Centerfield: Carter deserves more credit for end of USSR

November 22, 2003

Carter deserves more credit for end of USSR

I write this post to straighten out the memory of Jimmy Carter's Presidency. I believe he shares equal responsibility for the fall of the Soviet Union with Reagan, and gets far too little credit for what he did.

Conservatives like to give 80% of the credit for the fall of the Soviet Union to Reagan, 19% to Bush I, 1% to the Russian people, and none to any other president. Carter was a useless wimp.

The truth is, Carter did at least as much as Reagan, and we have to give most of the credit to the Russian people, whom by their actions preferred freedom to empire. In fact, in my opinion, Carter was better at war than peace. The end of the Cold War is one of the great episodes in US history, while the Nobel-blessed Egyptian/Israeli peace has proved to be a bit of a devil's bargain. Certainly, I feel that now, his kowtowing to dictators in the name of peace is sad to watch.

My source for *most* of this post is "From the Shadows," by Robert Gates, CIA DCI under Reagan and Bush (now, alas, Texas Aggie-in-Chief). He wrote that Carter has gotten a raw deal from history, in large part because Carter's boldest moves were covert.

According to Brzezinsky in an article in Journal Nouvel it was he, with Carter's approval, who began policies of supporting the Afghan rebels in a big way that would attract Soviet attention before the Soviet invasion, thus triggering Soviet fears and possibly the Soviet invasion six months later to support their puppet.

This put the Soviets into an even worse situation than Vietnam, because their lack of automatic democratic reform made it much harder for them to move on. It was a huge, Vietnam-style defeat for the Soviets, that caused them to have even more questions about the usefulness of their military for anything, and since their empire was based on old-fashioned conquest, all of a sudden the whole thing seemed threatened to them.

Gates noted that the Soviets were reluctant to invade Poland in respose to Solidarity. That was a year or so into their Afghan experience. Were they afraid that the ol' Army of Repression would misfire?

A big secondary reason for credit is the focus on human rights. Although Ford started it by negotiating the Helsinki Treaty, which included human rights guarantees, and which the Soviet bloc signed, it was Carter who went to town on human rights. He spoke loudly about human rights at every opportunity. He funded, encouraged, and continues to encourage, human rights groups both here in the US and in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europs and in dictatorships across the globe. This put fear in Soviet leaders and hope in their citizens, because they knew the leaders' ill deeds were now counted. Such groups in Warsaw Pact countries were leaders in the the rebellions that toppled the Soviet domination, and are now leaders of their own countries.

It was Carter who made human rights a fundamental part of US policy. Ungrateful conservatives now wisely use human rights language all the time now to frame resistance to dictators.

So what was Reagan's contribution? There is no question that SDI did alot to help, because, as Gates put it, among those who believed it would work were not just Reagan's advisers, but the Soviet Politburo as well. Even before a single dollar was spent! I don't think Carter would have initiated SDI - he was pretty conservative on technology.

And, let's face it - Reagan got lucky on his timing. Does anybody believe that Reagan did more to face down the USSR than Truman, Ike, and JFK? But the slow rot was only half done back then.

After reading Gates' book, I don't see where the vast arms buildup helped much. AN arms buildup was needed, of course, and Gates rightly pointed out that one was already going on well before the election. The "hollow military" thing was probably already addressing itself after Ford made the Army all-volunteer. But Gates says the Soviets were mostly spending beyond their means in the Third World. Carter had already engaged the Soviets in the Third World, mostly via covert assistance. Reagan did exactly the same thing - the big difference is that his CIA director was didn't respect Congress, and so everything Reagan did "covertly" leaked.

Again, of course it is the Russian people whom we mostly have to thank for the end of the USSR. They preferred freedom to empire. They worked harder and took took risks far greater than we did to weaken and topple the USSR that they had built. They saw where the future was and acted when the chance arose. And they chose not to reenslave the SSRs, much less the Warsaw Pact nations. Posted by Jon Kay at November 22, 2003 03:11 AM

Comments

I'll give you the funding of Afghan rebels, but that's about it. Carter always did things by half-measure. I don't think the Afghan resistance would have won had not Reagan ratcheted up the pressure.

The credit goes to Truman, for containing Communism in the first place, Reagan, and Pope John Paul II and the Polish people. Poland became a sore in the Warsaw pact. I can't see that the Russian people had much to do with it until the very end, when Yelstin stood up against the coup plotters.

Carter's human rights policy has a number of positive results (and negative, I believe, in Iran) but I don't believe it scared the Russians or prevented them from cracking down on dissidents.

I'll take a look at that book, and it would be interesting to learn more about what happened covertly, but the overt events of the Carter years are nothing to brag about.

Posted by: rickheller at November 22, 2003 04:43 PM

IT was not the Russian People's desire for freedom but the Russian leadership's loss of faith in their system that led to the empire's collapse.

