Chapter 150 - Who’s Crying Now?: RFK’s First Year of Foreign Affairs
Above: National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (left); President Robert F. Kennedy (center); and Secretary of State Edmund Muskie (right). Together, these three men would craft American foreign policy at the dawn of the 1980s.
“So many stormy nights
So many wrong or rights
Neither could change their headstrong ways
And in a lover's rage
They turn another page
The fighting is worth the love they save
One love, feeds the fire
One heart, burns desire
I wonder who's crying now?
Two hearts, born to run
Who'll be the lonely one?
I wonder who's crying now?” - “Who’s Crying Now?” by Journey
“Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions, and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue.” - Zbigniew Brzezinski
“Diplomacy, n. is the art of letting somebody else have your way.” - David Frost
At the outset of his administration, President Robert F. Kennedy made foreign affairs one of his top priorities.
Like his elder brother, RFK, it was later said, acted more or less as “his own Secretary of State”. Unlike most commanders in chief, Kennedy was deeply involved in setting his administration’s policy toward other nations on a personal level. With the Cold War heating up once more, how America conducted itself, toward both its allies and its rivals, was more important than it had been in years. The new president favored an active approach, utilizing American soft power to expand US influence and contain the Soviet Union, without sacrificing his commitment to human rights around the globe.
The first region which saw the new Kennedy Doctrine in action was Latin America.
By 1981, US-Latin American relations were at something of a low ebb. Though Jack Kennedy had spent the 1960s cultivating close relationships throughout Central and South America through the Alliance for Progress, his successors - George Romney and George Bush - were decidedly less friendly toward the region. In particular, countries with left-wing or even left-leaning governments were often the target of CIA-backed covert actions and military coups in what came to be known as Operation Condor. This left most Latin Americans feeling once bitten, twice shy. Even President Udall’s attempts at warmer relations - culminating in 1979 with the return of the Panama Canal to Panama - did little to assuage the region’s misgivings. Decades, if not centuries of American meddling in Latin American affairs could not be undone in just a few years. Thus, when Bob Kennedy entered the White House, he took up the task of returning the United States to the status of “good neighbor” to its fellow nations in the Western Hemisphere.
Above: Members of the FMLN (left); soldiers of the Salvadoran government (right).
Ten days before Kennedy’s inauguration, the
Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a leftist political party and guerilla group in El Salvador, currently engaged in a civil war with the Salvadoran government, launched their first major offensive. They swiftly captured most of the Morazán and Chalatenango departments, which remained largely under guerrilla control throughout the rest of the civil war. Insurgents ranged from children to the elderly, both male and female, and most were trained in FMLN camps in the mountains and forests of El Salvador to learn military techniques.
In its effort to defeat the insurgency, the Salvadoran Armed Forces (led by the so-called Revolutionary Government Junta - JRG) carried out a “scorched earth” strategy, and adopted tactics similar to those being employed in neighboring Guatemala by its security forces. These tactics were inspired and adapted from U.S. counterinsurgency strategies used during the Cambodian Conflict. An integral part of the Salvadoran Army's counterinsurgency strategy entailed “draining the sea”, that is, eliminating the insurgency by eradicating its support base in the countryside. The primary target was the civilian population - displacing or killing them in order to remove any possible base of support for the rebels. The concept of “draining the sea” had its basis in a doctrine by Mao Zedong that emphasized that “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” The strategy was effective, but it involved the mass employment of so-called “terror tactics” - bombings, shellings, and occasionally, massacres of civilians.
As if these barbaric tactics, approved by the JRG were not enough for Presidents Udall and Kennedy to rescind US support for their regime, then the ongoing terror campaign against the Catholic church in the country certainly was.
First in March of 1980, Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated while celebrating mass. The perpetrator was later revealed to have been a member of a far-right militia movement that opposed Romero for speaking out against the escalating political violence in his country. Romero would be declared a martyr by Pope Stanislaus and the case for his beatification as a saint swiftly began. Later that year on December 2nd, members of the Salvadoran National Guard were suspected to have raped and murdered four American, Catholic church women (three religious women, or nuns, and a laywoman). These women were on a Catholic relief mission providing food, shelter, transport, medical care, and burial to death squad victims. In 1980 alone, at least 20 religious workers and priests were murdered in El Salvador. Throughout the war, the murders of church figures increased. This proved a bridge too far, especially for the devout President Kennedy.
