972, so that some sort of tacit understanding to that effect may have been reached at the Moscow summit. In the case of the Middle East, where Soviet prestige was less heavily engaged inasmuch as none of its local partners was a Communist state, the Soviet side appears to have promised not only to prevent its military personnel then in Egypt from engaging in combat against Israel but to withdraw most of them (this was done in July 1972 under the guise of a face-saving request for withdrawal from President Anwar Sadat) and to try to discourage the Arab states from attacking Israel. The main single cause of the comparative Soviet reasonableness at the Moscow summit, apart from the overriding one of not wanting to be the odd man out facing a Sino-American détente, was probably economic: the Soviet economy, badly strained by the missile build-up and by a poor 1972 harvest, was lagging behind the West in many sectors and was in serious need of expanded trade and credits if it was to catch up.

The Second Nixon-Brezhnev Summit

During the first year after the Moscow summit, Soviet-American relations developed to the reasonable satisfaction of both parties, with certain exceptions to be noted later. On the Soviet side, there was a powerful incentive for maintaining the relationship in flourishing condition, in that Sino-American relations continued to improve. It is probably not a coincidence that the announcement in February 1973 that the United States and the People’s Republic of China would exchange liaison offices (embassies in everything but name) was followed in March by indications that Brezhnev would visit the United States in June. In spite of various difficulties that delayed agreement on a date for the visit, it took place on June 18-25, 1973.

On President Nixon’s side, interest in holding a second summit was at least as great as his interest in holding the Moscow summit had been; if 1972 was an election year, 1973 was the year when the Watergate controversy assumed major proportions, and the President was obviously eager for diplomatic successes, or apparent successes, that would confirm his self-image as a great statesman and help to distract the American public from the operations of his “plumbers” and other subordinates and friends. Prior to the Brezhnev visit, various United States government agencies were cajoled by the White House to think of additional agreements on Soviet-American cooperation that could be signed during the Brezhnev visit and perhaps help to create the desired effect. On the Soviet side, there was a continuing interest in not being outpaced by Peking and in expanding trade and getting credits; it is probable that Brezhnev wanted to impress as strongly as possible on official American thinking the pleasantness and advantages of détente with the Soviet Union, so as to minimize the adverse consequences for the overall Soviet-American relationship of a major Soviet initiative in the Middle East that appears to have been already in the planning stage.

This being the case, the second Nixon-Brezhnev summit inevitably consisted for the most part of atmospherics. A number of politically meaningless agreements were concluded on cooperation in such fields as trade, oceanography, and the prevention of nuclear war. More significantly, it was agreed that at the second round of SALT talks (SALT II) every effort should be made to reach a permanent agreement including qualitative as well as quantitative limits on offensive weapons in 1974.

East-West Relations: The View from Washington

It is not very difficult to identify the forces in the United States that can be described, at the cost of some oversimplification, as for and against détente with the Soviet Union.

Liberals and radicals, especially academics and other intellectuals, generally favored détente during most of the 1960s, although they were somewhat put off by the bureaucratic quality of the Soviet system. They were increasingly alienated, however, by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and above all by the anti-Israel thrust of Soviet Middle Eastern policy and by the official repression of Soviet Jews and dissenters. By the early 1970s the liberal and radical wings of American opinion, except for actual Communists and some of the youth, were in favor of extracting a price from Moscow for détente, in the shape of concessions tending to modify the Soviet posture on the issues just mentioned.

The most powerful force behind détente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s has been not the intellectuals but the United States government. The reasons for its enthusiasm for détente are touched on elsewhere but may usefully be summarized here. They appear to be: a desire to avoid, via arms control agreements, the necessity of matching the Soviet strategic weapons build-up; a desire to moderate Soviet Middle Eastern policy, partly with an eye to pro-Israeli feeling in the United States; a desire to capitalize on the Soviet desire for trade and credits to the advantage of the American business community, of whose interests the Nixon administration is of course solicitous in the extreme; a desire to enhance the Nixon administration’s image (and above all self-image) as a uniquely creative and statesmanlike innovator in the field of foreign policy, to the advantage of its domestic political standing and by way of distraction from its actual or alleged involvement in illegal activities; a desire for help, or at any rate understanding, in achieving at least the semblance of an Indochina settlement; and a desire to insure against a possible renewal of Soviet trouble-making in Europe.

