Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume XX, Eastern Europe

21. Paper Prepared by William Odom of the National Security Council Staff for the East-West Planning Group¹

Washington, undated

EAST EUROPE IN THE CONTEXT OF U.S.-SOVIET RELATIONS

The United States² has four general options in its approach to the Soviet Bloc. First, it can pursue a more cooperative³ relationship with both Moscow and the East European states. Second, it can pursue a more cooperative relationship with Moscow while not emphasizing a cooperative approach to Eastern Europe. Third, it can pursue a cooperative relationship toward Eastern European states while de-emphasizing the cooperative approach to Moscow. Fourth, it can de-emphasize cooperation with both Moscow and Eastern Europe. These analytical distinctions can be arrayed as follows:

	Similar Policies toward Moscow and East Europe	Different Policies toward Moscow and East Europe
More Cooperative	1/Toward Moscow and East Europe	2/Toward Moscow but not East Europe
Less Cooperative	4/Toward Moscow and East Europe	3/Toward Moscow but not East Europe

Our real policy choices, to be sure, are not so tidy. This framework, nonetheless, can help us think about some of the causal relations within the real choices. To some extent, we have pursued all of these variants at one time or another in the last three decades. Although they are set down with excessive sharpness here, that sharpness clarifies an inherent ambivalence about goals in U.S. policy. On the one hand, there is a desire to loosen the Soviet grip on East European states; on the other hand, there has been a recurring desire for detente with Moscow. Even in the high time of the cold war, the United States was reluctant to go all the way in helping an East European state escape the confines of the Warsaw Pact. In the high time of the most recent detente period, the U.S. did not wholly ignore differences between Moscow and East Europe that were exploitable for loosening Soviet control, but it did go quite far in giving the impression that we would not work very hard toward loosening the grip, presumably because that could deny us the larger fruits of cooperation with Moscow.

A number of arguments for and against can be provided for each of the four options in the matrix. The following ones should be taken merely as suggestive pros and cons for starting the discussion.

1. Emphasize cooperation with both Moscow and East Europe.

The justification for this approach could be that it tends to loosen authoritarian control in all members of the Soviet Bloc by setting in motion economic, social, and finally political change, which presumably will benefit the West. This approach assumes that political factors are driven by economic and social considerations even to the point of systemic transformation, albeit in a slow evolutionary process.

The objection to this approach is that political factors can and probably do set firm limits to the evolutionary process. Furthermore, the economic and technological assistance gained through cooperation may allow the Soviet leadership to avoid, delay, and limit reforms which otherwise might be forced on an unwilling Soviet leadership. In other words, this approach is more likely to block than facilitate evolutionary change.

2. Emphasize a more cooperative relationship with Moscow while not emphasizing a cooperative approach toward East Europe.

This is what many understood—wrongly or rightly—to be the Sonnenfeldt doctrine. Its assumption is that interests in the world order, if commonly shared by Washington and Moscow, take precedence over detaching East Europe from the Soviet Bloc. Its proponents might argue that cooperation with Moscow must come first, loosening up that regime, which is a pre-condition for significant political liberalization in East Europe.

Its critics could argue that it, like the first approach, merely allows Moscow to evade reforms through exploiting Western economic and technological assistance and at the same time to prevent significant loosening of its hegemony in East Europe. It makes the Washington-Moscow relationship look like a super-power coalition against which an East European state like Romania, for example, has an increasingly difficult time playing its maverick role. Nor can the neutrals be sure that their policies will not be the victim of a Moscow-Washington understanding. Finally, the West Europeans find that they can take European security less seriously because the U.S.-Soviet relationship ensures it. West Europeans are left free to pursue whatever policy lines they choose without as much concern for building a NATO policy consensus.

3. Emphasize cooperation with Eastern Europe but not with Moscow.

The case for this policy would be that it promises to exacerbate Soviet control problems by creating alternative sources of support for East European regimes over a long evolutionary period. At the same time, it would deny the USSR the benefits of economic and technological assistance and whatever relief that could provide the leadership. The Politburo would face not only growing independence in East Europe but also sharpened dilemmas between political control and efficient use of human and material resources within the Soviet economy.

The objection to this approach might be that the fruits of cooperation—especially economic interaction—would not stop in East Europe but would filter through to Moscow in any event. Furthermore, economic assistance to East Europe would alleviate some of the tensions created there by consumer dissatisfaction and inefficient resource allocations. Finally, it could sharpen the Soviet fear of political evolution in East Europe and perhaps bring greater Soviet repression.

4. De-emphasize cooperation with both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The rationale of this option could be that denying—or merely impeding—the flow of economic assistance and technology transfers sharpens the reform issues in the Soviet political system more quickly and critically than would increasing economic interaction. Thus, by reducing the role of Eastern Europe as a conduit of technology to the Soviet Union, the U.S. could increase the internal Soviet pressures for change. At the same time, this approach should reduce the Soviet capabilities and pursue a competitive foreign policy with military and economic means.