By killing Church figures, Kennedy claimed, “the military leadership of El Salvador showed just how far its position had hardened in daring to eliminate those it viewed as opponents. They saw the Church as an enemy that went against the military and their rule.”
Kennedy immediately ordered the suspension of “any and all material aid” to the Salvadoran government and placed the country’s regime on the US government’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. This policy was criticized by some conservatives in the United States, such as Kennedy’s 1980 opponent, Ronald Reagan. But even William F. Buckley, himself a devout Catholic, had to admit that the actions of the JRG - “warranted, at the very least, a pronounced pause in support, regardless of their stand against communism in that country”.
Without US backing, the Salvadoran military regime turned increasingly to right-wing nationalist militias and drug cartels for weapons and support. The Salvadoran Civil War ground on for several more years before eventually ending in a ceasefire and negotiated settlement in 1987. This was not, unfortunately, until thousands more Salvadorans (especially civilians) were massacred by state-backed “death squads”. Subsequent elections saw a broadly center-left coalition rise to power in the country. It did not, in fact, fall to totalitarian communism, as some conservatives in the US had predicted. RFK’s realistic approach to idealism had paid off.
El Salvador came to represent the template for relations with Latin America that would last throughout Kennedy’s presidency. Continuing the process that began under Mo Udall, the president continued to withdraw American support for right-wing dictatorships and military juntas throughout Latin America, and instead shifted toward diplomacy and flexing American soft power (cultural influence, financial influence, etc.) to “co-opt” rather than “coerce” support in the region. Kennedy reinvigorated foreign aid to Latin America, mostly in the form of favorable, low-interest loans, which encouraged the various nations’ economic development. He also expressed firm support for the Organization of American States (OAS) and renewed the US’ commitment to meeting that body’s goals:
- To strengthen the peace and security of the continent.
- To promote and consolidate representative democracy, with due respect for the principle of non-intervention.
- To prevent possible causes of difficulties and to ensure the pacific settlement of disputes that may arise among the member states.
- To provide for common action on the part of those states in the event of aggression.
- To seek the solution of political, judicial, and economic problems that may arise among them.
- To promote, by cooperative action, their economic, social, and cultural development.
- To eradicate extreme poverty, which constitutes an obstacle to the full democratic development of the peoples of the hemisphere.
- To achieve an effective limitation of conventional weapons that will make it possible to devote the largest amount of resources to the economic and social development of the member states.
Kennedy’s actions, though far from perfect (and still economically imperialist in the eyes of some), began to repair America’s relationships with her sister republics throughout the Western Hemisphere. The United States’ position in the Cold War world was greatly strengthened as a result.
Above: Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Robert Kennedy’s first national security advisor, speaks at a press conference, explaining the administration’s support for a military-aid package to the Democratic Republic of Iran.
Another region to feel the flex of American diplomatic muscle in 1981 was the Middle East. As it had in Latin America, the Kennedy administration inherited a complex geopolitical situation there.
As it had been since 1948, America’s chief ally in the region (besides NATO member Turkey) was, of course, Israel, a nation for which President Robert Kennedy had always expressed staunch public support. The reasons for this were, of course, many.
For one thing, Israel’s status as a liberal democracy made it (in the eyes of the West) unique in the region. For another, the United States contained a large Jewish diaspora and many devout Christians; both groups were largely Zionist, and supported Israel’s right to exist against opposition from the Arab World. Unfortunately, despite their obvious strength and utility as an ally, Israel was also, from another point of view, a liability for the United States. With the exception of Egypt, who had formally accepted Israel’s sovereignty in the 1975 Walker’s Point Accords, the vast majority of Arab countries still wished to wipe Israel off the map. Because many of these countries (in particular, Saudi Arabia) controlled a vast amount of the world’s petroleum supply, they exercised an influence on the United States and its economy far above their weight class on paper. Both of these facts (Israel’s lack of recognition and OPEC’s influence on American national security) were things that Kennedy aimed to change. There was also the wave of terrorism that followed from the Arab-Israeli conflict, on both sides. This took the form of hostage taking, bombings, and political assassinations, among others.
Above: The Palestinian and Israeli flags (left); Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel (right).
But the conflict between Palestine and Israel was complicated by a myriad of factors.
