What Ever Happened to Detente?

By Strobe Talbott

Eyeball to eyeball with the bad news bears

Detente means the relaxation of tensions between nations. By that definition, the detente era in Soviet-American relations is over. Since Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan in December, Washington's policy toward Moscow has been almost exclusively punitive: a boycott of the Olympics, a partial embargo on grain sales, tightened restrictions on high-technology exports. The SALT II treaty that Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev signed a year ago this week may die on the Senate shelf. After more than a month in office, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie has yet to meet with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin. Muskie did meet on May 16 with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Vienna, but their exchange consisted largely of reviewing mutual recriminations. Each side has a long list of charges against the other.

Beyond the immediate points of contention, anti-Soviet opinion in the U.S. has crystallized around three general, related concerns: first, the U.S.S.R. continues to build up its military capability beyond levels that seem justified by the legitimate need to defend itself; second, it has begun in recent years brazenly and disruptively to project its power into the Third World; and third, Soviet encroachments in mineral-rich Africa, the oil-rich Middle East and the sea lanes of the Pacific threaten the vital economic interests of the Western democracies and Japan. The Soviet Union is seen as exploiting--if not actually instigating--new problems for the capitalist world. "The Soviet tendency in recent years to take advantage of targets of opportunity--incrementally, deliberately, persistently--raises questions in Congress and among the public about the U.S.S.R.'s commitment to detente," Muskie told TIME last week. "It raises questions whether they really share our perception about the world, whether they believe in domination or coexistence."

Soviet-American relations have been on a downward slide since 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate --an event that some Soviets still regard as part of a sinister plot by American hard-liners to unseat a President who then favored a policy of accommodation with the U.S.S.R. Those relations fell off a cliff when Jimmy Carter became President. Looking back over the past 3 1/2 years, Soviets launch into a long, angry, but obviously one-sided litany of grievances: the President's letter to dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov barely three weeks into Carter's presidency; Carter's ill-fated --and ill-considered--opening move in SALT, which would have required drastic reductions in the Soviet arsenal; his unseemly rush to normalize diplomatic relations with Peking, grant China most-favored-nation status and sell it military equipment; his saber rattling over the belated discovery last August of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba.

As an overall complaint, the Soviets say the Carter Administration has been guilty of "vacillation and inconsistency," of shifting policies and switching signals. "The present leadership in Washington has never adopted one line to which we could adjust or respond," says a Soviet diplomat, echoing a view shared by many critics of the Administration in Western Europe and the U.S. The Soviets are especially bitter over one shift in Carter's policy. They say he deliberately tricked the U.S.S.R. into thinking that it might be a diplomatic partner in the Middle East. In the fall of 1977, a joint U.S.-Soviet statement on the Middle East was finally scrapped after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's surprise initiative toward Israel. Carter then launched the Camp David process. In the Soviet view, the U.S. was deliberately excluding the U.S.S.R. from the mediation in order to deprive it of credit and influence.

Of all the Carter Administration's military moves, the Kremlin objects most to the decision last year deploy intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe to counter Soviet rockets aimed at the West. Says Oleg Bykov, a top specialist on the U.S. at Moscow's Institute of World Economics and International Relations: "That decision epitomizes the fact that negative forces have got the upper hand in the U.S. Those weapons are targeted on our territory."

The Soviets accuse the U.S. of insensitivity to their legitimate security interests, and they claim that those interests are endangered by the new mood of militancy in the U.S. "Your desire to control the oil-producing areas of the world is driving a frantic effort to enlist other countries in this region to that goal," says Bykov. "What is so often forgotten in the U.S. is that for us, that area is on our doorstep. The situation is similar to what might arise south of the Rio Grande; America would certainly be sensitive to instability on its borders."

In other words, the Kremlin argues that it would be more tolerant of a U.S. invasion of Mexico than the Carter Administration has been over the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan. What is officially euphemized in Moscow as "the recent events in Afghanistan" is, according to Bykov, "a peripheral issue that exacerbates the overall strained relationship between our countries."

Afghanistan, however, is clearly anything but peripheral. By their virtual annexation of the country, the Soviets have made its fate central to their most fundamental disagreement with the U.S. At issue: What rules should govern the rivalry now that the U.S.S.R. has emerged as a true superpower, coequal with the U.S. in military might?

That question has arisen only in the past few years, as the U.S.S.R. has caught up with the U.S. in the accumulation of weapons that would be used if the two countries ever went to war with each other. From Moscow's viewpoint, the question was given particular force by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev and forced him to remove Soviet rockets from the island. A relieved Dean Rusk, then Secretary of State, added a memorable phrase to the annals of diplomacy when he commented at the time: "We were eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked."

An aide to Brezhnev told TIME that the party chief came to office in 1964 mindful of one lesson learned from the missile crisis--namely that the Soviet Union must pursue "a lessening of tensions" with the U.S. On the other hand, the humiliation of having seen their country accept Kennedy's ultimatum over Cuba made Brezhnev and his comrades, particularly those in the military, vow that never again would the U.S.S.R. blink first. They undertook an all-out campaign to match the U.S. in intercontinental nuclear weaponry, so that the next time a Soviet ruler faced an American President eyeball to eyeball, he would do so as an equal. By the late 1970s Moscow had achieved that goal. For the first time in the long and uneasy relationship between the two nations, there is an approximate balance of strategic might, sometimes called "parity" or "essential equivalence."

