Links for the Study of Presidents Lyndon Johnson through Jimmy Carter back to topTHE CRISIS OF THE
NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
THE FAILURES OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
POLARIZATION ON FOREIGN POLICY AND THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS
The Breakdown of the Bipartisan Foreign Policy Consensus
RICHARD NIXON AND THE STRATEGY OF HEGEMONIC FLEXIBILITY
The Nixon Doctrine
JIMMY CARTER AND THE POLITICAL FAILURE OF HEGEMONIC FLEXIBILITY
Carter on the Inordinate Fear of Communism
Carter on the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Links for the Study of Presidents Lyndon Johnson through Jimmy CarterTHE FAILURES OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
The preceding two chapters recounted the ideologies by which presidents up through Lyndon Johnson justified their policy behavior. They examined the public statements of many presidents, emphasizing the role of ideology in shaping the actions of administrations.
But as was noted in the Chapter 1, ideology serves another purpose: to obscure uncomfortable realities about the political system and the policies that administrations pursue. Chapters 8 and 9 take a more critical view of presidential ideologies. They recount how presidential ideologies failed to deal effectively with the real policy problems the nation faced and thus bear much of the responsibility for the policy failures that culminated in the political crises of the 1970s.
The Vietnam War
The most obvious failure of the National Security State was the American humiliation in Vietnam. The myth of the invincibility of U.S. military might was forever laid to rest by a small, underdeveloped, minor power. Unlike other U.S. wars in the twentieth century, the loss of lives and the heavy material costs of the war did not lead to the achievement of any political objectives. Instead, after the death of 58,000 Americans and the suffering of over 200,000 wounded, and millions of Vietnamese killed and the tens of millions injured or uprooted, in 1975 the United States was forced to withdraw in defeat.
Americans and Vietnamese allies struggle to catch one of the few
evacuation helicopters during the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City)The Arms Race
The growth of the military power of the Soviet Union was another failure of the National Security State. At the end of the World War II, the United States was the only great power unscathed; the Soviet Union, in particular, had been decimated by the Nazi invasion. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States enjoyed a monopoly on nuclear weapons. But in the 1950s the Soviets developed the capacity to devastate the United States with nuclear weapons. By the 1970s the Soviets had attained rough parity in nuclear forces and Americans had to live in the shadow of MAD, mutual assured destruction.
Soviet nuclear missileThe decision to go to war had always been one that had determined the fate of nations. But now for the United States war meant risking not only national power but also national suicide, and perhaps the end of the human race itself. Yet as Einstein had said about the explosion of the first nuclear weapon, "Everything has changed except the way we think and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Military realities had changed, but political institutions were slow to catch up. In the postwar world, the cold war rivals acted much like the great powers of Europe before the world wars. The national security state was modeled on the failed empires of the past rather than on the realities of the nuclear age.
New International Economic Realities
U.S. economic power was also under challenge in the 1970s and 80s. The European and Japanese economies had recovered from the destruction of the war and were reemerging as major competitors with the United States for world markets and even in the American domestic market. In the immediate postwar period the U.S. economy represented nearly half of the world's total economic production. By the 1970s this figure had shrunk to less than 25 percent. In the postwar period the U.S. dollar became the international currency. By 1971 the dollar was devalued and taken off the gold standard. But the worst had yet to come. In the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Arab oil embargo dealt a crippling blow to the Western economies. The emergence of OPEC as the leading force in oil markets brought a steep increase in oil prices that triggered the two deepest recessions in the United States since the Great Depression. The National Security State was not designed to cope with these new international economic realities.