All this makes a formidable list of reasons, but the administration with its characteristic lack of frankness seldom presented them in this way to the American public. Instead, détente was presented as necessitated by the urgency of avoiding a nuclear war, an argument that is self-evidently true but not highly relevant, inasmuch as both sides have been completely determined for years to avoid such a war and the measures adopted by the Nixon administration in the name of détente have gone far beyond what could reasonably be considered necessary merely for the purpose of avoiding a nuclear war. Nevertheless, the equation between détente and peace can easily be made to appear plausible, and the latter is a theme with an understandably powerful appeal to Western (and other) opinion; when President Nixon delivered his State of the Union address to Congress in January 1974, the theme that evoked the loudest applause was his references to his efforts to achieve peace. It is also a theme that Soviet propaganda has found very effective as a means of playing on Western feelings, through emphasis on the alleged devotion of the Soviet Union to peace (in plain English getting what it wants without war). The well-known Soviet tendency to seek, or at least proclaim, détente in areas where it might be dangerous to do otherwise, while seeking every possible advantage in other areas, was minimized by the Nixon administration, in its public comments on East-West relations, with the bland statement that “selective détente” would not be tolerated. Unfortunately for this theory, the Soviet Union’s highly assertive recent Middle Eastern policy (which is discussed in greater detail below) and the insult to the spirit of détente represented by the expulsion of the Soviet Union’s most eminent writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, went unpunished by the Nixon administration.

Next to the administration, the main lobby in favor of détente is the American business community. The reasons for its enthusiasm, which are too obvious to need much elaboration, include such windfalls as the “great grain robbery” (Senator Jackson’s phrase) of 1972, in which grain dealers close to the administration made a handsome profit. Under one of the agreements signed during Brezhnev’s visit in the United States in 1973, ten of the leading “monopoly capitalist” firms in the United States were allowed, and in fact encouraged, to establish offices in Moscow. To them, obviously, détente has no political meaning; it means only profits.

The most important counterpressures came not so much from various private groups such as the Jewish community, for which the administration had little regard, as from an influential collection of “hawks” in Washington. Some of these were connected with the Pentagon and included former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, as well as his successor James Schlesinger. They tended to favor more of an effort to match the Soviet strategic build-up, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, and to have serious reservations about SALT I. The views of this group overlapped to a high degree those of the man who had become the most articulate and influential spokesman of the entire anti-détente coalition, Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington. Senator Jackson remained profoundly suspicious of Soviet intentions and was far more attuned to the imperatives of containment than to the desirability of détente. He insisted that future SALT agreements must embody the principle of numerical equality; through his influence the American delegation to the SALT talks and the leadership of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency were extensively purged. Jackson, among others, insisted successfully on the development of the new Trident nuclear submarine.

Unfortunately, Jackson has become unduly preoccupied with numbers, which are not the essence of the problem, at least as long as the United States retains an assured retaliatory capability against the Soviet Union. The problem rather is one of political intelligence and determination, and continuity of policy, in all of which it can be argued that the Soviet Union is superior or at any rate capable of achieving and maintaining superiority. Jackson has taken a political interest in the fate of the Soviet Jews and a humanitarian interest in the fate of Soviet dissenters. He has been instrumental, via the Jackson Amendment, in blocking most-favored-nation treatment for the Soviet Union—with the result that Soviet goods have had to pay higher import duties in the United States than goods from many other countries—as long as it restricts Jewish emigration. In 1973, obviously in an effort to meet this condition without unduly antagonizing the Arab countries, the Soviet Union relaxed its restrictions on Jewish emigration somewhat. Most-favored-nation status still eluded Moscow, however, on account of the reverberations on Capitol Hill caused by Soviet involvement in the Middle Eastern war of late 1973, which were greater than those created (publicly at least) at the White House.

The argument between the pro- and anti-détente schools continues unresolved. The former has an obvious intrinsic advantage in that the administration is still committed to détente.