For one thing, despite the progress made at Walker’s Point, the conflict was far from settled. In 1977, two years after Walker’s Point, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his Labor Party were defeated in parliamentary elections by Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud Party. This was the first election in Israel’s history not to be won by the left, and ended thirty years of Labor dominance in that country. In addition to overhauling the Israeli education system and other domestic reforms, Begin, who began his political career as a “radical Zionist” and member of a paramilitary group, quickly escalated the conflict with Palestine. Though he agreed to abide by the terms of Walker’s Point in turning over the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt (and did so in 1978), he was far less resolute in enacting the section of the Accord calling for Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Indeed, by 1981, in a bid to rally support from his far-right base, Begin appointed Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon to implement a large-scale expansion of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories claimed by Palestinians (in particular, the West Bank), a policy intended to make future territorial concessions in these areas effectively impossible. During his term, dozens of new settlements were built, and the Jewish population in the West Bank and Gaza more than quadrupled.
That same year, Begin’s government officially announced that it was annexing the Golan Heights from Syria. This came just a year after the annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980. Though both annexations were condemned by the UN as illegal under international law, with the United States and her allies largely standing behind Israel, there was little that the rest of the international community could do. Begin and his defense and foreign ministers defended these aggressive actions, claiming that the rise of the Baathist United Arab Republic between Iraq and Syria represented an existential threat to Israel that needed to be put on notice.
An example of this policy - which would come to be called the “Begin Doctrine” - was Operation Babylon. Conducted on June 7th, 1981, this was a surprise airstrike conducted by the Israeli Air Force, which destroyed an unfinished nuclear reactor located about eleven miles southeast of Baghdad, UAR. The Israeli operation came after an airstrike by Iran the year prior, which had targeted (but not destroyed) the same facility. This was part of the ongoing war between the UAR and Iran. The Iranian strike inflicted only minor damage, however, which was swiftly repaired by technicians hired by Saddam Hussein’s government from France. Having received intelligence which claimed that the facility was “only a month or so from going critical”, Begin declared his own strike to be an act of self-defense on Israel’s part. Cynical pundits also pointed out that the attack took place less than three weeks before the legislative elections for the Knesset. Clearly, Begin was hoping for a “rally around the flag” effect heading into what was surely going to be a nail-biter of an election.
The strike killed ten UAR soldiers and one French civilian.
Though the preemptive strike succeeded in setting back the UAR’s hopes of developing a nuclear weapon, it also sparked widespread international criticism, even in the United States. Both the UN Security Council and General Assembly rebuked Israel’s actions on two separate occasions. In the media,
The New York Times wrote: “Israel’s sneak attack… was an inexcusable act of short-sighted aggression.”
The Los Angeles Times went further, calling the attack “state-sponsored terror”.
The Kennedy administration’s response was more muted, with Ed Muskie, the secretary of state, calling the attack “a mistake” and “misguided”. He called for “diplomacy and mutual understanding” in resolving non-proliferation issues, while not condemning the attack outright. The UAR was, after all, a Soviet ally, and thus, not friendly to the United States.
Privately, President Kennedy fumed. He compared the Israelis’ situation to the United States’ own during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which he had firmly rejected the idea of a pre emptive air strike on the missile bases. Bob Kennedy had believed then and still believed now that “sneak attacks” were wrong; they went against everything he believed in.
Though Muskie’s mild rebuke was not exactly a bold stance for the administration to publicly take if it truly wanted peace and international cooperation, Kennedy was concerned about the possibility of alienating Begin, with whom he believed that he would have to work in the future to pursue a more thorough peace agreement with Palestine.
In the end, however, these fears proved unfounded.
In an election that came down to fewer than ten-thousand votes, Begin and Likud were defeated in the 1981 elections by Labor, now led by Shimon Peres. Known for his oratorical brilliance and for being the protege of Israel’s “founding father” - David Ben-Gurion - Peres channeled the Israeli public’s backlash against Begin’s handling of the economy (which was suffering from hyperinflation) and at leaked plans from Begin’s defense ministry that Begin intended for the IDF to invade Lebanon in order to combat Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) strongholds there if elected to another term. Begin never recovered in the polls.
