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.

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 protege, 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.

But those criteria will be given less priority now, at least in countries directly threatened by the Soviet Union or indirectly by its proxies. As it moves to shore up relations with nations around the arc of crisis, from radical Libya to reactionary Saudi Arabia, the Carter Administration is being less fastidious about the humanitarian virtues of the various regimes than it would have been before the Afghan crisis. A month ago, for example, Pakistan was a triple target for American pressure: the U.S. was working to thwart the country's nuclear aspirations, goading the military government to restore democracy, and withholding military supplies. Now U.S. policymakers look at Pakistan as a vital and vulnerable piece on the strategic chessboard, and they are muting their civics lectures and reversing their arms-sale policy accordingly.

Pakistan is also an example of the danger that the pendulum could swing too far in the other direction. The U.S. could throw itself foursquare behind the military rule of President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq just before Zia came tumbling down--another client-dictator the U.S. would then have "lost."

Carter seems aware of that danger and determined to avoid it. "He's always been stubborn in his convictions," says a close adviser, "and in the past few weeks he's acquired a new one, that the Russians will use raw power anywhere they think they can get away with it. But he's still got his old convictions, too, and he's not going to abandon them."

The President now faces two tasks: first, he must figure out how to convince the Soviets--presumably not by friendly persuasion but not by going to war either --that they can't get away with invasions. And second, he must reconcile his conversion to a belief in the pre-eminence of geopolitics with his old, still strongly held belief in the importance of global issues and abstract principles. But already his Administration has had to revise, if not reverse, its course in a number of key respects. As a consequence of the increase in East-West tensions, the world is farther than ever from the objective of disarmament that Carter proclaimed in his Inaugural Address. With Harold Brown's statements in China last week about Sino-American common interests in countering Soviet expansionism, the Administration abandoned the last pretense of the "evenhandedness" it promised in its policies toward Moscow and Peking. Far from playing down the Soviet-American relationship, Carter and his advisers today are more preoccupied with the problem of how to deal with the Russians than any American leaders since the Cuban missile crisis. And Carter may, for some time to come, use maps when he addresses his countrymen on the world.

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