American Experiment (379 page)

At the same time Carter was determined to pursue SALT II negotiations, despite warnings that the two efforts would collide. Vance, who had been urging quiet diplomacy as opposed to public pressure on human rights, journeyed to Moscow in late March hoping at least to pick up on negotiations as Ford and Kissinger had left them in Vladivostok, and if possible to move ahead with a much more ambitious and comprehensive plan of the President’s. The Soviets, who had responded to the campaign for the dissidents with more arrests, were in no mood to bargain. After cataloguing alleged human rights violations in the United States and attacking the new SALT proposals as harmful to Soviet security, Brezhnev sent Vance home empty-handed.

Nothing more clearly reflected the fundamental ambiguity and the later shift in the Carter foreign relations approach than its rapidly evolving human rights policy. What began as Vance’s ambivalent “principled yet pragmatic” posture became increasingly an attack on specific human rights violations that the Kremlin on its side chose to interpret as an onslaught against Soviet society. The American “ ‘defense of freedom,’ ” said
Pravda,
was part of the “very same designs to undermine the socialist system that our people have been compelled to counter in one or another form ever since 1917.” When Carter contended that he was upholding an aspiration rather than attacking any nation, the Russians tended to suspect Brzezinski’s motives rather than the President’s moralisms. The human rights files in the Carter presidential library make clear what happened: the President’s early Utopian tributes to human rights encouraged Soviet, Polish, and other dissidents and their American supporters to put more pressure on the Administration, especially through sympathizers like the national
security aide. At the same time that Moscow was condemning American human rights violations at home, black leaders were complaining to the White House that the Administration was retreating on its promises to minorities.

Nearer home Carter applied his foreign policy of “reason and morality” with considerable success during his first year in the White House. He and his wife had a long-standing interest in Latin America, had traveled there, and knew some Spanish. He saw in Latin America, according to Gaddis Smith, a “special opportunity to apply the philosophy of repentance and reform—admitting past mistakes, making the region a showcase for the human-rights policy.” Of past mistakes there had been plenty—years of intervention, occupation, and domination. FDR’s Good Neighbor policy had brought little surcease. The CIA-managed coup in Guatemala in 1954, John Kennedy’s abortive invasion of Cuba, LBJ’s intervention in the Dominican Republic, the efforts of the Nixon Administration and the CIA to undermine the duly elected leftist President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and their contribution to his eventual overthrow and death—all these and more still rankled in the memories of Latin American leaders, liberal and radical alike.

No act of Yankee imperialism was more bitterly recalled than the imposition on the Republic of Panama in 1903 by the United States and its Panamanian “puppets” of a treaty defining a strip of land ten miles wide connecting the two oceans while cutting Panama in two and giving the northern colossus near-sovereignty in perpetuity over the canal and the surrounding area. Following a bloody fracas between Panamanians and troops of the United States in 1964, negotiations had been dragging along under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford pointing toward the renegotiation of the 1903 treaty. Carter decided to move quickly. He was well aware of the virulent opposition to a settlement by nationalists in both countries. “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours and we’re going to keep it,” had been one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite punch lines in the 1976 presidential primaries. Backed up by Defense Secretary Harold Brown’s view that the canal could best be kept in operation by “a cooperative effort with a friendly Panama” rather than by an “American garrison amid hostile surroundings,” Carter and Vance negotiated with Panama two treaties, one repealing the 1903 treaty and providing for mixed Panamanian-United States operation of the canal until December 31, 1999, the second agreement defining the rights of the United States to defend the canal following Panama’s assumption of control on that date.

The White House then threw itself into the battle for Senate ratification, using the time-honored tools of exhortation, bargaining, and arm twisting. The opposition counterattacked with its traditional devices of delay and diversion. Only a mighty effort to mobilize every scrap of his influence enabled the President in the spring of 1978 to win acceptance of the treaties, and then by only the thinnest of margins and at considerable loss of political capital. So virulent was the opposition that, as Carter glumly noted in his memoirs, a number of senators “plus one President” were defeated for reelection in part because of their support of the treaties.

