Zbigscam: U.S. Foreign Policy, 1976-80
James A. Nathan
Like movie goers who saw last summer's thriller, Alien, observers of the Carter Administration's foreign policy have been presented with a creature whose inexorable and seemingly inexplicable transmogrifications both amuse and terrify. If those ill-fated astronauts of the film in the year 2039 and some top officials, such as Cyrus Vance, always had the option of abandoning ship, the U.S. public did not. Poll data found in the American mood only a resignation to the worst. The Cold War, so fervently exorcised by part of the Carter foreign policy apparatus for nearly three years, yet so feverishly conjured by others, has resurfaced.
One by one, the means by which the Carter Administration had, at first, wished to turn aside from the Cold War proved vulnerable to the apparent immutability of the Soviet-American contest and the doctrines and commitments which have surrounded that conflict. By the beginning of 1980, the Soviet Union, once placed in an equivalent station with other "global issues," reemerged as the pivotal focus of the Carter Administration. In the wake of the Afghan crisis, an even more expansive series of undertakings was contemplated. Formal overtures were tendered to an embarrassingly coquettish constellation of would-be satrapies. It could not be argued that Oman, Yeman, or Somalia were outposts of liberal values. But the quandary of the Cold War, of aligning with regimes of low repute and military advantage, had, after all, been customary to just about everyone but Carter and some of his younger State Department advisors. Perhaps, after Afghanistan, the reintroduction of personal animus in Soviet-American relations made it easier to yield scruple to necessity.
