Cy vs. Zbig

The struggle between Vance and Brzezinski came to a head in April 1978, when the Soviets and their Cuban proxies dramatically escalated their intervention in Ethiopia. Brzezinski urged a show of force; Vance argued that it was not the right time or place to draw the line. For one thing, contended Vance, the Ethiopian government had asked for Soviet-Cuban assistance in repelling an invasion by Somalia. That made it harder to charge Moscow with aggression.

Vance won that round. To this day Brzezinski believes that if he had prevailed two years ago and the U.S. had stood up to the Kremlin over Ethiopia, the Carter Administration would have impressed congressional hardliners, chastened the Soviet leaders, preserved detente and secured enough support for the ratification of SALT II. Because of that incident and others, Vance's temperamental reluctance to get involved in fights was too broadly interpreted by his critics. They saw him as being soft on Soviet expansionism.

At the end of 1978, Brzezinski stage-managed one of the Administration's boldest strokes, the normalization of relations with China. That development came as a double blow to Vance: first, because he had been off in the Middle East while Brzezinski was sealing the deal with Peking; second, because when he met Andrei Gromyko in Geneva for what was supposed to be the final SALT session, the meeting produced yet another impasse, in part because of Soviet unhappiness over Sino-American normalization.

Vance's partisans felt that Brzezinski had deliberately undercut the Secretary and inadvertently sabotaged SALT. Brzezinski concluded that the Kremlin saw Vance as weak and was toying with him. Although he knew that the Soviets disliked him personally, Brzezinski felt they would be more likely to come to terms with him than with Vance. The White House floated the idea of Brzezinski's undertaking a mission to thrash out SALT and the relationship with the Soviets. Vance drew the line and the idea died.

The invasion of Afghanistan was widely interpreted in Washington as confirming Brzezinski's more sinister view of the Soviets. It could just as well have been seen as confirming Vance's view that with detente on the skids, SALT in limbo and anti-Sovietism resurgent, the Kremlin would figure it had little to lose by invading. Then last month came the clash between the two old rivals over the wisdom of the raid to rescue the hostages--and that ended the struggle.

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