1973 meeting of OPEC
POLARIZATION ON FOREIGN POLICY AND THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS back to top
From the late 1940s through the 1960s the national security ideology dominated thinking in both major parties. In the immediate postwar period there were those within the Truman administration and Congress who counseled continued cooperation with the Soviet Union or a return to isolationism. But by the election of 1948 the national security ideology was triumphant in both major parties. While the national security ideology held sway, the greatest conflict in policy-making was generally on how tough to act toward the Soviets. There were always elements, usually in Congress or the military, who advocated all-out holy war against the communists, who criticized the incumbent administration for not being tough enough. Since anticommunism was the defining feature of U.S. foreign policy, those who were not responsible for the consequences could always advocate tougher measures against the Soviets. The incumbent president, who would be held responsible for the outcome of policy, had to weigh the potential Soviet reaction and thus could rarely match the most militant fire eaters. Tough or tougher—this was the dominant issue in the era of the foreign policy consensus.
But Vietnam and other crises broke down the bipartisan consensus on the national security ideology. In the 1970s many policymakers began to question the assumptions that had driven U.S. foreign policy for a quarter of a century. A real debate about the goals and methods of foreign policy emerged. Different concepts about America's role in the world and relations with the Soviet Union and the Third World began to gain credence, and the range of options which policymakers considered legitimate was expanded. A new set of ideas and assumptions about foreign policy emerged that I have labeled the theory of hegemonic flexibility. These themes had always been present to some degree in foreign policy-making. But under the impact of the defeat in Vietnam, American vulnerability to nuclear annihilation, and the decline of U.S. economic power, they took on new influence over policymakers. The assumptions of the national security ideology were under attack, and the theory of hegemonicflexibility was the ideology of centrist political opposition.
Richard Nixon had to preside over the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Under intense pressure from a growing antiwar movement and its liberal Democratic supporters in Congress, he was also the first president to articulate a comprehensive theory of hegemonic flexibility. After Nixon left office, foreign policy differences began to take on an even greater partisan dimension. The Democratic Party became the home of the philosophy of hegemonic flexibility, while the Republican Party tended to return to the positions of the national security ideology.
The rising anti-Vietnam War movement had penetrated much more deeply into the Democratic party. In 1968 peace candidates Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy got the vast majority of votes in the Democratic primaries. In 1972 the peace movement's candidate, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, won the Democratic nomination.
The movement against the Vietnam War challenged the National Security ideologyThe congressional Democratic Party was changing as well. Congressional Democrats became the center of opposition to the war. Each year liberal Democrats introduced bills to cut off funding for the war or restrict the power of the president to conduct the war as he saw fit. Even as Nixon gave ground on the substantive question of the Vietnam War and the larger questions of foreign policy philosophy, he was adamant in asserting his prerogative as president to set the course of foreign policy.
The conflict between congressional Democrats and the Nixon White House over foreign policy intensified over the years. The culmination of this struggle was the War Powers Act of 1973, which for the first time since World War II tried to put some meaningful congressional restrictions on presidential warmaking. The War Powers Act had some Republican support but was largely the child of the Democratic Congress.
But the Democrats were not alone in turning foreign policy into a partisan political issue. Ronald Reagan nearly won the 1976 Republican presidential nomination away from incumbent Gerald Ford in large part through his attacks against Nixon-Ford policies in Vietnam and on arms control. The Reagan candidacy was the focal point of the counterattack of the supporters of the national security ideology. In 1980 Reagan made a major issue not just of the policy failures of the Carter administration but also of Carter's basic foreign policy philosophy.
The breakdown of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus can be represented schematically. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, the national security ideology held sway. In the 1970s, the doctrine of hegemonic flexibility emerged from the nether zones to become part of the political center.
RICHARD NIXON AND THE STRATEGY OF HEGEMONIC FLEXIBILITY back to top
Vietnamization
The most politically painful failure of the national security state was the Vietnam War. It was the dominant issue in the first term of Richard Nixon.
