Henry Trofimenko

The overdramatized political and diplomatic reaction of Washington to the military aid which the U.S.S.R. and Cuba have given to Angola and Ethiopia and, in recent times, to the aid which the U.S.S.R. has offered Afghanistan, has been one of the major factors clouding Soviet-American relations in the last few years. Alluding not only to these events but also to the general support and assistance which the Soviet Union and other socialist countries have been giving the Third World movements for national and social liberation, the American press has been claiming for years that while the United States and the Soviet Union seem to have agreed on stabilizing the world situation, the Soviet Union has been destabilizing it by its actions. In point of fact, the charge that the Soviet Union has "broken the rules of détente" in the developing world has been one of the main pretexts used by the Ford and Carter Administrations in domestic debates to try to justify their own abandonment of the policy of détente.