Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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September 1979 may well go down in diplomatic history as the month that the U.S. Government went a little bit haywire. Both the Executive and Legislative branches have overreacted to the belated discovery of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba and have severely jeopardized rational consideration of the SALT II treaty. The events of the past four weeks provide a case study in the breakdown of constitutional process whereby the Administration and Congress are supposed to be partners in statesmanship...
...intelligence community, finally recovered from its obsession with Cuba of the 1960s, had recently consigned the island to its peripheral vision and focused instead on what seemed more important tasks, like monitoring the tests of new Soviet intercontinental missiles. Then, re-examining evidence that it had been sitting on for a long time, the CIA changed its opinion about the exact nature of Soviet military manpower in Cuba...
What upset the intelligence analysts was not that they had exposed some new and perfidious Soviet menace but that they had failed to notice a brigade that had been there for years. What upset the Carter Administration was not the intelligence failure but an acute political problem. Vance had inadvertently misled the Senate...
...Howard Baker to ingratiate himself with the Republican right, the Administration would give a senatorial ally, Idaho's Frank Church, a sneak preview of the information and thus offer him an opportunity to go public with it. That way, he might be a principal arbiter of an acceptable Soviet explanation for the brigade. But Church, facing tough conservative opposition to his reelection next year, panicked. The Senate would not ratify SALT, he proclaimed, until the Soviet brigade had been removed...
...will the Soviets oblige. They are notoriously loath to let U.S. Senators beat them with sticks, no matter what the carrots. In 1974 the Kremlin made clear that it would rather live without most-favored-nation status than submit to "Scoop" Jackson's condition of increased emigration of Jews. Soviet sensitivities are a matter not only of international pride but also of intramural Kremlin politics. Nikita Khrushchev lost his job partly because the Kennedy Administration forced him to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba...