Nation: Back to Maps and Raw Power

The Kremlin teaches Carter a lesson in geopolitics.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan may have profoundly altered the way Jimmy Carter looks at the world, and therefore the way he shapes U.S. foreign policy. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott examines the consequences:

When a grim-faced President went on television Jan. 4 to denounce the Soviet army's blitz against Afghanistan, he used what for him was an unfamiliar prop. As Carter talked about "the strategic importance" of the attack, a color-coded map of the embattled region flashed on the screen. It illustrated his warning that the Soviet jackboot was now firmly planted on "a stepping stone to possible control over much of the world's oil supplies."

Presidents have used maps on TV before. John Kennedy and Richard Nixon pointed to the political borders and battlefronts of Indochina as they briefed the nation on their policies toward Laos and Cambodia, respectively. But Kennedy and Nixon were used to thinking and talking geopolitically. Their careers took shape in the 1950s, when the entire globe was starkly and simplistically color-coded to differentiate the free world from the Communist bloc, and when America's unquestioned obligation was to keep the Red stain from spreading on the map.

Carter, by contrast, refined his world view in the late '60s and early '70s, when geopolitics was in some disrepute, largely because charts of Southeast Asia and slogans about the free world had helped bring the U.S. to grief in the Viet Nam War. Carter came to the presidency thinking not about the power of armies and political systems, but about the power of moral principles. The strength of the U.S., he said in his Inaugural Address, was "based not merely on the size of an arsenal but on the nobility of ideas." He declared war on "poverty, ignorance and injustice, for those are the enemies against which our forces can be honorably marshaled." In his Notre Dame speech of May 1977, Carter promised a "new" American foreign policy "based on constant decency in its values and on optimism in our historical vision." Even when he addressed the threat of Soviet expansionism, it was in terms that sounded more Quaker than Baptist: "We hope to persuade the Soviet Union that one country cannot impose its system of society on another." Neither in his mind's eye nor on his podium was there a map of the world.

Carter's deliberate playing down of the power relationships of traditional geopolitics was more than just rhetorical. He came into office determined to normalize relations with Hanoi and Havana, despite their close ties to Moscow. He unveiled an agenda of new objectives that were ambitious and admirable, although they often proved elusive and sometimes mutually contradictory. These goals cut across not only national and regional boundaries but across the ideological Great Divide as well. Among them: the crusade for human rights, the promotion of better understanding between developing and industrialized nations, and curbs on the proliferation of nuclear technology and conventional arms sales.