East-West Relations: The View from Moscow

Soviet elite opinion on the subject of détente appears to be somewhat more complex than its American equivalent. To some extent this difference may be an illusion produced by the “closed” character of the Soviet system and the difficulty of interpreting its leaders’ statements, but not entirely.

It seems very likely that there is a sizable core of agreement among Soviet leaders on matters relating to the United States. They are all influenced by, and in most cases probably share, the pervasive nationalism of the Soviet—or, more accurately, the Russian—people. At the same time, they believe in at least the central concepts and clichés of Marxism-Leninism, if only because of their proven utility in legitimating, or at least rationalizing, the authority exercised by the Soviet leadership over the people. The slogan “Soviet patriotism” obviously tries to blend these two crucial elements, nationalism and Marxism-Leninism. Both imply, or at least benefit from, the actual or alleged existence of an external adversary, and Leninist ideology in its post-1945 version has fairly consistently identified it as American “imperialism.” There is accordingly a basic ideological and political hostility to the United States, and a deep-seated belief in the underlying hostility of American “ruling circles” to the Soviet Union. Specific anti-Soviet acts and policies on the part of the United States are met in Moscow with great resentment, if not necessarily with surprise; President Nixon became the object of considerable Soviet approval precisely because he took practical steps, especially in the field of technological contact and trade, that were favorable to Soviet interests. In fact, a sufficient sense of stake in President Nixon was built up in Moscow so that his political troubles aroused considerable concern there; it was only in late 1973 that the Soviet press began to mention Watergate and other such matters. By this time nearly everyone in the Soviet elite realizes that the United States is not the Wall Street dictatorship assumed in classical Marxist theory but a reasonably plural or “open” society. Partly for this reason, it is thought to be in a state of long-term decline in both its domestic affairs and its international position.

It seems reasonable to describe, at least tentatively, the dominant attitude toward the United States of the top Soviet elite, including Brezhnev himself, roughly as follows. On the one hand, this attitude is based on a desire for ultimate “victory” over the United States, without war, on a more or less global scale. It is strongly influenced by the Soviet “military-industrial complex,” which finds the image of an aggressive American “imperialism” useful if not indispensable as the rationale for high military budgets. On the other hand, this dominant attitude sees détente (or “peaceful coexistence”) with the United States as a desirable transitional situation, provided it is not allowed to harm Soviet interests or constrain Soviet freedom of action unduly, because it reduces the risk of a major war and facilitates economic and technological contacts through which the Soviet Union can increase its national power. American self-interest, actual or supposed, is thought to dictate cooperation in these respects, to the point where the dominant Soviet attitude seems to aim at a kind of Soviet-American global condominium, based on approximate strategic parity, as the best attainable model for the international system pending the eventual Soviet triumph. This liking for condominium, or bipolarity, is pushed to the point where it consciously conflicts with the United States’ strong preference for a multipolar world order, in which China, Japan, and Western Europe would play roles of at least comparable importance to those of the two superpowers. In fact, the Soviet Union systematically tries to discourage the United States from contributing to the strengthening of these other centers of power and influence and to weaken them itself whenever this can be done without excessive risks or costs. This is one of the purposes and aspects of Soviet management of the Sino-Soviet confrontation. In the case of Japan and Western Europe, the Soviet Union has discovered an important vulnerability that it can exploit to some extent, by proxy: dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Furthermore, Soviet hostility to Israel, a virtual client state of the United States, has the ideological utility of demonstrating to Communist hardliners at home and elsewhere that détente and condominium do not require an abandonment of basic hostility to American “imperialism.”

