Protection of human rights became one of the major foreign
policy goals of the next U.S. president, Jimmy Carter
(b. 1924). Ironically, just at the point when U.S. involve
Protection of human rights became one of the major foreign
policy goals of the next U.S. president, Jimmy Carter
(b. 1924). Ironically, just at the point when U.S. involvement
in Vietnam came to an end and relations with
China began to improve, the mood in U.S.-Soviet relations
began to sour, for several reasons.
Some Americans had become increasingly concerned
about aggressive new tendencies in Soviet foreign policy.
The first indication came in Africa. Soviet influence was
on the rise in Somalia, across the Red Sea in South
Yemen, and later in Ethiopia. Soviet involvement was
also on the increase in southern Africa, where an insurgent
movement supported by Cuban troops came to
power in Angola, once a colony of Portugal. Then, in
1979, Soviet troops were sent to neighboring Afghanistan
to protect a newly installed Marxist regime facing
rising internal resistance from fundamentalist Muslims.
Some observers suspected that the Soviet advance into
hitherto neutral Afghanistan was to extend Soviet power
into the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. To deter such a possibility,
the White House promulgated the Carter Doctrine,
which stated that the United States would use its
military power, if necessary, to safeguard Western access
to the oil reserves in the Middle East. In fact, sources in
Moscow later disclosed that the Soviet advance into Afghanistan
had little to do with a strategic drive toward
the Persian Gulf but represented an effort to take advantage
of the recent disarray in U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath
of defeat in Vietnam to increase Soviet influence
in a sensitive region increasingly beset with Islamic fervor.
Soviet officials feared that the wave of Islamic activism
could spread to the Muslim populations in the Soviet
republics in central Asia and were confident that the
United States was too distracted by the “Vietnam syndrome”
(the public fear of U.S. involvement in another
Vietnam-type conflict) to respond.
Other factors contributed to the growing suspicion of
the Soviet Union in the United States. During the era of
détente, Washington officials had assumed that Moscow
accepted the U.S. doctrine of equivalence—the idea
that both sides possessed sufficient strength to destroy the
other in the event of a surprise attack. By the end of the
decade, however, some U.S. defense analysts began to
charge that the Soviets were seeking strategic superiority
in nuclear weapons and argued for a substantial increase
in U.S. defense spending. Such charges, combined with
evidence of Soviet efforts in Africa and the Middle East
and reports of the persecution of Jews and dissidents
in the Soviet Union, helped undermine public support
for détente in the United States. These changing attitudes
were reflected in the failure of the Carter administration
to obtain congressional approval of a new arms
limitation agreement (SALT II) signed with the Soviet
Union in 1979.
World History