With the social democratic Labor Party back in power with a slim majority and Peres - in Kennedy’s mind, a far more diplomatic partner - as prime minister, there was renewed hope for further development toward a lasting peace. This would take time, however. Kennedy would need to first develop a strong relationship with Peres and with his Palestinian counterpart, the chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat. Of course, because the US did not officially recognize Palestine’s authority, the president could not engage in this relationship building directly, at least, not right away. He would need a surrogate, someone that he trusted, the way that President Bush had trusted Henry Kissinger to open talks with Zhou Enlai’s China.
Above: Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres (left); PLO chairman Yasser Arafat (right).
Kennedy assigned this task - of developing relationships with Peres and Arafat - to his own national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski took to the task at once, conducting his own unique brand of what Kissinger had called “shuttle diplomacy”. Though it was slow going at first, with the PLO especially distrustful of the Americans’ intentions, both Brzezinski and Kennedy remained patient. These initial steps would pay dividends in the years to come.
“Peacemaking is a slow process.” Kennedy later told Ken O’Donnell in a private talk in the Oval Office, the kind he used to have all the time with Jack. “But I’ll fight like Hell to keep us talking.”
…
Meanwhile, throughout 1981, the aforementioned war between Iran and the United Arab Republic continued.
For the first eight months of the year, both sides adopted a decidedly defensive footing (with the exception of the Battle of Dezful - the largest tank battle of the war - in which Iran tried and failed to break the UAR’s siege of several Iranian cities). The Iranians needed more time to reorganize their forces, which were still in disarray after the command reshuffling of 1979-80. During this period, fighting was mostly limited to artillery duels, night raids, and limited skirmishes.
When the initial Arab invasion failed to elicit the immediate capitulation or popular uprising in Tehran that Saddam Hussein had expected (indeed, if anything, the war seemed to make Iranian Prime Minister Ebrahim Yazdi
more popular), the war quickly bogged down into World War I style trench warfare, albeit with tanks and other modern, late 20th-century weapons. Due to the power of anti-tank weapons such as the RPG-7, armored maneuvers by the UAR forces were very costly, and they consequently entrenched their tanks into static positions. The UAR also began firing scud missiles into Dezful and Ahvaz, and used terror bombing to bring the war to the Iranian civilian population. Iran launched dozens of “human wave assaults” as poorly executed counterattacks.
Above: A UAR soldier dons a gas mask in a battlefield trench in the Iran-UAR war, circa 1981.
Fulfilling a pledge he’d made on the campaign trail the year prior, President Kennedy had a bill authorizing financial and military aid to the Democratic Republic of Iran drawn up and submitted to Congress. This proposed aid came in two parts: $200 million in military equipment - mostly spare parts for helicopters, fighter jets and other aircraft that the Iranians already possessed - and a further $5 billion in partially taxpayer-backed, low interest loans from American banks that would enable Iran to deal with the economic damage wrought by the UAR’s invasion. Kennedy sold the aid package on Capitol Hill and to the American public as a fulfillment of the solemn vow laid out in his “Kennedy Doctrine” - to support any nation in the world resisting aggression from communism or from Soviet allies. In a nationally televised address explaining the need to aid Iran in their fight, Kennedy evoked American efforts to aid the British during World War II, and posed the following rhetorical question:
“Will the world be safer if Saddam Hussein and his forces achieve their desired hegemony over the Persian Gulf? Will the people of Iran be able to enjoy the freedoms for which they so courageously fought in their recent revolution if they are subjugated by a sworn ally of the Kremlin? Of course not. A nation, populated by human beings just like you and me, yearning to breathe free, cries out to America for aid. The question before us is this: will we answer their call? The answer: yes we will.”
The address, in which the president came across as both compassionate to the plight of the Iranians and tough as nails, did the trick. The aid package passed through both chambers of Congress with nearly unanimous support. He swiftly signed it. Over the next several years, Iran would use this aid to fight back the UAR invasion. More on that in subsequent updates.
Above: Tourist poster advertising Geneva, Switzerland (left); Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko addresses the UN General Assembly, announcing his support for a summit in Geneva to discuss possible arms-reduction with the United States (right).
On November 30th, 1981, representatives from both the United States and the Soviet Union met at the Hôtel Les Armures in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss another possible treaty for arms-reduction.
