US-Soviet arms talks collapse

At the moment, I can't remember a recent move in American foreign policy that has caused less of a rumpus and more of a puzzle than the plan President Carter delivered to the Russians for limited strategic arms. To say that the talks collapsed before they started is exactly true.

The most interesting, the oddest reaction in Congress and in the newspapers is that almost everybody praises President Carter for his unrepentant scolding of the Russians about their denial of human rights. Even the big Russian policy experts – I mean Americans and refugee experts – wondered quietly the other night whether or not Mr Carter's scolding had offended the Russians enough to make them turn their backs on practically any foreign policy proposals coming from Washington. Slowly, however, the consensus in Washington is coming round to the feeling that Mr Carter's upbraiding of the Russians had everything to do with their sending Secretary of State Vance packing from Moscow. 

A letter writer to the New York Times put the view in its sharpest form. He says, 'Our foreign policy is now being conducted by dilettantes who arrogate to themselves the right to demand that other countries observe principles of human rights which the founding fathers wrote into our constitution but which, to this day, have not been too successfully observed by ourselves. 

'How can anyone,' he goes on, 'how can anyone in this administration expect the present Soviet leadership to accept humbly and silently the tongue-lashing given them by the President of the United States in connection with the way the dissidents are being treated and immediately thereafter sit down with his emissaries and conclude a pact leading to mutual disarmament? This country has, in the past, been reproached for military imperialism and economic imperialism. It seems that we have now entered a phase which could be called "moral" imperialism.' 

Well, it's the same point I quoted a month or two ago when the president announced that he would, in this administration, strictly apply the so-called 'Sunshine' laws to Americans doing business overseas. The Sunshine laws require open publication of who is selling what to whom and who is getting a cut, if any, on the side. The president was provoked to say this after we'd had a rash of scandals about big corporations paying bribes to middle men in export sales. 

There was a time, just before the Second World War, when the United States was practically self-sufficient. Only when America got into that war did we realise that we lacked, for instance, natural rubber. So, it was a typically American response to get busy immediately and make synthetic rubber. But apart from that big scare, there was precious little we needed to import for war purposes except, as I recall, tungsten and molybdenum. 

But times have drastically changed. Now, the United States has its own balance of payments problem. Now, to the astonishment of anybody over 50, the United States finds that several of her own prosperous industries are being badly threatened by huge imports from countries we never used to think of as industrial giants, Japan and Italy, for instance. The Italians came in, oh I don't know, 15, 20 years ago with excellent women's shoes made for a fraction of the price of American-made shoes. And for the past decade, certainly, a town in Massachusetts which boasted that it was the shoe capital of the world has been in a depression very little better than that of the 1930s. And now there's a strong move in Congress to ask for tariffs on Japanese cars and television sets and the other electronic gadgets at which they're so accomplished. 

So since January something has been dawning on us that we never expected to see again, decidedly not during a Democratic administration, the tariff. The protective tariffs of the 1920s were always looked on by the Democrats as the most senseless of Republican crimes. The Democrats have always been free traders and nobody thundered against what he called the 'horse and buggy' traders and the 'economic royalists' more than Franklin Roosevelt. Now, however, we hear about tariffs as a sad, but necessary, protection for the American industries that are wilting before foreign competition. Just as we were hearing this unfamiliar sound from the president, he was also, in the view of the business world, putting shackles on American exporters by warning them that they would have to practise a code of conduct in selling abroad morally superior to that of their competitors in Europe and Asia. 

Well, the approaching problem, as I then put it, was how to export American morals and yet preserve our bargaining position in foreign trade. Now the question is how to stand up for human rights and yet preserve a world in which any humans will be left standing up at all. The last, the Ford, administration may not have been braver, but was more tactful. Mr Kissinger obliquely reflected the Ford administration's view of the Russian dissidents by saying flatly, 'the greatest moral imperative of our time is to keep the peace'. 

