Breck Walker

"Neither Shy nor Demagogic – The Carter Administration Goes to Belgrade"

The very limited historiography on the Carter administration’s approach to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe review meeting in Belgrade has been generally focused on the very influential roles of the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the head of the American delegation, Ambassador Arthur Goldberg. The fervent activism of both certainly shaped in meaningful ways the objectives and tactics adopted. What has received less attention is the centrality of the CSCE to Carter’s early and provocative initiatives on human rights in the Soviet bloc as well as the contingencies surrounding the evolving perspectives on Belgrade in the highest levels of the administration. In the end, the Belgrade review meeting came to serve as the initial primary conduit for Carter’s moral fervor directed at the Soviet bloc, as the common ground forged, however briefly, between Secretary of State Vance and National Security Adviser Brzezinski on Soviet policy, as an intended brake on Congressional inclinations to be more legislatively assertive on human rights issues, as a means of accommodating various domestic political constituencies, and, not least, as one tactic among many to ensure that the administration’s highest diplomatic priority, a successfully negotiated and ratified SALT II treaty, was not derailed.