U.S.-Soviet Relations: The Long Road Back

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1981

Summary:  American presidents have usually inherited poor relations with the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower, of course, was confronted by the tensions of Korea and President Kennedy by the Berlin crisis. Lyndon Johnson was a temporary exception, but Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam and the Czech crisis. Gerald Ford had to deal with a faltering détente, and Jimmy Carter was embroiled in early disputes. In January 1981, Ronald Reagan found himself in much the same position as his predecessors, except that relations were worse than usual. Indeed, relations were frozen. Even the outgoing Administration was pessimistic. The departing American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Thomas J. Watson, Jr., summed up the prevailing gloom: "I don't think the West has any conception of how dismal the future looks for East-West relations."

William G. Hyland is currently a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served in the Department of State in 1974-75 and as Deputy Director of the National Security Council Staff from 1975 to 1977.

But there was a prolonged rear-guard action against this decision, conducted by the Defense Department. While Secretary Haig was publicly resuming his contacts with the Soviet Ambassador after the Soviet Party Congress, the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, was lecturing Europeans, "if the movement from cold war to détente is progress, then let me say we cannot afford much more progress." Weinberger also introduced a new issue by linking negotiations on European missiles to prior Soviet restraint on Poland. The State Department countered by issuing repeated assurances that the United States was committed to negotiations; restraint in Poland was not a precondition, although Soviet action there would make any talks "impossible."

This skirmishing was simply a preliminary to the real decision by the President, made just before the NATO ministerial meeting in Rome in early May. At a National Security Council meeting, Haig was instructed to confirm the willingness of the United States to negotiate and to begin the talks by the "end of the year." Ironically, this new commitment had no great effect: the peace activists in Europe were not interested in diplomatic timetables; they wanted all American nuclear weapons out. Some of the NATO governments were still skeptical about U.S. policy. Moscow was contemptuous but did slightly improve its bargaining offer during a visit by two key Europeans, West German Socialist Willy Brandt and British Labour Party leader Michael Foot. Brezhnev offered a more substantial missile reduction as a reward for suspending the NATO missile program for the duration of negotiations.

The procedural fight having been settled, the United States and allied governments moved to the substance of the negotiations. Out of the second round of this arms control debate emerged the "zero option," proposed by the President on November 18: the United States would cancel its missile deployments if the U.S.S.R. would entirely "dismantle" its intermediate-range missiles.

During this debate, a quiet revolution in approaches occurred within the Administration. The skeptics in the Reagan Administration embraced the zero option as a simple but effective device to expose Soviet intransigence. The proponents of negotiation, who saw the talks as a means to bridge transatlantic differences, saw serious pitfalls in the zero option: could the United States negotiate for, say, 18 months, and then repudiate its own proposal by beginning actual preparations for deployments? Would NATO remain united in the face of tempting Soviet counter-offers? Nevertheless, the final Reagan decision contained in the speech of November 18 was both plausible and a shrewd tactical maneuver, meeting several problems and providing an effective counter to the Soviets. Yet, differences within the Administration and within NATO made it vulnerable to a Soviet counterattack.

The nature of the eventual dilemma was illustrated by Brezhnev's response. Contrary to the clever arguments for the zero option as a means of placing the Soviets in the dock, the Soviet rejection was coupled with a further offer. Brezhnev took another small step by offering to reduce "hundreds" of weapons if the United States and NATO canceled the deployment. Of course this was brushed off by Washington, though less so by Bonn. But it pointed to an eventual decision point after the preliminary posturing was completed in the Geneva negotiations that began on November 30. Would NATO give up its weapons for a low ceiling on Soviet SS-20s? This could result in a missile threat of less magnitude than Europe had faced for two decades from older Soviet missiles. But it would nonetheless be a substantial retreat from the position of December 1979. Or would a token NATO deployment be sufficient psychological compensation?

Whatever the outcome, the process of arms control in Europe has been revived, if only temporarily, and this simple fact illustrates a significant new dimension in superpower relations. Arms control and other security issues have ceased to be the domain of the statesmen in Washington and Moscow. New weapons are involved, and new actors; new strategic debates have begun under new popular pressures. The politics of protest has reared its head, and both Moscow and Washington are now involved in a new triangular relationship with Europe. As one observer put it, the struggle for the hearts and minds of Europe has begun-a sad commentary on the policies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The collision between theory and reality was also evident in the Administration's handling of strategic arms limitation talks. It entered office not only opposed to the SALT II treaty, but to the very idea of a SALT "process." The approved tactic seemed to be to allow the treaty to lie in limbo and let the SALT dialogue atrophy. This fitted the program of rearming and deferring negotiation until the American position was clearly strengthened. Initially it suggested that the SALT agreements might be allowed to lapse or even be repudiated in order to focus priority on bringing weapons systems into operation. This view was publicly expressed by a junior official early in the year, only to be severely and publicly repudiated by the Secretary of State.

Presumably the Secretary recognized the American dilemma. There was no immediate gain from explicitly freeing the Soviets from the SALT II constraints, which were being observed on both sides. With Reagan in the White House, the Administration did not need the psychological booster shot of officially denouncing SALT. Its defense budget would pass easily. And the Administration had no clear strategic program of its own; it could not even decide on the mix of new strategic programs (MX, B-1, etc.). Thus retaining SALT as a tactical hedge seemed to make sense, especially in light of the growing nervousness in Europe over the Reagan Administration. But having accepted the strange position of abiding by a treaty it had no intention of ratifying, the Administration for many months offered no substitute for SALT, other than the hackneyed insistence that substantial reductions were necessary.

The approach that finally began to evolve flowed from the three principal objections to SALT I and II made by SALT critics, including some prominent members of the Administration. First, there was the problem of developing a new unit of measure or new "common currency" for strategic weapons negotiations. Hitherto the unit had been numbers of launchers (e.g., missile silos, bombers). This was misleading and dangerous because it equated quite different elements of power. What was needed was a more comprehensive measure of what Administration officials loosely termed "destructive power." But the slogan was difficult to translate into a technical formula that might have operational significance and still prove negotiable.

Second, there was the question of reductions. Some reductions were obviously more effective than others. Some might even be dangerous. The United States would not want to reduce its own forces to a point where it might lose its second-strike capability and a first strike might prove tempting to the Soviets. Fewer fixed ICBMs with multiple warheads would not necessarily create greater stability. Fewer strategic submarines were in fact more vulnerable, and fewer bombers confronting an unconstrained air defense might be downright dangerous. But token reductions (already achieved in SALT II) were certainly illusory. So it appeared, more and more, that what would eventually be involved was in fact an old and unsuccessful demand, namely, that the Soviets reduce their heaviest ICBMs-scarcely a "new direction."