Reply to the Commentaries: Using Critical Oral History to Reassess the Collapse of U.S.-Soviet Détente in the Carter-Brezhnev Years

We are grateful for the comments on "When Empathy Failed," and for the opportunity to respond to them. The authors of the comments witnessed the events of March 1977 from diverse perspectives. We take them up, in turn.

The View from Vance's Delegation

Mark Garrison was on the plane with Cyrus Vance when it landed in Moscow on its ill-fated mission. He also absorbed what Vance called the "cold wet rag in the face" from the Soviet leaders. He asks us to consider the centrality of the "connectedness of issues, domestic politics and psychology." The Carter administration, he believes, should have rejected Zbigniew Brzezinski's specific concept of issue-by-issue linkage and should have embraced a more comprehensive idea of linkage, for the simple reason that if the adversary believes things are linked, then that is where the negotiations must begin.

By March 1977, many Soviet officials were already convinced that the new Carter administration meant to treat them, as Georgii Kornienko said, like a "banana republic": as a second-rate power that could be bullied into submission on arms control and that would just have to get accustomed to relentless criticism from the administration of its human rights record. Whether or not this was an accurate view of Carter's beliefs and intentions toward the USSR, many Soviet officials believed it was. To forge ahead, as the Vance group did in Moscow, without taking the Soviet point of view into account, necessarily confirmed Soviet suspicions about Carter's motives. In other words, according to Garrison, the Carter administration failed to empathize with the Soviet Union because U.S. officials failed to ask and pursue the answer to the canonical question on which, according to Clifford Geertz, all attempts at empathy are based: "what the devil do they think they are up to?"

Garrison usefully amends our claim that a basic justification for the deployment of empathy is ethical or moral. He reminds us that although ethical questions may well be involved, policymakers rarely have the luxury of extended meditation on ethical niceties. They are too busy, and anyway in the conduct of foreign affairs the main objective must be to advance the national interest, not to achieve ethical purification. This is why officials need to empathize with their adversaries. In the process, an adversary can appear less mysterious, less capricious, less likely to respond shockingly and counter productively to probes and initiatives, thus preempting the downward spiral of perceptions that plague adversarial relationships.

Garrison's own experience as a member of Vance's delegation makes his point powerfully. Look what can happen, he suggests, when empathy is absent at a key moment: a fateful delay in getting an arms control pact and the growth of mistrust, which attained a momentum irreversible by either side. All the while the groundwork was inadvertently laid for an increasingly virulent and dangerous phase of the Cold War. Much of this, in his view, occurred because the Carter administration was so obsessed with its hot pursuit of comprehensive reductions in nuclear arms that it failed to anticipate the way the initiative would be "linked" by Soviet officials to their evolving, comprehensive view of the new administration.

The View from the Declassified Documents

Raymond Garthoff was the U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria in March 1977, following a distinguished career as an analyst of Soviet affairs in several branches of the U.S. government. His prolific scholarly work on the Cold War is required reading for anyone who seriously intends to contribute to the literature. Aspiring historians of U.S.-Soviet relations must read Garthoff first, then decide whether there is anything left to say. His three volumes on U.S.-Soviet relations from Richard Nixon through George H.W. Bush, cited in the first footnote of his commentary, come to nearly 3,000 densely packed, massively documented pages of historical narrative. Moreover, Garthoff 's discussion of the role of Zbigniew Brzezinski in the run-up to March...