As usual the Middle East confronted Washington with the most intractable problems of all. How defend Israel’s security without antagonizing the Arab states? How persuade the Israelis to be more conciliatory toward the Arabs? How find a humane solution to the plight of the Palestinians, whether inhabitants of the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank or holders of a precarious Israeli citizenship? How strengthen friendly Arab states militarily enough to steel their resistance to Soviet power but not embolden them also to threaten Israel? Carter approached these problems not only with the traditional top-priority commitment of Washington to Israel based on domestic political and national security considerations, but also with a deep moral concern. He believed “that the Jews who had survived the Holocaust deserved their own nation,” and that this homeland for the Jews was “compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God.”

For sixteen months Carter and Vance conducted an intensive, often desperate search for peace in the Middle East. It was their good fortune that Egypt was ruled by the remarkably farsighted President Anwar el-Sadat, with whom Carter established cordial personal relations, and that Israel came to be headed by a tough negotiator, Menachem Begin, who had enough standing with Israeli hard-liners to risk agreement with the Egyptians. In his own efforts in Washington and in the Middle East, Carter proved himself a resourceful and indefatigable mediator. Often his hopes flagged, particularly after Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in March 1978 in retaliation for a terrorist assault that cost the lives of thirty-five Israelis, all but two of them civilians. To maintain credibility with the Arabs he supported a UN condemnation of the invasion and demand that Israel withdraw its forces. The reaction of American Jews was so sharp, Carter wrote later, that “we had to postpone two major Democratic fund-raising banquets in New York and Los Angeles because so many party members had cancelled their reservations to attend.”

Caught between implacable forces, Carter resolved in July 1978 that it “would be best, win or lose, to go all out” to obtain a peace agreement.
He persuaded Sadat and Begin to attend together a September meeting at Camp David. For thirteen days the President and his aides conducted with the two leaders a kind of footpath diplomacy between the cabins. The upshot was Sadat and Begin’s agreement to two sets of guidelines: a framework for an Egyptian-Israeli peace providing that the Sinai would be turned over to Egypt by stages while protecting certain Israeli interests there; and a separate framework for “Peace in the Middle East,” providing for a five-year period during which a self-governing authority under Egypt, Israel, and, it was hoped, Jordan, would replace the existing Israeli military government in the West Bank and Gaza, while the three nations negotiated the final status of the territories.

At perhaps the high point of his presidency Carter declared to a joint session of Congress, with Begin and Sadat present: “Today we are privileged to see the chance for one of the sometimes rare, bright moments in human history.” But nothing important ever came easy for Jimmy Carter. When Begin and Sadat were unable to agree on final peace arrangements before the planned deadline of mid-December 1978, the President decided as “an act of desperation” to fly to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal diplomacy. Once again he demonstrated his flair for mediation, gaining agreement from both sides on the remaining thorny issues, with the aid of inducements and guarantees from the United States. Amid much pomp and circumstance, Sadat and Begin signed the final agreement on the White House lawn late in March 1979.

Wrote Carter in his diary, “I resolved to do everything possible to get out of the negotiating business!”

Over all these efforts abroad there fell—at least in American eyes—the shadow of the Kremlin. No matter how much the White House denounced violations of human rights outside the Kremlin’s orbit the issue always came back to Soviet repression of dissidents. A major disturbance could not erupt in a newly emerging African nation without suspicion in the White House that Moscow plotters were afoot. The Administration began its peacekeeping effort in the Middle East in cooperation with the Soviet Union, only to turn away from it out of fear that Moscow was interested less in peace than in extending its own influence in the region. The more Washington pursued its rapprochement with Peking, the more it encountered hostility in Moscow. The Administration suspected that the Russians were bolstering their military strength in Cuba. Even the Panama settlement, which seemed far outside the Soviet sphere of influence, was almost fatally jeopardized by those Americans who feared that the strategically
vital canal would under Panamanian control prove vulnerable to Soviet political or military threat.