Nixon came to power as an unreconstructed cold warrior. He had made his early political reputation by hunting for domestic subversives. As vicepresident he had confronted Nikita Khrushchev in the famous "kitchen debate." He had campaigned as a hard-line anticommunist in both 1960 and 1968. He made the failure of the Johnson administration to bring the Vietnam War to a successful conclusion a major part of his 1968 campaign. He claimed he had a secret plan to end the war. Now in power, Nixon recognized that he had to extricate the United States from the quagmire Vietnam had become. Throughout his first term Nixon looked for a way to strike a decisive military blow without increasing the domestic costs of the war or drawing the Chinese or Soviets into the conflict. He escalated the air war, increasing the frequency of bombing missions and widening the range of targets hit. In the spring of 1970 he invaded Cambodia to strike at communist forces taking sanctuary in officially neutral territory. In 1972 he mined the major Vietnamese harbors of Hanoi and Haiphong.
Bombing of North Vietnam began during the Johnson
administration and was intensified under NixonBut the escalated bombing did not significantly alter the situation on the ground. The invasion of Cambodia failed to find the supposed central command post coordinating the war in South Vietnam, much less alter the course of the ground war. Sustained efforts to close North Vietnamese ports ran the constant risk of killing Soviet sailors and provoking a major Soviet response.
There simply was no way the United States could win the war when its South Vietnamese clients had so little political support in the countryside. Certainly there was no way the military tide could be turned without massively increasing U.S. casualties and risking inducing Chinese or Russian counterescalation.
The essence of Nixon's strategy was his Vietnamization plan. Vietnamization was a return to the position LBJ had taken before the commitment of U.S. ground forces. In the midst of the 1964 campaign Johnson had said that American boys should not be sent to do the job that should be done by Asian boys. Vietnamization proposed to turn the primary responsibility for the war back to the South Vietnamese. Vietnamization had several appeals. Most important, it would reduce rising U.S. casualties. It squarely faced the basic political reality of the war: that Americans could not impose a government on a people who would not accept it. It smoothed the way for an eventual U.S. withdrawal, reducing the exposure of U.S. forces to heavy casualties in a final communist offensive.
The Nixon Doctrine as Hegemonic Flexibility
Vietnamization was only the most visible aspect of a more fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy under Nixon. John Kennedy had said in his inaugural address that Americans would pay any price, bear any burden to defend liberty around the world. Vietnam proved this was not so. Nixon had to show the flexibility of a world power facing the fact that it had made commitments it could not keep. To justify retrenchment of the U.S. position in the world, the administration developed the Nixon Doctrine. Nixon did more than simply articulate a new doctrine. In the election year of 1972 he made bold pilgrimages to Beijing and Moscow to negotiate new relationships with the communist world and to try to minimize the international and domestic impact of final disengagement from Vietnam.
The Nixon Doctrine
Peace must be far more than the absence of war. Peace must provide a durable structure of international relationships which inhibits or removes the causes of war.
Peace requires partnership. Its obligations, like its benefits, must be shared. . . . To insist that other nations play a role is not a retreat from responsibility, it is a sharing of responsibility.
Our commitment to peace [must] be convincingly demonstrated in our willingness to negotiate our points of difference in a fair and businesslike manner with the Communist countries. We are under no illusions. . . . But any nation today must define its interests with special concern for the interests of others. If some nations define their security in a manner that means insecurity for other nations, then peace is threatened and the security of all diminished. This obligation is particularly great for the nuclear superpowers on whose decisions the survival of mankind may well depend. back to top
The Opening to ChinaThe opening to China was the biggest shock. Since the communist victory in 1949 in the civil war with the U.S.-backed forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the United States had refused to recognize the communist government of China as legitimate. Instead, the United States preferred the legal fiction of recognizing the Chiang Kai-shek forces, which had been exiled to the offshore island of Formosa (Taiwan) as the government of all of China. Within two years of the communists taking power in China, the United States was at war with them in Korea. As other Western nations slowly adjusted to reality in the years following the Korean War, the United States maintained its hard line. It repeatedly used its veto power at the United Nations to keep the communists from taking China's seat on the Security Council. Probably the American politician most associated with this hard-line position was Richard Nixon. As Eisenhower's vicepresident and as a presidential candidate in 1960 and 1968, Nixon had repeatedly reiterated his rejection of any accommodation with the Chinese communists.
