Word: eastern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While the Western leaders easily reached agreement on the defense program, they sidestepped another serious problem: the hostility between NATO members Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. One senior diplomat called the schism "a serious menace to NATO'S eastern flank, perhaps even to the alliance's future. It is a terrible wound." Making it even worse, in NATO'S eyes, is Congress's 1974 embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Turkey, which used weapons provided by the U.S. in Cyprus...
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...
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...
Brzezinski and other U.S. policymakers are acutely aware of the danger that the Soviets might react swiftly and brutally, as they did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, if their control were to be seriously subverted in Eastern Europe. But at the same time, the Soviet Union is finding it harder than ever to meet its satellites' need for better living standards. The U.S. policy is predicated on the belief that Moscow is more afraid of riots by Polish workers over low wages and high food prices than of Brzezinski's "mischiefmaking" in Poland, and therefore the Kremlin...