The view from Moscow was clouded by its perception of an ever more threatening America. Washington was seeking to exclude Soviet influence in the Middle East—a strategic area in Russia’s own back yard. The Americans were trying not only to make friends with the Chinese but to arm them against the Soviet Union, and thereby encircle it. Washington was trying to block the Soviet Union, as the mother communist nation, from exercising its right and duty to help both stabilize and strengthen “national liberation” movements in the fledgling nations. Above all was the matter of arms—the Soviet Union was on the verge of achieving some kind of nuclear parity with the United States, at which point the Carter Administration undertook a big new arms program that could result only in a spiraling arms race.

Both sets of perceptions were misconceptions. Washington was more interested in restoring triangular diplomacy with China than in exacerbating the Sino-Soviet rupture. The Russians were more interested in stability in the Middle East than in military advantage. Each side saw itself as defensive, peace-loving, cooperative, the other as offensive, aggressive, destructive. Looking at Moscow, Washington remembered the brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956, the shipping of missiles to Cuba in 1962, the suppression of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Looking at Washington, Moscow recalled the attack north of the 38
^th
parallel into North Korea in 1950, the occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965, the bombing of North Vietnam and invasion of Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mutual suspicion and hostility of the two superpowers touched every part of the globe—even the smallest and weakest nations. The tiny Yemens were a prime example. South Yemen, with its major naval facilities at Aden, the former British port, accepted aid from Moscow and gave it access to the port. North Yemen, fearful of the Yemenis to the south, wanted American military aid. When the Soviets began to give heavy aid to Ethiopia in support of its dispute with Somalia, Brzezinski saw a new Soviet threat to the Middle East. The canny North Yemenis, seeing their chance to pay off the southerners and gain more aid from Washington, sent alarmist reports of a looming invasion from the south. Alert to this mortal peril, Washington sent American arms and advisers to North Yemen and dispatched the carrier
Constellation
to the Arabian Sea “to demonstrate our concern for the security of the Arabian Peninsula.” In the end several Arab states mediated the scrap between the Yemenis—and North Yemen made an arms deal with the Russians twice the size of the American deal. The fight between the Yemenis, scholars later concluded, had not been plotted by Moscow.
“The United States,” according to historian Gaddis Smith, “was responding, not to a reality, but to imaginary possibilities based on the assumption of a sinister Soviet grand design.”

Nor was Washington plotting in most of these situations. It was a classic case of confusion rather than conspiracy. At the center of the confusion was the President himself. He continued to be convinced, during his first year in office, that he could crusade against human rights violations in Russia and at the same time effectively pursue détente with Moscow. During his second year he was still talking détente and SALT II but emphasizing also the need to strengthen United States forces in Europe to meet the “excessive Soviet buildup” there. By mid-1978, Carter’s ambivalence was so serious that Vance formally requested a review of relations with the Soviets, noting “two differing views” of the relationship. The emphasis, Vance said, had been on balancing cooperation against competition; was the emphasis now merely on competition? When Carter at Annapolis in June reaffirmed détente but now spoke a language of confrontation, the press complained about “two different speeches,” the “ambiguous message,” and general “bafflement.” Moscow, however, viewed the speech solely as a challenge.

Carter was now enveloped in a widening division, especially between Vance and Brzezinski. The Secretary of State, who had built his reputation largely on high-level negotiations during the 1960s, spurned ideology in favor of détente through persistent—and if necessary severe—diplomacy. The national security adviser, son of a prewar Polish diplomat, had taken a hard line toward Moscow since the 1950s. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, from his Columbia University post he had telegraphed the Kennedy White House a warning against “any further delay in bombing missile sites.” Under Carter the two men repeatedly disagreed over policy toward the Soviet Union—most notably the extent to which the “China card” should be played against Moscow. And they insistently denied the disagreement—until it came time for their memoirs. Vance remembered the national security adviser as afflicted with “visceral anti-Sovietism.” Brzezinski evaluated the Secretary of State “as a member of both the legal profession and the once-dominant Wasp elite,” operating according to “values and rules” that were of “declining relevance” to both American and global politics.