But the deteriorating position of U.S. forces in Vietnam had a salutary effect on the Nixon administration. In order to divert attention from the withdrawal from Vietnam, and in hopes of stabilizing the southeastern Pacific so that U.S. losses were confined to Indochina, Nixon traveled to Beijing and treated with his former nemesis.
Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai toasting in BeijingArms Control and the Soviet Union
However, China was neither the most powerful communist nation nor the most important military backer of the North Vietnamese. The Soviet Union was the communist country holding the high cards in the international power game. It was the power with the nuclear arsenal that could annihilate the United States. It was the military giant that could project forces into Europe, east Asia, the Middle East, and even Africa and Latin America. If there was to be a structure of world peace, it would have to begin with relations between the superpowers.
Even before its commitment of ground troops to Vietnam, the United States had been seeking agreements with the Soviet Union to control the nuclear arms race and stabilize regional conflicts. Eisenhower had met with the Soviets in Geneva. Kennedy had signed the nuclear test ban treaty. Johnson had carried on nuclear arms control talks even as he escalated the Vietnam War. But again, it was the staunch anticommunist Nixon who made the most dramatic moves, finalizing negotiations on nuclear arms limits and then flying to Moscow to sign the historic agreement.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) was truly a momentous treaty. The United States had developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. In the 1950s it enjoyed a huge advantage in nuclear capacity. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the United States could deliver more than 1,000 nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. The Soviet capacity was closer to 100, enough to wreak devastation on the United States, but still a militarily meaningful disadvantage. However, in the 1960s Soviet nuclear capacity began to catch up with that of the United States. By 1972 both superpowers had thousands of missiles and were rapidly proceeding to arm them with multiple warheads. Each side had attained the ability to wreak assured destruction on the other even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This situation is called nuclear parity or essential equivalence.
The provisions of the SALT treaty recognized this nuclear parity. Each side agreed to limit its nuclear missile launchers to the numbers it had at the time of the treaty signing, roughly 2,500 launchers each. If either power wanted to deploy new systems beyond the treaty numbers, it had to destroy existing systems to keep within the totals. Just as important were the agreements on strategic defenses. Under the theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD), the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed to limit antimissile systems to two sites per country. This meant that each side could be assured its missiles could reach their targets, making further buildups militarily unnecessary.
Soviet leader Breshnev and the Nixons at a state dinner at the White HouseSALT went into effect once it was ratified by the Senate in September 1972. It established the crucial precedent that the United States and the Soviet Union could reach and abide by arms control agreements. But there were also massive loopholes in the treaty. Although the number of missile launchers was limited, the number of warheads put on each missile was not. Therefore, each side could continue to increase the number of deliverable weapons by putting multiple warheads on each missile. This is exactly what each side did in the 1970s. SALT I negotiators also could not agree on more difficult issues like bombers and short-range and medium-range missile systems, so their development was totally unimpeded. SALT I was an important precedent, but it was only a marginal restraint on the arms race.
The War Powers Act, the Imperial Presidency, and the National Security State
While the Nixon Doctrine called for a more peaceful, orderly world, it was not a general retreat into isolationism. On the face of it, Nixon appeared to be searching for a new foreign policy that would fundamentally change the U.S. role in the world. But in many ways the Nixon Doctrine can be seen as an attempt to lower the costs of achieving traditional goals.
The doctrine of hegemonic flexibility as it emerged in the 1970s was, after all, a strategy to maintain U.S. hegemony even as the world was changing. Only now the United States would be calling on its resurgent European and Asian allies to pick up more of the costs and take more of the risks of maintaining the global system. The rich western Europeans and Japanese would be pressured to provide a higher proportion of the forces and the financing of Western military operations. Nixon's vision of regional Third World powers like the Shah of Iran or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines was that they would act as their own forces of counterinsurgency in their region of the world. The United States would provide financing, hardware, and training, but would be spared the need to shed American blood to achieve its goal of containing socialist and other radical Third World forces.
