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. 19 Steeped in their historical pes-simism, Nixon and Kissinger also badly underestimated the capacityof the United States to recover from the trauma of Vietnam and thewillingness of the American people to sustain a vigorous foreign policywhen forthrightly alerted to danger.The remarkable success of Ronald 108 In Defense of the Bush DoctrineReagan s grand strategy refutes the notion that détente was the best theUnited States could do.Carter s Naive IdealismNo administration before President Clinton s embraced the policy pref-erences and underlying assumptions of the Vietnam War s liberal criticswith such fervor and conviction as President Carter s.20 Especially duringhis first three years in office, Carter, like President Clinton, spurned powerpolitics in favor of a foreign policy based on human rights.He and mostof his major advisors rejected unilateralism and coalitions of the willing infavor of multilateralism and an enhanced role for the United Nations.21There are of course revisionists who argue that President Carter tooka tougher line toward the Soviet Union than his critics recognize.Zbig-niew Brzezinski, Carter s more hawkish national security advisor, makesthis case by stressing a series of measures the administration implementedlate in the president s term of office: his decision to proceed with the MXmissile; his approval in 1979 of military aid for mujahedeen Afghanistan;his imposition in 1980 of a grain embargo on the Soviet Union; his es-tablishment in March 1980 of a Rapid Deployment Force; the issuance ofPresidential Directive (PD) 59 in May 1980, which gave greater emphasisto targeting our nuclear forces at Soviet military installations, industry, andintelligence facilities rather than population centers; and his support for a5.4 percent increase in defense spending for FY 1981.22Brzezinski s line of argument is even less tenable than Kissinger s de-fense of détente.True, Brzezinski himself advocated a more robust policythan his administration usually followed.As Soviet Ambassador Dobryninattests, Carter s support for prominent Soviet dissidents such as AndreiSakharov and Natan Sharansky deeply disturbed the Soviet leadership.Af-ter the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter didindeed display greater firmness toward the Soviet Union than he had dur-ing his previous three years.23 His speech on June 7, 1978, at the U.S.Navalacademy contained some stern rhetoric presaging what Carter did duringhis final year in office.Nevertheless, Jimmy Carter s dovish inclinations largely guided hisforeign policy up until 1980 and after he left office.Carter s actions speaklouder than Brzezinski s words.Almost all his political appointees to the Moral Democratic Realism and the Endgame of the Cold War 109Departments of State and Defense came from the New Politics wing of theDemocratic Party, largely associated with Senator George McGovern.So didAndrew Young, Carter s first ambassador to the UN, and Ted Sorensen, hisnominee (subsequently withdrawn under pressure) to head the CIA.24 Therenowned liberal civil rights lawyer Morris Abram described Cyrus Vance,Carter s secretary of state, as the closest thing to a pacifist the U.S.ever hadas Secretary of State, with the exception of William Jennings Bryan, whoresigned over Woodrow Wilson s policies toward Germany.25 For his chiefadvisor on Soviet affairs, Vance chose Columbia s Professor Marshall Shul-man, one of the most conciliatory and optimistic of Sovietologists.26For his chief arms control negotiator, President Carter chose PaulWarnke, who epitomized the sensibilities of the New Politics wing of theDemocratic Party.Warnke believed that the Soviet Union armed pro-digiously not to subjugate the West, but because the giddy heights ofAmerican defense expenditure gave the Soviet Union no choice but to re-ciprocate.He regarded the arms race as the primary source, not symptom,of a Soviet-American rivalry, which arms control and American unilateralrestraint could alleviate.27 Thus, Warnke wrote in his landmark Apes on aTreadmill, which encapsulated the outlook of a generation of like-mindedarms controllers and liberal multilateralists: We should.try a policy ofrestraint, while calling for matching restraint from the Soviet Union.The chances are good.that highly advertised restraint on our part willbe reciprocated.The Soviet Union, it may be said again, has only one su-perpower model to follow.To date, the superpower aping has meant theantithesis of restraint.It is time for us to present a worthier model.We can be the first off the treadmill. 28President Carter sought, moreover, to transcend what he called in hisMay 1977 speech at Notre Dame University our inordinate fear of commu-nism by conciliating our communist adversaries to a degree even Nixonand Kissinger in their euphoric moments over détente never thought pru-dent
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