A few interesting, and at least potentially important, deviations from this dominant attitude deserve to be noted. One is the view of Mikhail Suslov, the elder statesman of the Soviet leadership, who has an unattractive reputation abroad as a militant and rigid ideologue, but whose overriding concern with the ideological soundness and political growth of the world’s Communist Parties has led him to regard China as a more serious threat than the United States, to oppose the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and (in December 1973) to express opposition to his colleagues’ insistence on massive military budgets. Of less political importance, but perhaps greater interest, are the views of the Soviet dissenters on the subject of détente. They are not uniform. The ideological Leninist Roy Medvedev believes that outside pressure is counterproductive for the purpose of improving the Kremlin’s domestic and external behavior, that such change can come only from internal forces, and that the pursuit of détente along the lines visualized in Moscow is the best course for the West. On the other hand, the two best-known dissenters, Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, argue that détente will only lull the West and strengthen the Soviet system unless the latter is somehow compelled to reform itself in the process. Most Soviet dissenters agree strongly with the latter view; they consider that they have done all they can, and that it is up to the West to apply all reasonable forms of pressure, even at the risk of disrupting détente in the short run, in order to make the Soviet leadership mend its ways and thereby make true détente possible in the long run.

The Middle East

Soviet policy in the Middle East, ever since it first became a significant phenomenon in the mid-1950s, has been a standing refutation of the stereotype, still occasionally encountered, that the Soviet Union is a status quo power. Moscow has no moral commitment to any Middle Eastern state comparable to the American commitment to Israel. No Middle Eastern country, with the possible exceptions of Turkey and Iran, is vital to Soviet security. Moscow’s Middle Eastern policy has consisted almost exclusively of an unabashed search for influence. Inasmuch as Stalin’s anti-Semitism and his Cold War with the United States created a pattern in the late 1940s of hostility to Israel and to the American policy of supporting it, the Soviet quest took the obvious path of cultivating the Arab states and therefore necessarily of supporting them to one degree or another against Israel. In 1967 this policy took the form of inciting Egypt to put pressure on Israel in order to deter what Moscow falsely alleged was an Israeli plan to attack Syria, in order to create a situation where Moscow could mediate, claim credit for managing a difficult situation, and compensate itself for what seemed at the time to be a series of American successes and Soviet setbacks in the Third World. An unexpectedly vigorous Israeli response, in the so-called June War, ruined this game plan and inflicted another setback on Moscow as well as a humiliating defeat on its Arab friends.

In late 1969, the Soviet leadership, looking for ways to get one up, detected what it thought was a weakening of American diplomatic support for Israel. Advanced Soviet weapons and military personnel were sent to Egypt to help the Egyptians push the Israeli back from the Suez Canal, and in the process to enhance Soviet influence on the Arab countries. This plan was checkmated by a vigorous Israeli military response and unexpectedly strong American support for Israel, in the form of arms shipments. In July 1972, therefore, most Soviet military personnel (apart from those at the Soviet naval bases on the Egyptian coast) were withdrawn from Egypt, apparently in accordance with an agreement reached with President Nixon at the Moscow summit in May; the withdrawal was skillfully and convincingly portrayed to the world, by both the Soviets and the Egyptians, as being conducted at Egyptian insistence.

The Soviet leadership then began to implement a somewhat subtler plan, one that it thought it could get by with because the United States was believed since the Moscow summit to be too deeply committed to détente to respond effectively. The essence of it was to continue large-scale military aid to the major Arab states confronting Israel, to encourage them to put repeated military pressures on Israel in order to wear it down, to withdraw Soviet military personnel whenever actual hostilities seemed about to break out, to use strong diplomatic and political pressure on Israel to deter it from capitalizing on any further military successes it might achieve, and to rely on the American commitment to détente to prevent a crunch between the two superpowers. As a parallel move, Soviet propaganda began early in 1973 to incite the Arabs to embargo oil shipments to Western countries to the extent that Arab interests might seem to indicate and to nationalize Western oil companies operating in the Arab countries.

From this Soviet strategy, plus of course Arab frustration at the fact that the verdict of 1967 had not yet been reversed, came the Middle Eastern war that began on October 6, 1973. There is no need for a discussion of it here apart from those aspects directly relevant to Soviet-American relations, except to say that the Soviet strategy inferred in the previous paragraph was carried out, faithfully and on the whole successfully. The main setback was that the Egyptian Third Army was trapped by the Israeli east of the Suez Canal. In mid-October Moscow alerted six of its seven airborne divisions, whether seriously or as a bluff. On October 24, Brezhnev sent a stern note to Nixon; although of course it has not been published it appears to have implied that Soviet troops would intervene unilaterally to free the Third Army unless the United States participated in a joint operation for that purpose, or unless at the minimum the United States put effective pressure on Israel to allow the Third Army to be resupplied (although not rearmed) from across the canal. The United States took action along the latter lines, although President Nixon also ordered a brief alert of American strategic forces on receiving the message from Brezhnev. Moscow apparently had no serious objections to President Nixon’s claiming that by strenuous action he had averted the worst American-Soviet confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis. An improvement in the Nixon administration’s domestic and international image was desirable, even from the Soviet point of view, after the self-inflicted political wounds that it had suffered.