One thing the Nixon Doctrine did not envision was a decrease in the power of the imperial president over the national security and warmaking machinery. The Nixon Doctrine was a grand policy strategy devised by a White House that saw itself in the tradition of the great imperial powers of nineteenth century Europe.
Nixon's foreign policy guru, Henry Kissinger, consciously patterned himself after Prince Metternich, who helped engineer the "concert of Europe" by which the European empires tried to keep their competition confined to the colonial periphery and away from the vitals of their homelands. Like the diplomats in Metternich's world, Kissinger valued secrecy and deception as great assets in the foreign policy chessgame. Nixon and Kissinger did not like either members of Congress or the general public meddling in their calculated maneuvering.
Chinese Premier Chou En-lai and Party Chairman Mao Zedong with President Nixon and Henry KissingerFailure in Vietnam intensified executive and congressional battles over war powers. Nixon eventually yielded to domestic pressure on the substance of Vietnam War policy, but he fought bitterly to maintain executive control over foreign policy decision making. The siege mentality in the White House that led to Watergate was conceived largely in the divisive struggles with Congress over escalation and deescalation of the war. The cold war faith in both the efficacy and the righteousness of covert action abroad eventually spilled over into the democratic process at home.
One of the tactics that congressional opponents of the war adopted was trying to use congressional power over government spending to end or limit the conflict in southeast Asia. Opponents of the war introduced bills forbidding the spending of funds for all or selected operations in southeast Asia. At first such fund cutoff bills got few votes, but as the war dragged on, the percentage of House and Senate supporters grew until it began to approach a majority. While the one funding cutoff bill that actually became law passed only after the Nixon had committed to withdrawing all U.S. fighting forces, the growing possibility that such legislation would pass placed strong pressure on the administration to bring the war to a conclusion.
A broader strategy adopted by congressional opponents of presidential warmaking was war powers legislation. The War Powers Act of 1973 was designed to rectify the changes in the balance between congressional and presidential war powers wrought by the cold war. On a policy level, it was designed to make it more difficult for the president to unilaterally commit U.S. forces to a combat situation. Thus the War Powers Act had the effect of undermining not only the imperial presidency but also the ability of the national security state to conduct counterinsurgency campaigns.
George McGovern, Senator from South Dakota and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate,
was a leader in congressional opposition to the Vietnam WarThe War Powers Act was based on Congress' constitutional powers to declare war and control the funding of military operations. It requires the president to have explicit congressional endorsement when committing U.S. forces to combat. The War Powers Act tacitly recognizes the president's power to act decisively in a crisis by allowing the him the latitude to conduct military operations without prior congressional consent. But whenever the president commits U.S. forces to a combat situation, he must get a congressional resolution approving the decision. If Congress does not approve within 90 days, the troops must be withdrawn.
President Nixon bitterly fought any congressional restrictions on the president's control over foreign policy. When the War Powers Act passed Congress after years of debate, Nixon vetoed it. But even many Republicans supported some new restrictions on presidential warmaking, and his veto was overridden by a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate, and the War Powers Act became law.
The impact of the War Powers Act on foreign policy-making has been more symbolic than real. As the conflict in the Persian Gulf later showed, it is very difficult for Congress to openly oppose decisive presidential action in a real crisis situation when American lives are at stake and the president is commanding the airwaves to call the American people to bold action. In actual practice congressional control over the funding of government operations has proven to be a more effective tool in limiting presidential warmaking, as the Reagan administration learned in its battles with Congress over funding the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s. But the War Powers Act was an expression of growing public skepticism over unlimited presidential authority to commit U.S. forces to combat, and as such it captured the shifting politics of U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s.
Of course, the war powers conflict was only one of Nixon's troubles in his later years in office. While the Watergate scandals that eventually led to his downfall were driven primarily by the administration's political misdeeds, one of the original articles of impeachment considered by the House Judiciary Committee concerned Nixon's secret war in Cambodia and the concealing of this war from Congress. The siege mentality in the Nixon White House and the ever more bitter relationship with Congress were also effects of the polarization of the country over the Vietnam War.
