Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (118 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

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On election day, Carter won, 40.8 million (50.1 percent) to 39.2 million (48 percent); 297 electoral votes to 240, though Ford won 27 states to 23 plus the District of Columbia for Carter. It was a completely clean election, and if 11,000 votes had changed sides, or Ford had polled 22,000 more in Ohio and Wisconsin, Ford would have won. It was almost as close as the 1960 and 1968 elections, though unlike those, with an ethically unexceptionable campaign. Gerald Ford had never sought nor expected to be president, entered the office in very difficult circumstances, and was, in his unpretentious plainness, a distinguished president. He had had no thought except what was good for the country, and had a long and happy retirement, ultimately living longer than any other president of the United States; he died in 2004, aged 93 years and five months, universally honored for his character, personality, and service. Unfortunately, this was also effectively the end of Henry Kissinger’s public career, though he sometimes was consulted by future presidents of both parties. He was too great a talent to have been left underutilized, and was only 53. He continued as a world-renowned and historic figure, but, for different personal reasons, future Republican presidents did not invite him back to the State Department.
6. PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER
 
The world was not sure what to expect from a president calling himself Jimmy, a successful peanut farmer and Naval Academy graduate who was an understudy of the father of the U.S. atomic submarine program, Admiral Hyman Rickover, and an authority on naval nuclear propulsion and submarine design, now the cornerstone of America’s nuclear deterrent. He had served on surface vessels as well and had been a well-regarded junior officer (as had Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford, though they were all in combat). President Carter was the first person from the Old South to hold that office since John Tyler. (Zachary Taylor and Woodrow Wilson were from Virginia but left in their mid-twenties, and Lyndon Johnson’s Texas wasn’t the Old South.) Carter was a very pro-civil rights governor in a state that had been fairly retarded in treatment of African Americans for an unconscionable length of time, though he was not otherwise a particularly distinguished governor.
He quickly paid for his unfamiliarity with the operations of the Congress, in particular contrast to his four predecessors, who between them had served 80 years at the Capitol before becoming president (including the last three as vice president). Almost none of his ambitious domestic program gained any traction at all, including his endlessly repeated promises of tax reform.
In foreign and defense policy, however, where the president does have much more latitude, his imprint was visible, and uneven. His secretary of state was veteran lawyer and public official Cyrus R. Vance, an able but very conciliatory foreign policy expert, balanced by the more hawkish national security advisor, the learned and forceful Polish-Canadian Harvard academic, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. (It says something distinctive and flattering about America that two of its greatest modern foreign policy experts were men of such distant and unlikely provenance as Kissinger and Brzezinski.)
Carter started with his unconditional pardon of draft evaders and deserters on inauguration day, and immediately began withdrawing forces from South Korea. This was quickly opposed by the armed forces committees in the Congress and he was widely advised that anything that might encourage North Korean adventurism was a bad idea. In the end, he only withdrew a few thousand of the American troops in South Korea. In his first budget, Carter slashed defense spending by six billion dollars and, in a major address a few months into his administration, said that the country must get over its “irrational fear of communism.” Most Americans, unlike in the McCarthy era, were not afraid of communism, but were a good deal more skeptical than their president about the motives of the Soviet Union. (The people were right.)
From the start, he emphasized human rights in foreign countries, including allies. This is always a controversial matter, disputed between those who emphasize morally neutral strategic interest and those who emphasize the moral high ground. It has been an almost constant irritant to Sino-American relations. At a certain point, some regimes become too odious for almost anyone, as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge Cambodians, who murdered over a quarter of the entire population, did even for the Chinese and Russians. But short of such an evil government, there is room for legitimate debate about the point of crossover between national interest and maintenance of political and moral standards. It is likely that Carter’s emphasis on human rights may have caused many countries to be less casual about oppression of their citizens, but it is also undeniable that the policy brought serious geopolitical inconvenience on the U.S., without accomplishing any significant improvement in the political quality of the lives of the populations Carter was sincerely trying to help.
He sided openly with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, essentially a communist front with no more regard for civil rights than communists normally have, against America’s longtime docile and corrupt protégé, the Somoza family (FDR’s famous “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch,” Chapter 9). The United States certainly could not go on being identified with the Somozas, as Eisenhower realized about the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the late fifties (Chapter 13). But assisting worshipful puppets of Castro provoked severe communist infiltration in Central America and required Carter’s successors to expend a great deal more effort and political capital in that region than it would normally justify.
Even more destructive to American interests was Carter’s appeasement of the fundamentalist Islamic opponents of the Shah of Iran, and his pressure on the Shah to yield ground to the Islamist leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. What possessed the U.S. president that an Islamic believer in a fundamentalist Muhammadan theocracy was any sort of legitimate democratic opposition escaped the comprehension of most observers and of all of posterity. Khomeini was militantly anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and an absolutist of the most primitive kind. It became clear fairly early on that the Shah could only deal with the problem by a combination of force and generosity, which he had the military and paramilitary force and the oil income to do. Carter discouraged him from that and in the end, as Brzezinski put it, “threw him out like a dead mouse,” in 1978. He did not even permit the Shah to enter the United States after he had abdicated, though he had been a fiercely loyal American ally since he had met with Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943 (Chapter 10) and particularly since Eisenhower had restored him to his throne in 1953 (Chapter 12). He had ignored the oil embargo five years before. (Carter did relent a year later, when the Shah sought entry for medical reasons.) Human rights in Iran deteriorated and the country regressed in every respect, becoming an even greater nuisance to the civilized world than the North Koreans. In this instance, Carter’s policy was self-destructively foolish and the fate of America’s relatively respectable allies, from Diem and Thieu to the Shah and others to come, was noted.