Maybe bravery and tact can never go hand in hand but after Secretary of State Vance came home to lick his wounds, or perhaps only to prepare some new American position papers, there's been a rising feeling that President Carter blundered in two ways. First, by speaking out so volubly about human rights just before the SALT talks were to begin and secondly, by getting out a plan which crossed the t's and dotted the i's much too soon on an American plan. In other words, what he proposed were severe limitations on the Russians, not quite such severe on the Americans which is, in usual diplomacy, the sort of neat package you suggest in private as a basis for bargaining, not as an accomplished fact which you had better accept, or else. The Russians are the last people on earth to accept psychologically the 'or else' approach. 

There's an American diplomat who served as an ambassador to the Soviet Union. He's a Democrat. He's spent his life as a student of Russian history and diplomacy and he is, just now, the strongest critic of the Carter administration not... not on the grounds that its motives are in doubt. In fact he's prepared to grant that this is the first administration in the past 30 years that is not trying to freeze the nuclear arms that may be manufactured next year or the year after, but actually hoping to cut back on our present stockpiles. 

And I might as well remind you at this point that from... from your point of view and mine, sitting back in bewilderment before all the knotty talk about Backfires and Cruise missiles and multiple warheads and the rest, to us there is the stark, massive fact and, at the least, of Secretary Vance's proposals asked both sides to cut back to 1,800 nuclear missiles each. When you remember that the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now called in the grim trade 'firecrackers', being absurdly ineffective by present lethal standards, a stockpile of 1,800 missiles each is about 50 times as much as either nation would need to blast each other's population, and most other populations, into cinders. 

Well, I was saying, this old American diplomat says the two blunders were, first, to preach in public about morals to the Soviets before we sat down to the talks, secondly to publicise ahead of time what amount to the final American proposals, the package we should like the Russians to agree to in the end. 

Now the second blunder, if it is a blunder, sends us back vividly in memory to the kind of blunder that was luckily avoided at the last minute during that frightful weekend in 1962 when Mr Khrushchev was sending cargoes towards Cuba to reinforce the missile launching sites he'd planted there and when President Kennedy and his advisers were meeting night and day wondering whether to risk a nuclear war by bombing the missile sites before the new shipments arrived. It was, as anybody alive and sentient at the time well remembers, the most touchy crisis we've lived through since the Second War – a weekend when it appeared quite possible that, like the governments of Europe in 1914, we should drift into a cataclysm. But, in 1962, a final one. 

I think we have to thank, more than anyone else, the late Robert Kennedy for the human ploy that saved us. Twenty-four hours before the Russian ships were due to arrive in Cuba, the White House received a ranting, terrifying message from Mr Khrushchev breathing fire and smoke and total defiance. The instinct of any proud president was to match defiance with defiance. Bobby Kennedy proposed that they send no answer but send a reasonable, quiet answer to Mr K's previous, reasonable message having to do with America's withdrawing her missiles from Turkey. 

In other words, the White House pretended they'd never had the ranting message. Mr Khrushchev was simply but firmly told that he ran the risk of naval warfare if the Russian ships approached the Cuban shore. And it's not fanciful to guess that Mr Khrushchev thought better next morning of his roaring message, wished it had never gone off and was mightily relieved that the Americans chose to ignore it. To the second message, he gave the most explicit reply in action. The Russian ships turned back. 

To put it simply, as a principle of diplomacy, never leave your adversary with egg on his face. Always leave him a dignified way out. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the SALT conflict in Moscow, there seems little doubt that by the time Mr Vance arrived there to sit down and talk, the Russians were offended on two counts. They had been morally condemned by the American visitor and they were being asked to sign a fait accompli before discussion. They were too proud to do either and told Mr Vance to go home. 

Whatever else the Carter administration has not learned, I imagine it is now aware that the Russians are superb chess players and very proud people who must be worked on slowly, with infinite tact, as equals and not treated as defeated generals summoned to a railway carriage to sign articles of surrender.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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