Ford, Kissinger, and the Nixon Doctrine
Henry Kissinger had been a key architect of the Nixon Doctrine. During Nixon's first term, Kissinger, as national security adviser, had handled the secret negotiations leading to the China and Moscow trips. In the second term Kissinger was rewarded with the post of secretary of state. When Nixon resigned in 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, retained Kissinger as his leading foreign policy adviser. Ford and Kissinger carried forward the policies of the Nixon years.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Soviet Party Chief Breshnev,
President Ford, and Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko at the Helsinki summitFord and Kissinger continued the arms control process. In 1974 Ford traveled to Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast of the Soviet Union, to sign another set of arms agreements. The Vladivostok accords clarified some of the issues left unresolved in the SALT treaty. Both sides were limited to 2,400 missile launchers. For the first time the number of launchers that could carry multiple warheads was limited, to 1,300 per side.
JIMMY CARTER AND THE POLITICAL FAILURE OF HEGEMONIC FLEXIBILITY
back to topThe Inordinate Fear of Communism and New Global Realities
In the early years of his administration, Jimmy Carter pursued the path of hegemonic flexibility. In 1977, at Notre Dame, Carter made his first major foreign policy speech since becoming president. He openly rejected many of the premises of the national security ideology. He argued that America's inordinate fear of communism had undermined its ability to conduct a just and successful foreign policy. He championed human rights and self-determination in U.S. policy toward the emerging nations of the Third World.
The Panama Canal and Latin AmericaBeing confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism that once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. . . For too many years, we've been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We've fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. back to top
Carter's new policies were best exemplified by the Panama Canal treaties and his human rights campaign. In the United States the Panama Canal was generally touted as a triumph of American vision and technology. In much of Central America, U.S. sovereignty over the Canal Zone served as a symbol of U.S. arrogance and imperialism, and a reminder of U.S. willingness to use its military superiority to impose its will on the region.
Tension had been growing between the United States and Panama over issues of sovereignty for many years. There had been periodic anti-American demonstrations and even riots by Panamanians seeking to regain control over the Canal Zone. Previous administrations had sought better relations, but none had been willing to face the domestic fallout of lessening U.S. control over the Canal Zone. However, as part of his administration's new flexibility in relations with Third World nations, Carter negotiated the treaties that returned legal sovereignty over the territory while maintaining de facto U.S. control over military use of the canal and military control of the area.
Jimmy Carter, Organization of American States Secretary Alejandron Orfilia
and General Omar Torrijos signing the Panama Canal TreatyCarter's new stance in Latin America could also be seen in his cutoff of military aid to military dictatorships in Nicaragua, Chile, and Argentina. Previous administrations had been willing to look the other way while Latin American and Asian dictators had slaughtered their domestic opposition, as long as they retained friendly military and commercial relations with the United States. As part of his new emphasis on human rights and his deemphasis of anticommunism, Carter put some distance between the United States and the most brutal dictatorships in Latin America.
Carter's human rights policies were highly selective. Military dictatorships in strategically contested regions of the world like Iran and South Korea were not held to the same standard as less strategically important nations. But for the first time in postwar U.S. foreign policy, concern for international protection of human rights became more than a tool with which to bash the Soviets and their allies.
Arms Control Under Carter
The Carter administration was committed to detente with the Soviet Union and the arms control process begun by the Nixon-Ford administration. In February 1977 Carter proposed a dramatic new departure in the SALT talks. He called for deep cuts in existing weapons systems and strict limits on qualitative improvements of nuclear forces. At the same time he proposed these initiatives, Carter expressed a willingness to continue more cautiously along the lines of previous SALT negotiations.