I well remember the Carter years, full of low growth, high interest rates and inflation, and little confidence in our future. According to many elites at the time, America's best years were behind us and Japan, and then Europe would soon pass us economically unless we adopted their more centralized economies.

Carter did little to help this although in fairness, he started the path to deregulating American business, a critically important decision on his part.

Under Reagan, we regained our confidence. That confidence, contrasted to the lack of confidence exibited by Peristroika and Glasnost played a ket role in the Soviets loss of faith.

Posted by: tallan at November 22, 2003 07:28 PM

All of this is a continuum. Carter inherited the low growth, high interest rates, and inflation from Ford (remember "Whip Inflation Now" buttons?), who inherited it from Nixon and the Vietnam War, who in turn inherited it from the "guns and butter" belief of Lyndon Johnson that we could have war and social programs at the same time.

The Russians spent themselves to death on defense, and Afghanistan also contributed, but the real thing that brought them down was the failure of a centrally-planned economy and increased information in the hands of their citizens.

At the end of the Cold War, I had a couple of engineers working for me, both of whom had recently gotten out of Soviet-controlled Armenia. We had a discussion one day about the burgeoning freedom in the USSR, and I said something about people wanting freedom and democracy.

"That's not it," said one of them. "I don't think we really knew what democracy was, and as for freedom... what we wanted was to be able to worship the way we were raised, and we wanted consumer goods like VCRs."

In a nutshell... God and VCRs.

The Carter continuum also led to Osama bin Laden... that pesky law of unintended consequences.

The one thing that I really do credit Reagan and Bush I (and Maggie Thatcher) for is engaging Gorbachev and helping the USSR to a soft landing. I think about what might have been the (very different) result with the current crop in charge...

Posted by: Ducktape at November 23, 2003 05:05 PM

Carter ratcheted up the pressure not just in Afghanistan, but all over the Third World, again, covertly, so nobody knew until Gates wrote his book. Gates claims that the human-rights stuff did make Communist leaders nervous, because now they felt their legitimacy was under attack.

I do think that Truman and all the Cold War presidents except for Nixon (that in a later post) share alot of credit for keeping the USSR contained.

I grant that Carter was on the wimpy side as presidents go. But I do think his Administration was part of the healing process after Watergate, Spiro Agnew, Cambodia, and the long failure to end Vietnam. Reagan could never have been elected in 1976; at that point, the electorate needed a man it could trust, even to the point of having some hairshirt impulses.

The economy sucked mostly because Nixon had shredded it to make the economy roar best in 1972, doing things like have the government buying a vast excess of toilet paper and other supplies (possibly including cheese?? remember the big cheese giveaway?), imposing energy price controls and rationing that created gas shortages for years after, and persuading the Fed chairman to lower interest rates at a time that let inflation out of control and created the infamous stagflation. It didn't help that Ford, who was mostly honest and clueful about capitalism, nonetheless kept on rationing gas. And, of course, OPEC imposed its '73 embargo just before Ford came in. Admittedly, Carter wanted to limit imported oil, and Congress wouldn't let him; still, this was less unclueful than the preceding Republican administrations, who were filled with people who did claim to be for letting the economy do its own thing.

Posted by: Jon Kay at November 23, 2003 06:13 PM

Carter was probably the nicest man ever to be president in the modern age. Shame that the presidency doesn't particularly need nice guys. He did manage some good things in foreign affairs. Economically, he was "challenged." Not that it was easy to for anyone to look good facing the economic hangover from Vietnam and the Johnson/Nixon expansions of the federal government.

The SovUnion imploded because it's hell trying to keep and grow an empire using a centrally-planned command economy while trying to keep up with the Joneses on the military front. Imperialism only seems to work when the subject nations have their economies modernized and expanded, not regressed and destroyed. Cuba is a case in point. If your subject nations ALWAYS need subsidies instead of providing more revenue than they absorb, it's time to rethink your plans for world domination!

We can argue about who gets the credit for the collapse of the SU, but all we're really arguing about is the timing. The end result of their expansionism was inevitable--economic collapse.

Posted by: Tully at November 23, 2003 09:52 PM

It's a typical American conceit that allows us to indulge in credit-giving over the USSR's collapse. Sure, give some credit to Carter for supporting Afghan rebels. or to Reagan for showing resolve. Or even to America as a whole for having a better system.

But I agree with whoever pointed it out above: the main reason for the USSR's collapse was that they had a crappy system, an extraordinarily inefficient stiflingly bureaucratic planned economy that couldn't come close to fulfilling the promises it had made and had to resort to demonizing the things it couldn't deliver. When the leaders lost the faith that the people never really had, it simply ground to a halt.

Posted by: bk at November 25, 2003 09:25 AM

Centerfield

A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics

November 22, 2003

Carter deserves more credit for end of USSR