Among the arguments against this approach, it may be insisted that U.S. policy cannot significantly restrain the diffusion of technology and economic interaction in the world, and, therefore, the Soviet Union will find other sources, notwithstanding U.S. reluctance to provide them. Such a competitive stance by the U.S. might also prompt a more aggressive Soviet use of its military power in winning the diplomatic and political leverage in non-European areas. Moscow might also pursue a less moderate role in European affairs by creating periodic crises and indulging in spoiling diplomatic tactics wherever possible.

The security policy corollary to these four options

Each of these options is based on different assumptions about the nature of change in the Soviet Bloc. Changes inevitably are accompanied by uncertainties, uncertainties which both Eastern and Western political leaders desire to reduce or eliminate. In other words, they want predictable change as long as it is also controllable for their own purposes. Military power provides one of the more important means for dealing with the political uncertainties and for controlling and limiting processes of political change.

The policy options that promise more economic change in the Soviet Bloc (1, 2, and 3) are also the options that will most likely prompt and allow the Soviet leadership to maintain a dynamic and comprehensive military establishment. That kind of Soviet policy in turn is most likely to stimulate larger U.S. military programs. If de-emphasizing cooperation and economic interaction (Option 4) is effective, it should make it more difficult for the USSR to support large military outlays, and it should constrain the Soviet capability for projecting its military power abroad.

U.S. military power for the non-cooperative approach (Option 4) could eventually be a limited security posture, something like minimum deterrence, but initially it might require an intimidating military posture. If the U.S. is prepared to stand aside and let change within the Soviet Bloc take its course, then military forces are necessary only for preventing disorderly developments from spilling into Western Europe. If, however, the U.S. wants to have some influence on the direction of change in the Bloc, then a larger military backdrop is needed for U.S. policy in Europe, both East and West.

For Option 3, a stronger military posture is required if it is to be a serious strategy for loosening the Soviet grip. A large NATO military backdrop during the Czech crisis of 1968 could conceivably have kept the uncertainties for the Politburo sufficiently high to have produced a compromise between Dubcek and Moscow of long-term durability allowing the Prague spring to yield fruit in the fall. The deployment of U.S. forces in Southeast Asia, the general disrepair in the U.S. forces in Europe, and the willingness of the Johnson Administration to reassure Moscow by taking Soviet military observers along the FRG-Czech border so that they could verify the absence of NATO military activities—all of these things contributed to Soviet confidence that the U.S. had neither the military means nor the intention to influence the course of events in Prague. Had the U.S. made even moderate military gestures such as slightly increasing routine military exercises, the Soviet decision to send forces into Czechoslovakia might never have been made.

Today there are again signs of change and transformation in East Europe. In particular, we have seen the continuation of the working class movement in Poland, and perhaps surprising to some observers in the West, dissidence in East Germany has reached distressing levels for the SED leadership.

In the case of Poland, can the present U.S. policy of economic and diplomatic support for Warsaw turn the processes of change to the purposes of the West? Or are we simply helping the Soviets avoid the price of more open and perhaps violent means of repression? Is it true, as some intelligence analysts recently argued, that Moscow is unaware of the explosive situation in Poland? Or is Moscow aware that we are aware and willing to bail the Poles out with credits? It seems difficult to conclude that the forces of change are necessarily favoring the West.

The East German case is not only more complex but of much greater consequence. It is not primarily about a state in Eastern Europe but about Germany as a whole. Moscow seems bent on exploiting Bonn’s Ostpolitik to draw the FRG back into the traditional German “middle” position, ambivalent about both East and West Europe. Without suggesting that a new Rapallo is at hand, it is nonetheless possible to argue that Bonn finds itself uncomfortable with the West and without recompense in the East. This is the result of three interacting developments:

—The re-emergence of German economic and military power without corresponding political power (or responsibility).

—The crisis in Ostpolitik which has failed to produce the kind of results promised either in inter-German relations or in relations with Moscow.

—Uncertainties and pressures created by U.S. policy toward Moscow and Europe, both security policy and economic policy.

There are at the same time signs of dissent and broader unrest in the GDR than many have believed before, but Soviet force deployments there make it virtually inconceivable that unapproved deals between the two Germanies can be more than ephemeral episodes.

Both of these cases, Poland and East Germany, force us to review once again Eastern Europe in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations.

1. Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Office, Unfiled Files, Box 130, East-West Planning Group: 1–8/78. Secret. In his March 20 covering memorandum to Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and Reginald Bartholomew, Odom wrote: “The attached paper is an effort to provide an analytical framework for a discussion of East Europe in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations on March 21. It is a product hastily done this past week with the idea of treating another major area in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations the way we discussed China at the last meeting. Is there an ‘East European card’? If so, how can it be played?”
2. The West European states are not given separate attention in this discussion of U.S. policy options for two reasons. First, space in a short paper does not allow. Second, the U.S., if it moves firmly in either direction of cooperative or competitive relations with the Soviet Union, can force the Europeans to follow the general trend. Admittedly, in the middle ground, where there is a more even mix of competition and cooperation, this is less true, but some of the implications for the West European role in those cases are discussed. [Footnote is in the original.]
3. “Cooperation” can be thought of in three broad categories: 1) economic, technological, and cultural; 2) political; 3) arms control. In the matrix here, the first category is the major kind of cooperation meant in defining the options. The discussion following should clarify the relationship to political cooperation. [Footnote is in the original.]