The Carter proposal would have cut the allowable number of launchers from the 2,400 agreed to in Vladivostok to somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000. The cuts were to be focused on the more accurate land-based missile systems that could be used in a first strike against the other side's forces, thus crippling the opponent's retaliatory capacity and undermining the principle of mutual assured destruction. The restrictions on testing and deployment of new systems would overcome the limitations of previous agreements that controlled only some systems while allowing the arms race to accelerate in others.
The Carter proposals were very one-sided. They focused particularly on the Soviet advantage in very large, land-based missiles that were so central to the Soviet forces. The Soviets based most of their missile forces in the interior of their country, reflecting their history and geography as a land power. The United States had split its nuclear forces more equally between land, sea, and air delivery systems, reflecting its history as a sea and air power. Thus, to focus cuts on land based systems was to favor the United States. In their response to the Carter proposals, the Soviets chose to highlight their one-sided nature, and rejected them out of hand.
President Carter meets with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko in 1977However, negotiations premised upon previous SALT agreements continued. In June 1979 a SALT II agreement was signed by Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at a summit in Vienna. The SALT II accord cut the total number of launchers from 2,400 to 2,250. It reduced the number of allowable multiple-warhead launchers from 1,320 to 1,200, and limited the number of land- based, multiple-warhead launchers to 820. It restricted each side to one new land-based missile system.
But SALT II never became law because it was never ratified by the Senate, as required by the Constitution. The Senate's refusal to ratify SALT II reflected the growing political failure of the strategy of hegemonic flexibility.
The Resurgence of the National Security Ideology
The policy failures of Vietnam and the spiraling arms race had brought discernible movement away from the national security ideology. But in the late 1970s it was the ideology of hegemonic flexibility that came under increasing political attack. By midterm, the Carter administration was sending mixed signals about its commitment to the ideas articulated in its first year. By its last year, the Carter administration had returned to most of the cold war doctrines that had guided U.S. policy in the 1950s and 1960s.
Several factors motivated this shift. The memory of the tragedy of Vietnam was beginning to fade. Already a historical revisionism was developing that blamed the debacle in Vietnam not on the national security ideology that justified the commitment of U.S. power, but on a failure of some mystical American will to win. The continued war and suffering in southeast Asia after the U.S. withdrawal lent superficial credence to the claim that the U.S. involvement had served some purpose, namely, to keep repressive communist regimes from coming to power.
Recognition was growing in the United States that its power to influence world events had declined. The rise of the OPEC oil cartel and its devastating effects on the U.S. economy were the most obvious signs of decline. The inability of the United States to halt the emergence of new socialist regimes in Africa and the Middle East was another. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of Islamic revolution was yet another, particularly since building up the Shah as a regional power had been one of the central components of the Nixon Doctrine. Just as the predominant national security ideology bore the blame for the policy failures of the 1960s, so detente began to bear the blame for the setbacks of the 1970s.
Presidents Carter, Nixon, and Truman with the Shah of Iran:
The fall of the Shah of Iran was a blow to U.S. power in the Middle EastDomestic politics also played a part in the shift away from hegemonic flexibility. Once LBJ left office in 1969, many Democrats who had been supporting his Vietnam policy out of party loyalty or pragmatic caution refused to do the same for Republican Nixon. In the same manner, once the Democrats recaptured the White House in 1976, many Republicans who had held doubts about detente came into open political opposition. The strong showing of Ronald Reagan in the 1976 Republican primaries revealed that opposition to detente was not only tenable but also, perhaps, even expedient.
The political pressures on detente increased in 1978. The Democrats lost 16 seats in the House of Representatives and 3 in the Senate in the midterm election of 1978. Carter foresaw the possibility of a strong challenge on the right in 1980 from Reagan or someone like him. In 1979 he began to position himself for the 1980 election by moving toward the political center. This shift affected relations with the Soviet Union.