In the short run, the Soviet Union had reason to feel moderately content with the outcome of the crisis. The Arabs embargoed oil shipments to Japan and the major Western countries until March 1974. The crisis created serious strains in the relationship between the United States and the West European countries, France in particular. Kissinger was predictably compelled to postpone a scheduled visit to Peking, and the Chinese were reminded that in the last analysis Moscow ranked higher on the American list of priorities than they did. The United States made no serious effort to punish Moscow for its role in the Middle Eastern crisis; at least as far as the Nixon administration was concerned, détente proceeded almost as though nothing had happened.

On the other hand, Moscow grew increasingly unhappy as the outcome of the crisis threatened to turn into a major triumph for American diplomacy. Having tried hard, but without success, to knock Israel out of the Sinai Peninsula, President Sadat soon began to show signs of shifting to a diplomatic approach that would require American good offices, as well as a more conciliatory attitude on the part of Israel. He accepted an agreement on a cease-fire and troop disengagement arranged by Secretary Kissinger, sent an ambassador to Washington for the first time since 1967, and gave some indications that he was contemplating exchanging the Soviet Union for the United States as Egypt’s patron and principal supplier of economic and even military aid. Moscow sought to avoid a serious setback of these dimensions by complicating the tasks facing American diplomacy in the Middle East; it encouraged the Arabs, unsuccessfully, to prolong their oil embargo against the West, and it incited the Syrians with greater success to maintain military pressure on Israel.

European Security

Since at least as long ago as Stalin’s time, the Soviet leadership has had a powerful two-front complex, in other words a determination to avoid simultaneous crises in Europe and the Far East. A situation of this kind seemed to Moscow to be emerging in the mid-1960s with the establishment of a linkage between its European and its Chinese problems, at a time when (as indicated in Chapter VIII) it was beginning to regard Peking as a military threat. In January 1964, in a move which had anti-Soviet motives among others on both sides, France and the People’s Republic of China exchanged diplomatic recognitions. More serious still, in view of Moscow’s obsession at that time with West German “revanchism,” was a series of secret talks between Bonn and Peking later in 1964, on a possible trade agreement and consular relations. Although frustrated by American opposition, these negotiations were very upsetting to both the East German and the Soviet leadership, especially since important voices were already being raised in West Germany in favor of contacts with the East European countries (other than East Germany), and on the part of Moscow’s béte noire, the right-wing politician Franz Josef Strauss, in favor of efforts to exploit the Sino-Soviet dispute for West Germany’s benefit.

In 1966 Soviet concern over China, already serious, was greatly heightened by the eruption of the Cultural Revolution. The need to decouple Moscow’s Chinese and European problems by promoting détente in the West and to free the Soviet leadership’s hands for more intense concentration on China appeared urgent. In July, the Warsaw Pact powers issued a declaration on European security that contained the essential points on which Moscow has continued to insist: general recognition of existing European frontiers and of the independent status of East Germany, withdrawal of foreign (i.e., American and Soviet) troops, and dissolution of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact (but not of the bilateral Soviet alliances with the individual Warsaw Pact countries, which have no counterpart on the Western side). There was little general response by the NATO powers to this overture. The response that materialized was not at all to Moscow’s taste. In October 1966 the new Grand Coalition government in West Germany, which included the two major parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, adopted its famous Ostpolitik. This was a policy of trying to isolate East Germany, and bring about its ultimate collapse and the reunification of Germany, through the establishment of economic and diplomatic relations with the other East European countries, a program that Bonn vainly hoped would not arouse undue alarm in Moscow given the new Soviet commitment to détente in Europe.