Originally scheduled in the dying days of Yuri Andropov’s regime, the Soviet delegation, now taking orders from the New Troika, largely saw the summit as a mere formality. They would attend in the name of keeping up appearances, but make no real effort toward an agreement with the west.
On the American side, President Udall told President-Elect Kennedy during the transition that he “should not get his hopes up for anything meaningful to come out of Geneva”. Kennedy understood. Nevertheless, he believed that, in the name of containing - that is, politically isolating the Soviets - that the US should head to Geneva and make “every reasonable effort to get the Soviets to negotiate”. If Moscow wouldn’t play ball, then Kennedy wanted the world to know that it was the Soviets, not the Americans, who left a possible deal on the table.
With these instructions in hand, US Secretary of State Edmund Muskie - head of the American delegation - departed for Geneva on November 29th from Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. The following morning, Muskie met Andrei Gromyko and his staff at the hotel’s conference center. The pair shook hands and sat across from one another. The mood was predictably gloomy.
Having been a person of considerable stature during his life, Gromyko held an unusual combination of personal characteristics. Some were impressed by his diplomatic skills, while others called Gromyko mundane and boring.
An article written in 1981 in
The Times of London said, “He is one of the most active and efficient members of the Soviet leadership. A man with an excellent memory, a keen intellect and extraordinary endurance… Perhaps Gromyko is the most informed Minister for Foreign affairs in the world.” In general, Gromyko was known for his dour demeanor and cold, humorless personality. Ambassador Charles W. Yost, who worked with Gromyko at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, the UN founding conference, and at the United Nations, recalled that the “humorless” Soviet ambassador “constantly looked as though he was sucking a lemon.” There is a story that Gromyko was leaving a Washington hotel one morning and was asked by a reporter; “Minister Gromyko, did you enjoy your breakfast today?”
His response was “Perhaps.”
Likewise, Muskie was widely considered a more reserved, serious personality as far as American politicians went. Some pundits believed that part of why he’d failed to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 over Lyndon Johnson had been that the latter was simply a bigger, more energetic personality, who seemed to better fit the mood of the party at that time. Nevertheless, Muskie’s sober manner mirrored Gromyko. A reporter, watching the initial meeting between the two elder statesmen later described the encounter as, “like watching two icebergs crash into one another”.
Muskie laid out his and President Kennedy’s proposal - a modest reduction in intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, in exchange for similar reductions by the Soviets in Eastern Europe. This was not at all dissimilar from the reductions laid out in the SALT II treaty by Udall and Andropov. Gromyko pointed out, correctly, that SALT had not been ratified by the US Senate, and questioned why the USSR should trust the Americans’ word that any agreement that they signed would be honored. Muskie replied that President Kennedy had a better relationship with Congress, and more moral authority to get an arms treaty ratified. Gromyko pulled back and conferred quietly with his colleagues in Russian. Muskie waited, hands folded in his lap.
When Gromyko returned to the table, he expressed his colleagues’ doubts about American intentions. He brought up the diplomatic boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, the grain embargo (which had since been lifted by the Kennedy administration), and the Americans’ vocal support for Solidarity in Poland. All of these, Gromyko announced, were seen as “slights” back in the Kremlin.
Muskie countered that these were “reasonable responses” to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, saber-rattling and border conflicts with the People’s Republic of China, and other aggressive acts. He then tried to pivot away from the Soviets’ “whataboutism” and bring the conversation back to the arms reduction. Gromyko acquiesced, but would make no firm promises. This early back and forth set the tone for the entire summit.
After seventeen days, the talks broke down. The Soviets pulled out first.
In the final two days of talks, Muskie began to make a series of “unrealistic” requests, such as for the Soviet military to withdraw immediately from Afghanistan, and to pressure Islamabad to hold “free and fair” elections in Pakistan. Delivered in Muskie’s signature, matter of fact tone, the demands, however unrealistic, came across to media observers as reasonable. Gromyko balked. In turn, he demanded that the Americans end their embargo of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In doing so, he appeared irrational and churlish. Gromyko’s decision to pull out of the talks made the Soviets look both stubborn and weak in the eyes of the world. Though there would be no arms limitation treaty in 1981, both sides
did agree to another summit, to be held in four years’ time - 1985.
That was the summit that would really make a difference.
Next Time on Blue Skies in Camelot: More Foreign Affairs in 1981
en.wikipedia.org
