For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War by Melvyn P. Leffler

Author:Melvyn P. Leffler [Leffler, Melvyn P.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2008-09-01T22:00:00+00:00

Iranians marching U.S. hostages, 1979. The hostage crisis highlighted U.S. vulnerabilities.

The American people rallied behind their president but yearned for bolder leadership. Hamilton Jordan was taken aback when his twelve-year-old nephew told him that his “friends at school say that Jimmy Carter doesn’t have the guts to do anything.” Carter knew what people were thinking. If “I asked the people of Plains [his hometown] what I should do, every last one of them would say, ‘Bomb Iran!’”310

Yet Carter appealed for calm. He asked Americans not to mistreat Iranians residing in the United States and to reduce oil consumption. When taunted at a news conference—Khomeini “doesn’t believe you have the guts to use military force”—Carter responded with restraint. All options were open, he said, but he preferred to resolve the crisis peacefully. Americans had learned in Vietnam, he said on 13 December, “that to become unnecessarily involved in the internal affairs of another country when our own security is not directly threatened is a serious mistake.”311 But he did not rule out the use of force.

Brzezinski and Brown prodded him to explore military options. Brzezinski was not so worried about the hostages as about the erosion of America’s position in the Persian Gulf. “I recommended a number of steps designed to enhance our security presence in the region and to place greater pressure on Iran, including the possibility of assisting efforts to unseat Khomeini.”312 On the bottom of one of Brzezinski’s memos, Carter wrote that his advisers should consider everything “that Khomeini would not want to see occur and which would not incite condemnation of U.S. by other nations.”313

The president was sorely tempted to take action, yet he was a man of tenacious self-discipline, and he wanted détente to survive. He held his fire and waited. He was still hoping to welcome Brezhnev to Washington after SALT II was ratified.314

Carter expected the Kremlin to share his priorities and show equal self-restraint. He was wrong. Brezhnev and his colleagues were eager to capitalize on America’s distress both in Central America and in the Persian Gulf. Brezhnev sent a telegram to the new Sandinista government in Managua congratulating the leadership on its heroic victory. On 8 August, an Aeroflot IL-76 landed in Nicaragua with medical supplies and baby food donated by Soviet trade unions.315 In an emblematic speech on 18 September, Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin’s leading ideologue, endorsed SALT, embraced peace, and heralded the “defeat of imperialist and neocolonialist forces” in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Kampuchea, and Nicaragua. “In the midst of the complex processes of world development one can distinctly see the chief trend of the modern era—the growth of [socialism]…and the steady development of revolutionary processes in the world.”316

But decolonization, revolutionary nationalism, and capitalist disorder bred danger as well as opportunity. Vigilance was a hallmark of Marxism-Leninism, and Soviet leaders never ceased reminding one another that they must be vigilant.317 The insurgency in Afghanistan made them wary. The truculence, incompetence, and undependability of their new comrades in Kabul heightened their sense of threat.

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