Nation: Back to Maps and Raw Power

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Carter was also eager to de-emphasize the Soviet-American relationship, which he felt had preoccupied postwar American diplomacy. His advisers encouraged him. Cyrus Vance is, by nature and by his legal training, a problem solver and a conciliator, a troubleshooter rather than a theoretician. His approach to huge, complex challenges has been to divide and conquer them one by one. He is uncomfortable with, and not very adept at, historical generalizations or global grand designs. Zbigniew Brzezinski, on the other hand, is a well-established, if somewhat controversial, geostrategist. He began talking of an "arc of crisis" around the Indian Ocean more than a year ago. He is also an anti-Soviet hard-liner of long standing. But Brzezinski too wanted the Carter Administration to distinguish itself from its predecessors by being "less hung up," as he once put it, on the Soviet challenge. He sought a "differentiated" foreign policy freed from the we/they, East/West bipolarity that underlay Henry Kissinger's Realpolitik no less than Dean Acheson's containment and John Foster Dulles' brinkmanship.

The trouble was, de-emphasizing the Soviet-American relationship necessarily meant defusing the Soviet-American rivalry, and just the opposite has happened. The Soviets were angry over the human rights policy, rapid Sino-American rapprochement, the hawkish tone of the Senate SALT debate, the go-ahead for the MX missile, and the decision to deploy new weapons in Europe. Partly because of that anger and partly because of the imperatives of their own national security, the Kremlin rebuffed U.S. attempts at "persuasion." It was as though the old men in the Politburo had decided to teach Carter a lesson in what happens when moralism is pitted against amorality backed up by armor and firepower. Carter was surprised not so much by the invasion of Afghanistan (the National Security Council's Special Coordination Committee, chaired by Brzezinski, had all but predicted the invasion a week in advance); rather, Carter was shocked by the Soviets' duplicity and cynicism in killing their own erstwhile protégé, Hafizullah Amin, branding him a CIA agent, and then claiming that Amin's government had "invited" the invasion.

The Carter Administration will almost certainly continue to pursue human rights, nuclear nonproliferation and curbs on arms sales. But it will now do so, Brzezinski told TIME, "with a more sober realization—which might be salutary—that the Soviets won't be benign partners." Carter's concern with what he has proudly called "global issues" has already been thoroughly institutionalized.

There is a variety of interagency committees in the Executive Branch, backed up by special laws and watchdog Congressmen, to make sure that foreign aid requests are vetted with an eye to whether the recipient country tortures political prisoners or is embarked on its own Manhattan Project.