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Soviet strategy has been, and will probably continue to be, brazen and brutal. But it has not been, and probably will not be, reckless. In picking their targets, the Kremlin leaders chose nations that the U.S. had somehow denied as outside its area of national interest. Congress did so explicitly in the case of Angola in 1975; the Carter Administration did much the same with Ethiopia; poor Afghanistan was effectively conceded to eventual Soviet domination as far back as the '50s, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles left it sandwiched between the U.S.S.R. and the now defunct Central Treaty Organization.
Détente needs to be redefined and rebuilt.
While the Soviet military challenge has to be met with better military deterrence, the broader, longer-range Western response must be political as well. Soviet expansion has been made possible by an increased military capacity, but it is also the result of a breakdown in the relationship known as détente. As a political slogan, détente is discredited—probably forever. One problem was that it fostered unrealistic expectations, even euphoria, about the possibilities for Soviet-American friendship. But as a concept, détente has indisputable validity. The word means nothing more controversial than the reduction of tensions between nations in order to reduce the danger of war. Each superpower may have the penultimate goal of defeating the other, but the shared, ultimate goal of both is to survive. (French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, from whose language détente was borrowed, has proposed "stability" as an alternative.) détente also implies that the U.S. and its allies can use their economic leverage. Because of the inherent weakness of the Soviet economy, the West can offer deals to induce restraint and, where possible, cooperation by the U.S.S.R. détente worked between 1969 and 1973, producing modest but tangible results in trade, arms control and emigration from the U.S.S.R. and occasionally some political accommodation as well. One small example: in 1972 the Kremlin leaders did not cancel a summit meeting with Richard Nixon, even though he had just ordered bombing raids on Haiphong harbor in which Soviet ships were damaged. Soviet intentions then were no more benign and altruistic than they are now. But the Kremlin was willing to play by a few limited rules in order to get American grain, technology and financial credits.
The beginning of the end for détente came in 1974, when Democratic Senator Henry Jackson of Washington championed legislation making freer Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R. a precondition for tariff concessions on Soviet exports to the U.S.
The Kremlin leaders complained, with justification, that this heavyhanded attempt to link economic rewards with exit visas constituted interference in their internal affairs. This kind of explicit, narrowly defined "linkage" tends always to stiffen Soviet backs. Linkage must be an underlying factor in the calculations on both sides rather than a stark equation by itself, such as the formula that freer emigration would equal freer trade, or that a Soviet pullout from Afghanistan would equal ratification of SALT.
In other words, both carrots and sticks are necessary in dealing with