At first blush, it might seem paradoxical that the U.S.S.R.'s catching up with the U.S. as a superpower should profoundly upset the relationship. After all, strategic equality would seem to be the most logical and equitable basis for peaceful coexistence. Certainly that is what the Soviets say. "The problem with you Americans," asserts an official of Moscow's Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, "is that you can't bring yourself to live with us now that we've finally corrected the imbalance. All this talk about 'the Soviet threat' in your country is nothing more than disguised nostalgia for what you regard as the good old days when you had a monopoly or at least superiority in power."

There has never been anything more offensive than a Russian on the defensive. The Soviet quest for absolute security has, with good reason, generated insecurity on the part of other nations. Will the U.S.S.R. be less paranoid and therefore less predatory now that it has attained the status of superpower? Recent history is not encouraging. The more powerful the Soviets have become in the past two decades, the more they have used their power to aid and abet the forces of violence, instability and radicalism around the world. They have been the bad news bears.

In the Middle East, they are backing terrorists and rejectionists among the Arabs. In Africa, Moscow has often worked against negotiated settlements, urging guerrillas to fight rather than talk--and particularly to fight any regimes that had U.S. backing.

Whenever possible, the Soviet Union has tried to convert sponsorship of a "national liberation movement" or a "people's revolution" into subjugation of a country. Afghanistan is only the most recent and flagrant example.

Soviet exertions of power abroad have a seemingly irresistible, irreversible quality that makes them much more threatening to world peace than American adventures. In justifying the occupation of Afghanistan, Soviet spokesmen argue that the U.S. has been deploying its troops, establishing bases and generally throwing its weight around for decades; now that the U.S.S.R. has achieved superpower status, it should be entitled to pursue its interests and protect its national security in similar ways.

"You still assign to yourself a global role and to us a very limited, regional sphere of influence," says a foreign ministry official in Moscow. "Well, you'll have to get over that notion. It's outdated and unjust. We too are now a global power, and we have the right to compete with you on a global scale. That is only fair if we are truly your equals."

That claim ought to be rejected until and unless the Soviet Union shows some sign of agreeing with the U.S. on a joint code of superpower conduct that forbids, or at least inhibits, naked aggression and the exploitation of regional instability. At their summit meeting in Moscow in 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev actually tried to formulate such a code, but it was hopelessly vague and thus catered to the Soviets' love of lofty-sounding principles and giant loopholes. The key phrase in the twelve-point declaration of principles they signed: "Both sides recognize that efforts [by one] to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly, are inconsistent with" detente. Soviet behavior since then has made a mockery of that pledge.

Raw military power is the principal foreign policy resource of the U.S.S.R., hence its reliance on strong-arm tactics in seeking to influence other countries.

While the U.S. has dispatched aid missions, Peace Corps volunteers and cultural exhibits, Moscow has mostly sent military advisers. Unlike the U.S., the U.S.S.R. has made little effort to assist Third World countries in economic development.

Spokesmen for official Soviet thinking are at once disillusioned, distrustful and implacably self-righteous about who is to blame for the decline of detente and who, therefore, must make the first move in a joint salvage operation. "It will take years to undo the damage done in the past few months," warns a member of the U.S.A. Institute. Moscow officials say privately that the Politburo's decision to invade Afghanistan was made much easier by three years of "hostile" Carter policies. "We had little to lose," says an expert on foreign affairs in Moscow. "Your Government had long since thrown away all its carrots and reached for every stick in sight."

Robert Legvold, the senior Kremlinologist for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, returned from a recent visit to the U.S.S.R. deeply discouraged: "There is a sense in Moscow that we may have passed through a watershed and may be entering a long period of tensions. The Soviets recognize that what is now happening between us is of historic proportions. They believe that detente is dead for the foreseeable future. They know that by invading Afghanistan, they buried detente. But in their view it had already been fatally poisoned by the U.S. They refuse to come to terms with their own responsibility for the disintegration of U.S.-Soviet relations."

Nonetheless, there may still be hope for halting that disintegration and restoring some version of detente. The main reason is that it is overwhelmingly in the interests of both sides to do so. Both need peace to survive. Moreover, neither the U.S., with its recession, its dangerous inflation and its need to improve its conventional forces, nor the Soviet Union, with its economic stagnation and mounting consumer demands, can easily afford another round of the strategic arms race, one that would be unfettered by even the modest constraints of SALT.

Says Bykov: "In a world where there are many shifts and realignments, there has got to be more political restraint on the part of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union."

Such rhetoric would be more reassuring if the U.S.S.R. were not waging a brutal war against the Afghan people, pouring weapons into the Yemens, and supporting Viet Nam's takeover of Indochina. No wonder there is a resurgence of feeling in the U.S. that the Soviets cannot be trusted. No wonder pro-detente liberals like Muskie are less certain than before that the Kremlin is genuinely committed to peaceful coexistence. The onus of showing more restraint is squarely on the Soviet Union these days.

Until the Soviets modify their behavior, especially in the Third World, it will be virtually impossible to resurrect detente. In the meantime, one task for America is to correct any dangerous gaps that have developed in the Soviet-American military relationship. Another task is to face the Soviets with political firmness and sophistication. That means eventually resuming carrot-and-stick diplomacy--with an effective stick, to be sure, but also with the restoration of those carrots that the Soviets complain have been thrown away. Only thus can the superpowers reverse the vicious cycle of retribution and recrimination that is driving them toward more and worse confrontations. The suspense 18 years ago was who would blink first. The challenge now is for the superpowers to find some way of blinking simultaneously so that they can start looking at where to go from here.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.