The Soviet leadership chose to interpret the Ostpolitik as a blow at détente, at European security, at its hold over Eastern Europe, and at its efforts to decouple its China and European problems. Its propaganda began to allege the existence of a “Bonn-Peking axis” based on hostility to the Soviet Union. This propaganda apparently reflected both a genuine, although unfounded, fear that collusion between China and West Germany might in fact be emerging and a desire to discredit the Ostpolitik in East European eyes by linking Bonn publicly with Peking, which was then widely unpopular on account of the excesses of the Cultual Revolution. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was intended in part to warn the East European countries against yielding to the Ostpolitik, to pressure them into revising their bilateral treaties of alliance with the Soviet Union (most of which lapsed in 1968) in a broader form worded so as to apply against “any state or group of states” (including China, obviously), and to demonstrate to the hypothetical “Bonn-Peking axis” the risks of trying to harm Soviet interests. Peking’s alarm at the invasion of Czechoslovakia reflected in part a realization that Moscow regarded itself as faced with a problem on two fronts, and a fear therefore that Soviet military action in the West might be duplicated in the East. On the whole the invasion was beneficial to Soviet interests in Europe; Bonn promptly adopted a drastically modified version of the Ostpolitik stressing the improvement of relations not only with the Soviet Union but with East Germany. In August 1970 the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that in effect accepted the territorial settlement of 1945 and the separate existence of East Germany. In 1972, in order to strengthen the Brandt government’s electoral position, Moscow actually gave its consent in private to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Bonn and Peking. Direct official contacts between the two Germanies got under way, and in 1973 both entered the United Nations.

Germany having been the central issue in the Cold War in Europe since 1945, these developments naturally stimulated a trend toward détente in Europe as a whole, the invasion of Czechoslovakia notwithstanding. In September 1971 an agreement was signed under which the Soviet Union promised not to interfere with Western access to West Berlin. On the Western side, the situation was complicated by growing demands in the American Congress for a reduction in the American military presence in Western Europe in view of the United States’ balance of payments problem. The NATO powers decided to try to compensate for this probably inevitable reduction by bargaining it for an equivalent reduction on the Warsaw Pact side. In June 1968, accordingly, NATO proposed negotiations with the Warsaw Pact on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR). Moscow showed no interest in the idea at first, since it did not see why it should have to pay a price for a partial American withdrawal that it could probably get merely by waiting, and because it had a greater interest in a conference on European security along the lines outlined in the July 1966 Warsaw Pact statement. It was not until May 1971, by which time hints of Sino-American détente were making Moscow more eager to improve its own relations with the West, that the Soviet Union indicated any interest in talks on MBFR. Agreement in principle was reached at the Moscow summit, in May 1972, to hold conferences on both MBFR and European security, the latter being conditional in NATO eyes on the former.

Preparatory talks on MBFR began at Vienna in January 1973, and a full-dress conference at the end of October. The word “balanced” was soon dropped out because of a basic disagreement: the Warsaw Pact wanted equal reductions, which would preserve its own numerical superiority; the NATO powers wanted larger reductions on the Warsaw Pact side, with the aim of ultimate equality in the critical Central European sector. Another important issue was a Warsaw Pact effort to exclude Hungary, where four Soviet divisions are stationed, from the scope of the talks. One possible reason for this effort was an intent to shift to Hungary additional Soviet divisions that might have to be withdrawn from other countries; if so, the ploy was a rather sinister one inasmuch as Hungary is the strategic key to Central Europe for the Soviet Union, as Romania is the key to the Balkans. Even more difficult than the reduction of American and Soviet forces in Central Europe via withdrawal was the problem of the reduction of European forces, which would have to be achieved via demobilization.