The euphoria of the early years of detente was fading. Detente had borne many unrealistic expectations of immediate harmony between the superpowers. Many Americans believed detente required the Soviet Union to conform to the U.S. position on every issue of conflict. Anything less was often interpreted as a lack of Soviet commitment to detente. When the Soviet Union continued to back friendly regimes and revolutions, to use their military power for their political ends, and to pursue advantages around the world, opponents of detente seized on these actions as proof that it was not working. It did not matter to American critics of detente that, if measured by these standards, the United States was not very committed to detente either.
The Crises in Iran and Afghanistan
SALT II ultimately fell victim to the resurgence of the national security ideology. The early Senate debates on the treaty centered on growing concern about the decline of American power. But the death knells of detente were the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Iranian Islamic revolutionaries held hostages from the American embassy for more than a yearIn November 1979 militant Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy and held more than 50 American personnel hostage. Even more serious was the commitment of massive Soviet military forces to the aid of the failing communist government in Afghanistan. Detente was dead. In his 1980 State of the Union message the president articulated what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine: that the U.S regarded the continued flow of Persian Gulf oil as a vital national interest that would be defended with military force.
The Carter administration reacted to the invasion of Afghanistan with several concrete measures. It withdrew the recently negotiated SALT II treaty from consideration by the Senate. Legislation to renew registration for the draft was initiated. Commercial ties were cut: grain sales were blocked and high-technology equipment was embargoed. American athletes were not sent to the Olympic Games held in Moscow in 1980. High level diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin were severed.The Carter administration's foreign policy ended on a very different note than it began. The criticism of the "inordinate fear of communism" had given way to a new cold war. In 1981 Ronald Reagan would make the new cold war the central philosophy of his early foreign policy.
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Web sites marked with * provided images for this chapter. Many images also are linked to the web site from which they originated.White House links to all former presidents' official libraries a good linking point if you want to study the official documents of several different presidents
The National Archives links to all former presidents' official libraries Another route to the presidential libraries
*NAIL Digital Images Search Search the National Archives and Records Administration for online presidential documents
*The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
The Gerald Ford Presidential Library
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library
*Richard Nixon Presidential Materials Official Nixon documents of the National Archives. Apparently the National Archives worries that even after Nixon's death they cannot trust the truth to Nixon and his followers, so they keep this separate site for his presidential materials, apparently detached from Nixon's own library
C-SPAN Nixon Tapes listen to tapes of actual White House conversations
Richard Nixon's White House Tapes Actual tapes Nixon made of White House conversations, many dealing with Watergate
Richard Nixon Audio Archive tapes of key Nixon speeches
*The Watergate Decade Washington Post's summary of the Nixon era
*The Kissinger Transcripts from the National Security Archive at George Washington University
The Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library
C-SPAN State of the Union files watch State of the Union messages of presidents back to 1989. Transcripts of State of the Union messages available back to 1945
History and Politics Out Loud audio files of presidents in office, with transcripts also available. Many files available for Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and John Kennedy
Inaugural Addresses The Inaugural Address is a key speech made when presidents are sworn into office. This site has them all
Speeches of the Presidents Inaugural Addresses, State of the Union Messages, and selected nomination acceptance speeches and war messages
The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden Highly recommended. Prepared by The Center for the Study of the Presidency, a leading group of scholars who study the presidency
Presidents of the United States Links to info on all American presidents. For each president it gives a brief biography, election results, cabinet members, chronology of major events, links to other internet biographies, links to key historical documents of the era, and other related links
The American President Biographies of each president and several essays on the presidency. Links to historical documents and other web resources. Each biography includes many links, including definitions of key terms
The American Presidency links to encyclopedia articles on each president and related subjects
Biographies of the American Presidents Biographies of each president. If the music file irritates you as much as it does me, click on the upper left to stop it
The Yale Law School Avalon Project Large collection of official papers on several presidential administrations. You can also find many international and congressional documents at their Major Collections page
Presidents' Day Links to resources on several key presidencies
Leadership Links on several presidents and articles on the presidency
The Political Resources Page Provides links for each president
University of Colorado Presidents Online Page links and explanations of many presidency web sites but too many dead links
