Thomas S. Blanton

"U.S. Preparations for the Belgrade CSCE Meeting"

This paper begins with the transformation in official U.S. attitudes towards the Helsinki process from the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger dismissal of the human rights provisions, to the embrace of those standards by the incoming Carter administration in January 1977 and onwards to Belgrade.  The paper reviews the Kissinger assurances to Soviet interlocutors leading up to the Final Act that the U.S. would not press human rights concerns, which helps explain the Soviet willingness to sign on to Basket III provisions they intended to ignore.  Jimmy Carter’s campaign explicitly rejected this kind of realpolitik thinking, and within six days of his inauguration, the new stance found public expression in the State Department’s denunciation of Czechoslovak repression of the Charter 77 signers.

This paper attempts to expand the conventional narrative of Carter policymaking beyond the traditional two-sided State Department versus National Security Council, Cyrus Vance versus Zbigniew Brzezinski, dove versus hawk paradigm.  For example, Brzezinski’s influential weekly reports to the President initially reinforced Carter’s own insistence that his public statements and commitments on human rights were "not a matter of anti-Soviet tactics" and should not be linked to policymaking on U.S.-Soviet relations.  But the national security adviser’s weekly advice rapidly changed in a matter of months into welcoming the way human rights statements have "put the Soviet leaders on the defensive" specifically in the context of negotiating arms control.  The State Department’s own response to a May 1977 National Security Council directive seeking a review of human rights policy argued that "our security interests and our human rights concerns both can be accommodated in our relations with the Soviet Union," as long as the approach was consistent and non-polemical.  Neither of those conditions obtained, however.

Preparations for the Belgrade conference dramatically exposed the internal fissures in the Carter Administration.  These divisions originated in the mindset of the President himself, who sought multiple goals vis a vis the Soviet Union which were not necessarily mutually exclusive but rapidly became so because of miscalculation by Washington, overreaction by Moscow, and in effect, inconstancy and polemics on both sides.  The documents show, for example, that staffers in the White House Counsel’s office (rarely a location for foreign policy decisionmaking) roundly criticized State’s failure to make diplomatic demarches in dissidents’ cases, and strongly influenced the surprise appointment – initiated by Brzezinski – of former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg to head the Belgrade delegation, supplanting the career diplomat, Albert Sherer, who had handled the preparatory meetings.  The Brzezinski weekly reports provide a rich portrait of the administration’s diverse and often divergent approaches, including the administration’s rationale for handling the CSCE followup through the European Community rather than through NATO; while declassified State Department cables and internal White House memos provide new detail about Goldberg’s own frustration at his instructions, which emphasized maintaining unity among the allies over, for example, achieving a robust final declaration at Belgrade.

The Carter Administration’s U.S.-Soviet security achievements, in retrospect, were negligible or worse, with the failure of the SALT II treaty ratification and the ultimate Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.  While Carter had reduced the previous centrality of U.S.-Soviet relations in American foreign policy, he still sought major arms control including significant reductions in nuclear weapons, and failed to achieve them.  In major part this was because of the unilateral proposals put forward in the miscalculated March 1977 Vance mission to Moscow, the degree to which this was taken as personal insult by Soviet leaders (especially Brezhnev) and unwisely on their part completely rejected, and the compounded public and media attention to the Carter Administration human rights polemics, especially at Belgrade.  While a failure in formal terms, the Belgrade conference did succeed in putting human rights in the center of the ongoing Helsinki review process, with long-term effect; and that impact, together with Carter’s forthrightness on human rights issues overall, made him a real hero to dissidents from Buenos Aires to Budapest.  Yet Carter’s failure in the strategic arena left the Soviets feeling they had little to lose by invading Afghanistan, and not only cost him SALT II but arguably the 1980 election as well.

In retrospect, the evidence suggests that Carter might have succeeded in his non-linkage approach, maintaining his strong commitments on human rights while still achieving real progress on arms control and SALT.  But Carter could have done both only if he had been more attuned to the expectations and political needs of the Soviets, especially Leonid Brezhnev, for gradual SALT progress based on earlier Kissinger-negotiated understandings, rather than the more radical reductions proposed by the March 1977 Vance mission to Moscow.  Such progress was the top Soviet priority, and they were apparently willing to be quite flexible on human rights issues as long as the U.S. was partnering on SALT.  The numbers for Jewish immigration from the USSR, for example, track almost precisely with SALT progress, peaking at the time of the Vienna summit in 1979, and not with U.S. human rights pressure or Belgrade speeches.  In this failure, Brzezinski played a key role, exacerbating Carter’s sense of disappointment and growing anger at the Soviets, and gradually undermining the President’s own goal of parallel tracks for human rights and for U.S.-Soviet arms reductions.  By 1980, when the failure of U.S. policy was evident, Brzezinski disingenuously blamed it on the State Department, writing Carter on May 1, 1980 that "The so-called zig-zags in our past policies have been more apparent than real and have been exaggerated by the absence of a strong public voice by the Secretary [Cy Vance] and by leaks and a lack of discipline in the State Department ranks."

Note on sources:

A host of new primary sources have become available in the past few years from the previously secret files of the Carter Administration, as the 25-year-rule first implemented by President Clinton in 1995 began to apply to Carter White House records.  Even with large backlogs in archival processing – so that many pages that are officially declassified still have not been organized into boxes and accessioned for researchers – still the new documentation adds extensive detail and context to the rich memoir literature and other public sources on Carter Administration policy-making, U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1970s, the Helsinki process, and the Belgrade review conference.  The new evidence builds on the large body of primary sources amassed during the 1990s by the "Carter-Brezhnev Project" series of "critical oral history" conferences with veterans and eyewitnesses, which produced a series of documentary briefing books compiled through Freedom of Information Act requests, archival sleuthing, official Russian government declassification, and the donation of personal papers by former officials.  This paper particularly relies on the series of weekly reports to President Carter initiated by national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the various NSC memos and agency responses in the 1977 review processes that led to Presidential Directive 18 on the strategic balance (August 1977) and Presidential Directive 21 on policy towards Eastern Europe (September 1977), CIA analyses of dissent and official response in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, State Department cables reporting from Belgrade, and White House Counsel’s office memos detailing the internal bureaucratic infighting within the State Department and between State and the White House staff.