Carter Policy in Perspective

CARTER POLICY IN PERSPECTIVE Robert E. Osgood From the historian's standpoint, a recent president's performance in foreign relations can be evaluated by how well he and his administration understood the principal problems facing the country and how well they dealt with them, considering the constraints of the international and domestic political environment and the intractability of the problems . This approach has the merit of focusing on factors of long-term significance instead of on quirks of personality, style, media images, and the like. But it suffers from the presumptuous and often false assumption that one knows, at any particular time, what the principal problems are and how to solve them. Nevertheless, to write about today as though one were the historian of tomorrow is, at least, a salutary discipline—providing one remembers that historians are forever changing the past in light of the present. To judge the Carter administration's performance in foreign relations by the standards of history, the best place to start is with the fundamental problems ofU.S. foreign policy that came to a head in the 1970s. Let us take as a given the core policy of containment, just as all recent administrations have done. The problems ofthe 1970s sprang, in one way or another, from the fact that the United States played the dominant role of container in a period in which its economic and military primacy was passing. The extent to which the Carter administration understood the problems correctly and responded to them adequately under the growing international and domestic constraints of 1976-1980 seems a fair measure of its success or failure. The problems of U.S. policy in the 1970s arose from fundamental changes in the international system and the position of the United States within it. They include the following: RobertE. Osgood is ChristianA. HerterProfessor ofAmericanForeign Policy andformerDean ofSAIS. He is also director ofsecurity studies ofThe Johns Hopkins Foreign PolicyInstitute, apost in which hedraws on his experienceas a seniorstaffmemberoftheNationalSecurityCouncil during 1969-70. 11 12 SAIS REVIEW —The steady and massive investment by the Soviet Union in a military buildup across the board, dating from the Cuban missile crisis, raised the problem of how to respond to the Soviet achievement of strategic nuclear parity and the prospect of Soviet superiority. It also posed the novel problem of contending with a growing Soviet capacity to project military power to Third World countries. —The development of détente complicated the problem of responding to the shift in the military balance. The death of Stalin, the deployment of devastating nuclear capabilities, the achievement of an EastWest equilibrium in Europe based on a divided Germany, the failure of Soviet confrontations in Berlin and Cuba either to attain more favorable terms of equilibrium for the USSR or to weaken military containment , the growing animosity between the USSR and China, the competition with China and the United States for influence in the expanding Third World, the Soviet difficulty of combining heavy investments in defense with the modernization of its inefficient economy— these were the principal developments that gave Moscow compelling incentives to seek a new period of peaceful coexistence called détente. The overriding question for the United States was how to use détente to moderate Soviet behavior, take the heat off Berlin and normalize relations between the two Germanies, and reduce the costs and risks of military containment without permitting the military balance or the cohesion of NATO to deteriorate. —The rapid expansion of the so-called Third World of newly independent countries, the weakness oftheir economies and governments, the revolutionary, nationalist, and communal turbulence that afflicted their international politics, and the widespread disposition to blame the Western democracies for their ills, made it difficult to foster stable, secure, and friendly countries not susceptible to communist subversion or domination. These obstacles were ofan entirely different nature and magnitude from the problems ofcontainment in Europe. As the cold war spread throughout the Third World, the formulas of the 1960s for economic and political development and for combatting "wars of national liberation" seemed inadequate to cope with the problems of containment in the volatile nonindustrial areas in the 1970s. —As the geographical extent ofU.S. security...