An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy

23. THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY FRIEND

237 23 THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY FRIEND Jimmy Carter’s human rights policies, too, would be sidelined by the very anticommunism that he had warned against in his Notre Dame speech in May 1977. One of the most jarring manifestations of this shift was his praise for one of the worst despots in Eastern Europe, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu. Receiving Ceausescu at the White House on April 12, 1978, Carter noted that he was “a great leader of a great country.”1 Not only that, but Romania had enjoyed most-favorednation status in its dealings with the United States since 1975—a privilege Carter refused to extend to the Soviet Union. Later that year, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal took a detour during his European tour to visit Ceausescu. Upon arriving in Bucharest on December 8, 1978, Blumenthal said,“I come to Romania at President Carter’s direction to reaffirm...the importance we attach to Romanian independence and to U.S.-Romanian friendship.”2 The virtue that mattered was that Ceausescu was charting a foreign policy course somewhat independent of the Soviet Union.3 That same spring, as the Russians sought to influence events in the Horn of Africa, the United States president embraced Mohammed Siad Barre, the erratic and ruthless dictator of Somalia. Also ignored were potential problems regarding the Chinese dealings with their own political dissidents. On December 8, 1978, National Security Council (NSC) aide Michel Oksenberg wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski that it was too early for the president or senior officials to respond to a dissident Chinese wall poster calling on the United States to extend its human rights policies to China. In a memo he prepared for Brzezinski to send to the president, Oksenberg suggested that the administration should not yet “praise popular aspirations” in China since to do so “would jeopardize the progress” being made. On the other hand, the United States should not praise the Chinese leaders, since to do this “would legitimate an authoritarian leadership as having human rights concerns.” Brzezinski did not sign the memo, remarking simply, “Need better movement.”4 After Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Washington, D.C., in early 1979 and the arrest of activist editor Wei Jingsheng, the administration made only one semicritical remark on Chinese human rights abuses, expressing surprise and disappointment at Wei’s prison sentence.5 A State Department report on Chinese human rights was upbeat, saying,“An encouraging trend has begun to emerge in the direction of liberalization .”6 Carter even overlooked the crimes of one of the most genocidal regimes of human history. Ever since the Pol Pot regime came to power in Cambodia in 1975, a few 238 RENEWAL OF THE COLD WAR congressmen and journalists had been documenting its systematic elimination of the entire class of educated people and ethnic minorities. At one point, on April 1978, Carter did note that the Cambodian government was “the worst violator of human rights in the world today.”7 On October 1978, Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) persuaded seventy-nine other senators to write Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, urging him to introduce the issue to the United Nations Security Council.8 But it would fall toVietnam to dislodge the Pol Pot Regime.In response to conflicts with the Khmer Rouge on its borders, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in the last weeks of December 1978. The invasion led to the discovery of massive piles of skeletons and other evidence that the Khmer Rouge had been engaged in systematic torture and mass murder.Nearly two million people had been killed.9 A U.S.foreign service officer, Charles Twining, who had earlier become aware of the extent of the Khmer atrocities, cheered when he heard of the Vietnamese victory, but he was practically the only one in the administration to respond in that way. Preoccupied with fighting the Cold War, most U.S. foreign policy decision makers were concerned about the possible extension of Soviet influence in the region because of its recent alliance with Vietnam.10 After the Vietnamese invasion,the Carter administration expressed no further outrage over the Pol Pot regime. Finally on September 21, 1979, the United States supported the UN General Assembly vote (71–35,with 4 abstentions and 23 absences) to endorse the Credentials Committee recommendation that the Pol Pot regime should continue to represent Cambodia in the UN.11 The vote was driven by Brzezinski, and reluctantly supported by Vance.Anthony Lake of the policy planning staff...