While taking an increasingly hard line with the Soviet Union, the Carter Administration has simultaneously—and for the most part quietly—been seeking For some time to improve relations with the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. The U.S. objective is to encourage political liberalization and relative independence inside the East bloc. Part of the reason for actively pursuing that goal is Washington's hope that some day Moscow will find itself with more to worry about close to home, and thus be less inclined to stir up trouble far away, in Africa, for instance.
Jimmy Carter's Republican predecessors also sought to strengthen ties with Eastern Europe, but they did so more cautiously and selectively, and never during a period of unusual tension in U.S.-Soviet relations. Henry Kissinger carefully synchronized his Eastern European diplomacy with the Soviet connection. He was concerned that separate overtures to Eastern Europe might provoke the Kremlin into tightening its control over the region. For that reason, Richard Nixon made the first visit by a U.S. President to Warsaw on the way home from the Moscow summit in 1972, and Gerald Ford stopped in Warsaw en route to a meeting with Leonid Brezhnev in Helsinki in 1975. Even during the halcyon days of détente, this concern in Washington over provoking the Kremlin into moving more harshly against Eastern-Europe prevailed. Yugoslavia, which is Communist but nonaligned, and Rumania, the only Warsaw Pact country with no Soviet troops on its territory, were treated as special cases because of their independent foreign policies.
Zbigniew Brzezinski came into office determined to combine a "more competitive" approach toward the Soviet Union with a "more differentiated" one toward Eastern Europe. As he told TIME: "We wanted to show that the road to Eastern Europe did not necessarily lead through Moscow." A year ago, Brzezinski prepared a classified Presidential Directive setting forth three guidelines for the Executive Branch: 1) the U.S. should cultivate a closer relationship with Eastern Europe for its own sake rather than as a byproduct of detente with the Soviet Union; 2) the criteria for deciding which countries to concentrate on should include how much they have relaxed their internal rules as well as how far they have strayed from the U.S.S.R. in their foreign policy; and 3) the Administration should maintain regular contacts with representatives of the "loyal opposition" in Eastern Europe—liberal intellectuals, artists and church leaders—as well as with government officials.