GORBACHEV
U.S. foreign policy and Carter’s conception of détente were conjoint. Carter outlined the following principal policy goals in his USNA address: maintain equivalent nuclear strength; maintain judicious mili-tary spending; support global and regional organi-zations; seek peace, communication, understanding, cultural and scientific exchange, and trade; prevent nuclear weapons proliferation; and limit nuclear arms.66 As means to these ends, Carter proposed a
“combination of adequate American strength, of quiet self-restraint in the use of it, of a refusal to believe in the inevitability of war, and of a patient and persistent development of all the peaceful alternatives.”67 Note in passing the coherence of “quiet self-restraint” and
“quiet diplomacy.”
Carter had grand objectives for détente. These in-cluded SALT “reductions, limitations, and a freeze on new technology,” a complete end to all nuclear tests, a ban on use and stockpiling of chemical and biological
weapons, reduced conventional arms sales, arms limi-tations in the Indian Ocean, a ban on nuclear weap-ons in the southern half of the Western Hemisphere via the Treaty of Tlatelolco, Mexico, the Middle East peace promotion, NATO-Warsaw Pact force reduc-tions in Europe, sharing of science and technology as well as cooperation in outer space, and world health improvement and hunger relief.68
In terms of nuclear strategy and declaratory policy, Carter made a stunning offer while toasting Leonid Brezhnev at the 1979 Vienna summit:
I hope, Mr. President [Brezhnev], that détente, which has been growing in Europe because of your great work, can now encompass other regions of the world.
. . . The SALT agreement . . . provides a good foun-dation. . . . Let us both agree never to use offensive weapons against any nation in an act of aggression.69
This quotation, taken from the official press release, is the closest thing to an offer of an American no-first-use policy of which I am aware. It therefore represents an amazing potential concession with implications for the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence. Bear these thoughts on credibility and extended deterrence when reading about Carter’s response to the Afghanistan in-vasion in the following passages.
If nuclear bombs are indeed the ultimate weapon, then part of Carter’s address at a 1980 Democratic Na-tional Committee fundraiser might be called an ulti-mate wish list. The first part of this list was free-stand-ing and strikfree-stand-ingly Reagan-like: Gofree-stand-ing further than his suggestion of nuclear no-first-use, Carter nearly called for nuclear abolition. He reached as far as effective nuclear abolition:
We are eager to see that detente [is] not weakened but strengthened. And we are eager to control nuclear weapons, to reduce our dependence on them, and ul-timately to eliminate nuclear weapons as a factor from the face of the Earth. This is our ultimate goal.70
Carter concluded with a restatement of Democratic Party platform commitments to peace, better relation-ships among peoples, control of nuclear weapons, and sound management of economic and energy issues.71 Note that this 1980 statement antedates the Afghani-stan invasion.
Most commentators proclaimed the death of dé-tente with the Soviet’s Christmas Eve invasion of Af-ghanistan in 1979. Not Carter. Just before entering his final full year in office, Carter declared:
And my hope is to go out of this office having kept our country at peace; . . . with firm, sound friendship and detente between ourselves and the Soviet Union; . . . having enhanced human rights; . . . with alliances and friendships firmly established with as many people as possible on Earth; and . . . with nuclear arms under control.72
Carter addressed the previous statement to student leaders. Lest one think his remarks were tailored to impressionable youngsters, later the same day Carter told an audience of magazine editors:
We’re committed to the preservation of detente. Once the Soviet troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan and the threat of military action by them is removed, then we’ll be very glad to pursue aggressively again further progress in the control of weapons and in the strengthening of our ties with all nations on Earth.73
Finally, Carter’s toast of German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt reaffirmed commitments to “the con-trol of weaponry” although they “have been shaken, but not changed, by the Soviet invasion of Afghani-stan.74 In returning the toast, Schmidt showed that Carter was not the only world leader who still held détente to be viable by noting the “necessity of a bal-ance of military power in Europe and in the world as a prerequisite for detente” and judging that this pre-requisite was, in fact, being met.75
Détente and deterrence remained intertwined for Carter in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Af-ghanistan. Within 1 month of the invasion, Carter’s State of the Union message declared:
An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means neces-sary, including military force.76
Although Carter did not specifically mention a nuclear response, Carter wrote afterwards that he intended to signal the U.S. response would “not nec-essarily be confined to any small invaded area or to tactics or terrain of the Soviet’s choosing.”77 In Febru-ary, an administration official subsequently declared,
“The Soviets know that this terrible weapon has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American president who dropped it both times.
Therefore, they have to take this into consideration in their calculus.”78 An ambiguous, but not ambivalent, mix of conventional and nuclear signaling took place in the form of 6 months of reconnaissance flights by B-52s.79 These nuclear signals, although of limited sig-nificance to the American response overall, are
note-worthy in light of détente. After all, many American elites had come to doubt the credibility of extended deterrence by the end of the 1960s, but the continu-ation of extended deterrence could be attributed to inertia, to the need for NATO solidarity, to the lack of danger in the era of détente, or to a combination of such factors. From this standpoint, then, the post-Afghanistan Carter doctrine is an innovation rather than a continuation, a unilateral action rather than a client-based action, and a decision undertaken in an unpredictable situation susceptible to miscalculation rather than in a business-as-usual context. Détente could have a hard nose.
After developing such a surprising policy, Carter reaffirmed the importance of deterrence in terms of détente, stating, “[I]f we continue to seek the benefit of detente while ignoring the necessity for deterrence, we would lose the advantages of both.”80 He empha-sized the U.S. mission was:
to promote order, not to enforce our will . . . to protect our citizens and our national honor, not to harm nor to dishonor others; to compel restraint, not to provoke confrontation; to support the weak, not to dominate them; to assure that the foundations of our new world are laid upon a stable superpower balance, not built on sand.81
Carter explained his post-Afghanistan actions as a choice to employ political and economic instruments
“and to hold in reserve stronger action in the future, if necessary, to preserve peace in that troubled region.”82 His policies retained a less aggressive posture than some predecessors—less aggressive, but no less realis-tic since the United States had to “respond effectively and forcefully and, I believe, peacefully to Soviet