49. Editorial Note

On September 14, 1978, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid I. Brezhnev wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter on the state of U.S.-Soviet relations. As part of his tour d’horizon of the “specific manifestations of the unsatisfactory state of affairs in our relations,” Brezhnev offered an assessment of the “problem” of the Middle East and of the Carter administration’s role in the Egyptian-Israeli peace process. Brezhnev wrote that the Soviet [Page 194] Union “is prepared, acting together with the US, to play a positive role in the settlement in the Middle East and in securing at last a durable peace there. We both had a good ‘asset’ here—last year’s joint Soviet-American statement. And the line of action charted therein is something that we should go back to. Any other steps, including the ones being taken most recently, do nothing but make the Middle East conflict still more deeply seated without solving its main issues. The fact that the USSR and the US are now practically following different roads in Middle East affairs cannot but have a negative effect both on the situation in that area and on our relations.” An unofficial translation of the Brezhnev’s letter and a Russian-language original version are in the Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Office, Out-side the System File, Box 69, USSR: Brezhnev-Carter Correspondence: 1–12/78.

Rather than provide a specific reply to Brezhnev’s letter, Carter instead dispatched a general message to Brezhnev at the conclusion of the Camp David summit, informing him of the outcome of the summit and the substance of the two documents agreed by the participants, “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East” and “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty Between Egypt and Israel.” The text of Carter’s letter is printed in Foreign Relations, 1977–1980, vol. VI, Soviet Union, Document 149.