U.S.-Soviet Relations: The Long Road Back

American presidents have usually inherited poor relations with the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower, of course, was confronted by the tensions of Korea and President Kennedy by the Berlin crisis. Lyndon Johnson was a temporary exception, but Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam and the Czech crisis. Gerald Ford had to deal with a faltering détente, and Jimmy Carter was embroiled in early disputes. In January 1981, Ronald Reagan found himself in much the same position as his predecessors, except that relations were worse than usual. Indeed, relations were frozen. Even the outgoing Administration was pessimistic. The departing American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Thomas J. Watson, Jr., summed up the prevailing gloom: "I don't think the West has any conception of how dismal the future looks for East-West relations."

The incoming Administration, of course, was not likely to contest this appraisal, though its members analyzed the causes quite differently. They believed that Carter's reaction to the "most brazen imperial drive in history" by the Soviet Union had been too little and too late. The new President immediately set a new tone when he asserted that the Soviets reserved the "right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." Other pronouncements from the new Cabinet secretaries and their minions echoed the President, though not as crisply or dramatically.

The basic Reagan attitude toward the Soviet Union was no surprise: the President himself had enunciated it over many years; he had challenged the Ford presidency over détente, and had campaigned vigorously in 1980 on a strong anti-Soviet platform. Moreover, there was a large body of scholarly and political literature that buttressed and elaborated his general concept of the nature of the Soviet threat, its future direction, and the proper American response.