Carter did complete the giveaway of the Panama Canal in 1977, and the Senate ratified it. The canal would have to be widened and deepened, and was no longer useful for large tankers, aircraft carriers, and even cruise liners, but it is not clear why Carter didn’t settle on some system of co-ownership. The U.S. had a clear title, unlike the British and French at Suez (Chapter 12), though it must be remembered that it was Ford and Kissinger who started down this path. The U.S. had occasion to invade Panama and seize a successor president and try him as a common criminal 12 years later (the trial and imprisonment a dubious enterprise legally, but that is addressed later in this chapter).
President Carter’s greatest achievement, and a great personal triumph, was the Camp David agreement of 1978 between Egypt and Israel and their formidable leaders, President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin. This secured the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, the reopening of the Suez Canal after 11 years, the exchange of full recognition and embassies between the two countries, and a promise by Begin to produce a formula for Palestinian self-rule. As Egypt was the most populous and historically significant of the Arab powers, this was an immense step forward for normalization of relations between the Jewish state and the Arab world. As part of the arrangement, the United States pledged extensive annual assistance, military and otherwise, to both countries, cementing the abject Soviet expulsion from Egypt.
Sadat had been an agitator for Egyptian independence in British times, and was Nasser’s vice president when the president suddenly and prematurely died in 1970. He had succeeded in inflicting a momentary defeat on Israel in crossing the Suez Canal in 1973 at the outset of the Yom Kippur War, which—through Nixon and Kissinger’s intervention with Golda Meir to prevent the destruction of the overexposed Egyptian army that had accomplished this (considerable) feat—enabled Sadat to be the liberator of the Sinai, who took back the Canal, and took the leadership of the Arab world back from the proponents of endless war with Israel (a policy easier for those who didn’t actually have to do battle with Israel).
Menachem Begin, a fugitive from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the head of the violent independentist organization Irgun, and 29 years the leader of the opposition in Israel against all the preceding prime ministers in the country’s history, had also moved a long way. He had been an advocate of a greater, Biblical Israel, with an ancient and expansive notion of its rightful extent. Regrettably, he gave no substance to the Palestinian autonomy plan, which, when it finally emerged, was, as one knowledgeable commentator on the Middle East put it, “the right of the Palestinians to take out their own garbage.”
Sadat would be assassinated in 1981 by the Muslim Brotherhood, chiefly motivated by the Camp David agreement. And Egypt lost stature, as its economy stagnated and its population grew, and the oil states, especially Saudi Arabia, became steadily more influential. But that takes nothing from President Carter’s achievement in brokering the greatest advance there has been in Arab-Israeli relations since Israel was created (in 1948, before many of the Arab states were fully independent).
President Carter went to Vienna in June 1979, to meet with Leonid Brezhnev, and signed there a SALT II agreement along the lines that Ford and Kissinger had negotiated with Brezhnev and Gromyko at Vladivostok. There was criticism at once that the United States was conceding too much nuclear equality to the Soviet Union. As if by delayed reaction, there was a backlash against McNamara’s reverence for Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), and the aggressive return of the Russians to public ruminations on the inevitable triumph of Soviet Communism as the wave of the future and force of history. Carter’s placation of the communist powers was creating unease across the American political and national security establishment.
The SALT II agreement was assured of a rugged passage, as by some measurement it did give the Soviet Union superiority (in numbers), though it didn’t entirely dilute Nixon’s inspired notion of “nuclear sufficiency”—technological superiority and multiple warheads. But that could not be publicly argued, and Carter was immediately on his back foot, contending with the bipartisan Committee on the Present Danger, supported by most of the intellectually serious national security experts from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, most of the southern Democrats, big defense Democrats led by Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, and virtually all the Republicans, except a few New York liberals. (Nelson Rockefeller had died in January 1979, aged 70, confirming Ronald Reagan as the almost certain leader of the Republicans in the next election.)
SALT II was in trouble with congressional and public opinion when the whole Carter policy of almost militant altruism hit land mines under each foot in the last days of 1979. In November, Khomeini’s regime stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, an outrageous violation of international law, and seized 52 hostages with diplomatic passports within. Carter made his natural appeals to international opinion, courts, and organizations, and was generally supported everywhere. But a popular late-night network news program began, entitled
America Held Hostage,
and continued to telecast every weeknight for the life of the crisis. Carter made occasional purposeful statements such as “The honor of America is more important than the lives of any individuals.” But he appeared impotent, to a degree completely unprecedented in the history of his country and his office. At least Lyndon Johnson was making war on North Vietnam, however ill-advisedly in tactical terms, and poor James Madison finally went to war with Britain, as did Wilson with Germany. Carter made pious statements and earnest entreaties, but Khomeini ignored him as if the president of the United States had no more deterrent or moral authority than the president of Albania or Paraguay. Carter continued the Democratic policy followed to some extent by all their presidents since Jefferson, except Roosevelt and Truman, of not seeming to wield an adequately large or versatile stick to defend the entire national interest.
And on December 26, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Leonid Brezhnev had enunciated the Brezhnev Doctrine (even Soviet leaders were resistless against the temptation to have a doctrine named after them, however portentous the phrase might be in the circumstances). This held that any country that became “socialist,” i.e., communist, would be retained in that condition, if necessary by the application of Soviet military force. This outrageous concept was invoked in the aftermath of the oppression of Czech liberalism in August 1968. Now Brezhnev was pushing it further, in implicit disregard for the deterrent strength of the United States, by invading a neighboring country that it claimed had adopted socialism and was being threatened by internal and external reactionary forces.

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