Abstract
Scholars continue to debate the goals and efficacy of the US President Jimmy Carter's human rights campaign. In A Precarious Equilibrium, Umberto Tulli rejects arguments that Carter embraced human rights to build a ‘post-Cold War’ foreign policy that placed more emphasis on addressing global problems than confronting the Soviet Union. To Tulli, Carter never really stopped waging the Cold War; instead, he exploited the issue of human rights to engage in more effective ideological competition with the USSR. Readers looking for a nuanced and informative study will not be disappointed. Utilizing a wide array of archival research, Tulli recounts Carter's efforts to promote human rights in the Soviet Union, which intersected with détente. While such arguments are not as novel as Tulli suggests, A Precarious Equilibrium still makes an important contribution to explaining how Carter waged the Cold War.
Hoping to avoid the pitfalls of a narrow focus on government relations, Tulli adopts an ‘intermestic’ framework, which reveals how U.S. domestic politics and congressional opinion shaped the Carter administration's behaviour; it also shows how the vicissitudes of détente influenced domestic politics. This ‘intermestic’ perspective suggests that Carter pursued a ‘double process of negotiations’ hoping that human rights promotion in the USSR would shield détente from domestic critics and then lead the Soviets to reduce internal repression – all in ways that enhanced superpower cooperation in areas like arms control (p. 5 and p. 194–195). Instead of fixating on policymakers’ behaviour, Tulli also examines the role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private citizens played in shaping the administration's effort to challenge Soviet internal repression.
Illustrating this ‘intermestic’ framework and the influence of private citizens, Tulli shows how during the Nixon and Ford administrations, Congress helped to replace the discredited paradigm of Cold War liberalism with human rights promotion. This shift allowed liberals to critique right-wing authoritarian regimes, and conservatives to highlight communist regimes’ violations. He also revisits how dissenters in the Soviet Bloc, Western NGOs, and the U.S. Helsinki Commission combined to challenge Soviet human rights violations. Like others have explored previously Tulli recounts the diverse reasons why Carter decided to identify himself with human rights during the 1976 Presidential Campaign, including his desire to unify conservatives and liberals in the Democratic Party around a common cause.
A Precarious Equilibrium continues by describing the important role that the National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski played in shaping Carter's views on human rights and détente. More impactful than Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Brzezinski endorsed implementing a ‘dynamic’ or ‘more reciprocal’ conception of détente that balanced human rights promotion and cooperative pursuits (p. 67). In practice, Carter took calibrated steps to implement this dynamic conception of détente. He challenged Soviet human rights violations in numerous public forums, held a private meeting with the freed Soviet political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky, and placed penalties on the Soviets for convicting several well-known dissidents such as Yuri Orlov in mid-1978. Responding to pressure from private citizens and the US Helsinki Commission, US representatives raised the subject of Soviet human rights violations during the Final Act follow-up meeting in Belgrade (October 1977 to March 1978).
Unhappiness with the Carter administration's efforts to build a more dynamic détente with the Soviets grew throughout 1978. Critics on the left chided Carter for paying more attention to human rights violations in communist countries than right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aligned with the United States. On the right, conservatives accused Carter of weakness when he spoke less about Soviet internal repression in public in the fall of 1978 to facilitate the completion of a SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) II treaty and reward Moscow for increasing Soviet Jewish emigration levels. In conservatives’ views, Carter had censored himself in deference to Soviet critiques of his human rights campaign – a criticism lobbied after his high-profile exchange of Soviet dissidents for convicted Soviet spies in 1979. Conservatives also pointed to Carter's weakness in responding to communist aggression in the Horn of Africa and the cancellation of neutron bomb construction. Tulli aptly summarizes the inherent contradiction – or the precarious equilibrium – of Carter's ‘double process of negotiations’ when he observes that the more Carter raised the subject of Soviet human rights abuses, the more Moscow grew wary of détente. The more the administration used quiet diplomacy to promote human rights, the more it invited accusations of weakness and undermined domestic support for pursuing détente (p. 196).
While A Precarious Equilibrium will help readers better understand how Carter waged the Cold War, it has some limitations. Whether intentionally or not, Tulli never fully acknowledges the diversity of existing scholarship on Carter's efforts to promote human rights in the Soviet Union, nor does he mention that authors like Olav Njølstad, Robert Gates and others both defend Carter's credentials as a tough Cold Warrior and outline how his administration exploited the issue of human rights (within the Final Act's provisions) to compete with the Soviet Union ideologically. Additionally, Tulli omits other aspects of the Carter administration's efforts to promote human rights in the USSR. For example, Carter attended church with the recently exchanged Soviet political prisoner Georgi Vins in April 1979. Carter officials also took a wide variety of steps to enhance the international credibility of US human rights criticisms, including supporting the US Helsinki Commission's publication of reports about US compliance with international human rights standards. Concurrently, Carter also signed and then sought the ratification of human rights instruments like the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights.
Some might also question Tulli's assertion that the Carter administration's efforts to promote human rights in the USSR became a ‘mere propaganda effort’ after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan torpedoed détente (p. 179). More to the point, some might wonder: is taking steps to publicize Soviet human rights violations and nationality problems without working for calibrated cooperation just a propaganda exercise? Or is such behaviour a proper and necessary way of engaging in effective ideological competition with a determined Cold War competitor? From another angle, if he had won reelection, Carter might very well have resubmitted SALT II for ratification after tensions cooled and then returned to something resembling the dynamic approach to détente of his first term. Whatever one makes of his ‘mere propaganda’ charge, Tulli deserves credit for explaining how the Carter administration helped institutionalize human rights in the conduct of US foreign policy. His account will also help readers better appreciate the inherent difficulties of balancing realism and idealism when conducting relations with a foreign rival.