Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (review)

294 SAIS REVIEW II, which concludes with a chapter on European financial integration, but it, too, is useful reading for students of banking and finance. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relationsfrom Nixon to Reagan. By Raymond Garthoff. Washington, D.C: The Brookings Institution, 1985. Reviewed by Jonathan Haslam, Associate Professor of Soviet Studies, SAIS. It is difficult to conceive of a subject as controversial yet as important as the history of relations betwen the United States and the Soviet Union from Nixon to Reagan. The preponderant weight of orthodox analysis here in the United States tells us that détente was shipwrecked on the Angolan coastline as contingents of Cubans arrived in Soviet transports, or that it was "buried in the sands of the Ogaden." The purveyors of this orthodoxy hold the Russians responsible. If it was not Angola or the Horn of Africa, it was the decision to deploy the SS-20. The "I-was-there" brigade customarily casts condescending glances if not verbal abuse at those so foolish to question such sacred truths. Dr. Raymond Garthoff—refugee from government, iconoclast, and dissentient—is an exception. GarthofFs volume, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, is enormous: more than one thousand pages, for the most part densely packed (yet only the Afghan chapter exhausts one's concentration) and heavily footnoted from both published and unpublished Soviet and American sources. Unlike his rivals on the anti-Soviet Right, who ape Soviet practice by using their writing as a continuation of the Cold War by other means, Garthoff insists on the importance of scholarship in the study of the most recent past. Not that he is neutral, however. On the contrary, for all his even-handedness, Garthoff takes a firm position on the liberal wing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, emphasizing the reactive nature of Soviet foreign policy, stressing perceptions above interests, and harmony over conflict. He is also partisan with respect to the dramatis personae: His loathing for Kissinger is evident throughout the text. Yet he is always meticulously careful in matching his interpretation of events to the available evidence, and the evidence he has unearthed is impressive. Garthoff retraces the steps of American and Soviet diplomacy from 1969. What he demonstrates is that under Nixon and Kissinger, the public rhetoric about détente existed not only in Washington but also in Moscow, that Brezhnev had to fight a battle at home in order to establish relations with the United States on a new basis, and that the pursuit of old-fashioned geopolitics by the Nixon administration continued unimpaired by grand declarations of principle. The U.S. government seized every opportunity to oust Soviet influence (the Middle East was the best example) and Brezhnev was in no position to behave otherwise when similar opportunities arose to weaken American influence (as in the Horn of Africa). Garthoff is at his best when dealing with the day-to-day flux of U.S.-Soviet relations. He is unbeatable at unweaving the tangled web of arms control issues. But he is somewhat at sea with ideology, as one might expect from a practitioner suspicious of political rhetoric. GarthofFs own experience gives these pages an extraordinary solidity and completeness. He has made exhaustive use of Soviet and American sources. Even members of the Soviet Communist Party Central BOOK REVIEWS 295 Committee have been interviewed and Garthoff has had either direct or indirect access to classified material on the American side of the relationship. However, for all the insights Garthoffs personal experience has afforded, it has also produced its own limitations. His attitude toward ideology is captured in the following assertion: "While ideological conditioning and belief do influence policy, they do not determine it." Politics is unfortunately not so simple. Consider, for instance, the "Failure to Define a Code of Conduct" between Moscow and Washington. Why were the powers unable to define a mutually acceptable and practicable code of behavior? The United States, Garthoff tells us, refused to "concede political parity." But this begs the question, why? Was it not because the ideological differences between the two powers ran too deep and ultimately determined policy? Garthoff consistently underrates...