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) began at Helsinki in July 1973. It included nearly all European states, and not merely the members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, as well as the United States and Canada (both members of NATO, of course). The conference’s agenda was divided into four “baskets,” or categories of issues, the first relating to security (nonaggression pledges, confidence-building measures, etc.), the second to various forms of cooperation (economic, technical, etc.), the third to human contacts between East and West (travel, cultural exchange, free movement of ideas across the Iron Curtain, etc.), and the fourth to machinery for implementing any agreements that might be reached. To the NATO countries, the main “basket” of interest is the third; one of the implicit, if not explicit, Soviet demands on the conference is a sanction for Moscow’s domination of Eastern Europe, but NATO is willing to approve this situation only if ideas from the West can have access to the Warsaw Pact countries, where they may eventually produce constructive changes. The Warsaw Pact countries, on the other hand, and the Soviet Union in particular, are basically opposed to the free exchange of ideas, as Moscow’s expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and its jamming of foreign broadcasts beaming excerpts from his Gulag Archipelago to the Soviet people show. The Soviet interest is in other aspects of détente, and hence in the other “baskets.”

Current Issues

Both the superpowers continue to improve their strategic weapons within the rather undemanding limits of SALT I. The United States is beginning to develop a new nuclear submarine (Trident) and a new heavy bomber (the B-1). The Soviet Union tested its first MIRV in 1972 and flew one on an ICBM over the Pacific in January 1974. Activities of this kind inevitably tend to arouse fears on each side that the other is trying to achieve the capability to annihilate its adversary’s strategic weapons with a first strike. On the Soviet side, this nervousness was enhanced by American Secretary of Defense Schlesinger’s emphasis on retargeting American missiles away from Soviet cities to Soviet missiles.

The SALT II talks began on November 21, 1972. In line with its current emphasis on “essential equivalence” in overall strength rather than numerical equality in any one category, the American side proposed equal totals for each side for the three main categories of weapons systems (ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers), each side to determine its own “mix” of the three. The United States also proposed equal payloads (or throw-weights) for ICBMs on both sides, obviously in order to curb development of the new “heavy” Soviet ICBMs, as preferable to controls on MIRV technology, in which the United States was considerably ahead. American forward (or overseas) bases were not to be regarded as strategic and were to be discussed within the context not of SALT but of MBFR, where they might be traded against Soviet MRBMs targeted on Western Europe. These proposals did not go down very well in Moscow, especially with relative hardliners such as Defense Minister Marshal Grechko, who evidently hoped to attain strategic superiority instead of settling for “essential equivalence.”

A number of problems continued to complicate Soviet-American trade. The Soviet grain picture improved sharply in 1973, with a depressing effect on American grain sales. The Soviet interest in American investment in the development of Soviet natural resources (especially energy sources) was countered by Moscow’s secrecy mania, which restricted access to sites and to other types of information needed by prospective investors. The Soviet Union wanted long-term, low-interest credits on the same basis as an underdeveloped country, whereas it seemed more logical to treat it as a developed country. Most-favored-nation treatment for Soviet exports to the United States, actually a less important question, continued to be bedeviled by congressional objections to Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration.

A modification of Soviet Cuban policy, in a direction adverse to Castro’s interests, was indicated by Moscow’s interest both in achieving a détente of sorts with the United States and in getting Cuba off the Soviet taxpayer’s back to a degree. The main purpose of an important visit by Brezhnev to Cuba in January 1974 was evidently to enlist Castro’s sympathy for détente, to interest him in improving his own relations with the United States, and to convince the United States that the Soviet Union had no strategic stake in Cuba. He apparently had some success with Castro, but the Nixon administration felt no detectable interest in better relations with Cuba.

The third Nixon-Brezhnev summit was held from June 27 to July 3, 1974. No agreement was possible on the development and deployment of MIRVs. This impasse was part of a larger problem that had troubled the SALT talks from the beginning. The American side wanted parity in total throw-weight, a situation that would be advantageous on account of the current American lead in MIRV technology and would permit the American side superiority in the number of warheads. The Soviet side wanted parity in the number of warheads, a situation that would confer an advantage on the superior yield of the Soviet warheads and the greater thrust of the Soviet missiles. The two sides succeeded in agreeing, at the third summit, not to build the second ABM sites permitted under the 1972 treaty (around Washington and around the Soviet ICBM force), to stop testing high yield nuclear weapons underground, and to begin negotiations on the control of environmental (chemical, etc.) warfare. Nothing significant is known to have been agreed upon with respect to Europe, the Middle East, or the Far East.