Brezhnev and Beyond

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1979

Summary:  The Brezhnev era is clearly ending. This October he will mark his fifteenth year as the head of the Party, a span at least four years longer than Nikita Khrushchev's official term. In December, he will be 73 and next spring he will, if he holds on, pass Stalin as the oldest Soviet leader ever to hold the top Party position. He has already established the precedent of being both chief of state and Party leader; he has matched Stalin in being promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union. By almost any standard, the past 15 years have to be regarded as his "era." Now the advancing age and physical infirmities of the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party suggest that a presuccession period is under way and that the process of summing up the Brezhnev period can begin.

William G. Hyland is a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. He was a member of the National Security Council Staff from 1969 to 1977, serving as Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs, 1975-77.

Despite the severe complication introduced by the mining and bombing of Haiphong, Brezhnev went through with the summit in May 1972, purging one of his anti-détente opponents (Pyotr Shelest) in the process. Of course, Brezhnev expected dividends. At a minimum he foresaw significant economic benefits, American credits and trade and participation in large developmental projects, especially in the Far East. He certainly hoped for a shading of American policy away from China, and repeatedly warned Nixon of the Chinese threat to both the United States and Russia.

What he achieved was well short of expectations. In Europe his détente seemed fairly firmly based, but one of its architects, Willy Brandt, disappeared. Coincidentally with Nixon's own departure (and partly as a consequence) the expected economic benefits from the United States were denied; then the attempt to patch up SALT was thwarted by a combination of new issues not resolved at Vladivostok, the intervention of American domestic politics and the U.S.S.R.'s own policy of interventionism in Africa.

As détente weakened and relations with China failed to improve after Mao's death, it must have appeared to Brezhnev and his colleagues by 1977 that what might be happening was a new form of encirclement. The relationship with Washington was strained by a new Administration that wanted to break with the policies of its predecessor, but chose not to challenge Soviet adventures in Ethiopia, Afghanistan and South Yemen. The Sino-Japanese talks finally made a breakthrough in 1978 and a treaty was signed with American encouragement. China was avidly pursuing European economic links, including arms supplies. U.S.-Chinese relations were proceeding toward normalization.

Brezhnev tried to break this trend by underwriting a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which had the aim of exposing Chinese impotence but ended with some question of Soviet willingness to run risks. On the other hand, the Vienna summit in June 1979 showed how far the policy of détente had faded as a counterweight to Sino-American accommodation. Brezhnev seems to have made little effort in Vienna to revive a relationship that went beyond the necessity of concluding SALT II. Leaving aside his health, the overall impression he and his colleagues created was one of extreme caution in avoiding the kind of commitment he had made in the early 1970s. The subsequent contention in the United States over the SALT II treaty almost certainly justified the hesitancy of the Soviet leadership to become too closely tied to an uncertain policy and to another American president.

While triangular relations have been in flux, the turmoil in the Third World has developed in a manner that provided setbacks as well as new opportunities for Soviet policy. The Middle East, of course, was the principal area of Soviet involvement, other than India; but Khrushchev's successors failed to consolidate the breakthrough he achieved. At first the Brezhnev group encouraged a new adventure in the 1967 War, which led to the humiliation of their clients. Then they abetted Egyptian rearmament and a confrontational program in the early 1970s, only to suffer a defeat by Israel in the semi-war of deep penetration raids in 1969-70, and then in 1972 a major humiliation in being evicted by Sadat (ironically because of Brezhnev's conciliation at the Moscow summit with Nixon, which convinced Sadat the Soviets would never deliver a negotiated settlement, or back a new attack). But the Soviets were back in the picture in the 1973 War, and despite their exclusion from the subsequent shuttle diplomacy and partial settlements, Moscow has managed to retain a position in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

But it was in Africa that the new breakthrough occurred. The United States was defeated in Angola in 1975-a partially self-inflicted defeat but one that nevertheless was a watershed for the Soviet position, which led in 1977 to new Soviet strategic footholds in the Horn of Africa. Cuban mercenaries were the new-found instrument. Coups in Afghanistan and in Yemen, whether wind-falls or careful orchestrations, were in any case important if temporary gains, magnified by the removal of the Shah. By 1978-79 the red star seemed in the ascendancy and Washington perceived an "arc of crisis," also magnified by the energy crisis and the aggressiveness of OPEC.

Underlying all of these episodes was a hard, irrefutable fact. The Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev had step by step increased its military position to a point where the balance of power, for decades dominated by the United States and its allies, was in danger of shifting to the U.S.S.R. One raw fact demonstrated what was occurring. The Soviet Union was still putting over ten percent of its entire economic effort into the military, and, according to the CIA's latest estimate, its defense spending in 1978 was $44 billion more than that of the United States.

There was no way around the fact that a consistent commitment at this general level for over more than a decade would not only pay off in the near term but would create a base for continuing expansion. Leonid Brezhnev would leave his successors some major ambiguities in his dealings with the West, a legacy of bitterness and suspicion in his dealings with China, and a number of openings elsewhere that skillful Soviet handling might turn to permanent gains. But above all he would pass on an inheritance of military power unrivaled in Russian history since the days when the Czar strode into Paris at the end of the long march from Borodino.

How will Brezhnev's successors handle this legacy?

IV