Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.65
The final sentence, which became enshrined as the Carter Doctrine, was interpreted in the Kremlin as a clear threat of war—even nuclear war. Vance attempted to remove it from the address, striking it from the draft that the State Department submitted to the White House. Brzezinski fought to keep it in, convincing Press Secretary Jody Powell that without it the speech was devoid of content. Powell persuaded Carter that his national security advisor was right.66
Interviewed the following month on NBC News, Assistant Secretary of State William Dyess reiterated the threat, pointing out that “the Soviets know that this terrible weapon has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American president who dropped it both times.”67
The Soviets thought that U.S. accusations of Soviet aggression in the Middle East were preposterous, yet Carter withdrew the U.S. ambassador from Moscow and took SALT II off the table. He cut trade between the two countries, banned U.S. athletes from participating in the upcoming Moscow Olympics, increased defense spending, and sent Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to China to sound out Chinese leaders about establishing military ties.
As many of Brezhnev’s advisors had warned, the Soviet intervention did spark a much larger uprising on the part of Islamists both inside and outside Afghanistan. Resistance groups based in Peshawar, Pakistan, joined with madrassa-trained Islamic zealots from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan to aid the Afghan resistance fighters. In Islamabad, thirty-five Muslim nations condemned the Soviet aggression. Brzezinski began looking for ways to fan the flames of potential discontent among Muslims in Soviet Central Asia. In earlier decades, the United States had employed Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon in the fight against secular Arab nationalism. It would now use Islamic extremism against the Soviet Union. But that meant cooperating with Pakistan’s president, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Carter had cut off aid to his repressive government in 1977 because of Zia’s contempt for human rights and his nuclear weapons program. Now, within days of the invasion, Carter offered Zia hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military and economic aid in return for supporting the Islamist insurgents. In February 1980, Brzezinski traveled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to work out financial and military collaboration. Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal told a CIA officer, “We don’t do operations. We don’t know how. All we know how to do is write checks.” The Saudis agreed to match the U.S. contributions.68
Despite Carter’s saber rattling, the United States would not have been able to repel a Soviet invasion of the Gulf, short of beginning a nuclear war. Carter therefore took measures to rectify that situation. He built up a rapid deployment force with new bases in Somalia, Kenya, and Oman from which several thousand U.S. troops could be quickly deployed to the Gulf in a crisis. He strengthened ties with friendly governments in the region, such as Saudi Arabia. And he made a major adjustment in nuclear strategy, issuing Presidential Directive 59, which changed the U.S. nuclear war-fighting strategy from fighting wars of mutually assured destruction to fighting “flexible” and “limited” nuclear wars that the United States could win. Not only did Carter’s effort to eliminate nuclear weapons fall flat, PD-59 initiated a massive increase in conventional and nuclear arms. Under it, the United States prepared to fight a protracted nuclear war, first targeting Soviet leaders, while holding attacks on cities in abeyance.
Thus were dashed, once and for all, the hopes that Carter embodied for a safer and more peaceful world. During his one term in office, he managed to support research on the neutron bomb, authorize deployment of nuclear-armed cruise missiles to Europe, commission the first Trident submarine, and double the number of warheads aimed at the Soviet Union. Thus, despite having Carter in the White House, the CPD’s campaign to defeat SALT II and increase defense spending had succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. In fact, by the end of his term, Carter had done a complete about-face and bought the CPD’s view of an aggressive Soviet Union that had to be contained. Détente was dead. Carter even repudiated his earlier criticism of the Vietnam War. Vietnam veterans had long since become freedom fighters who “went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people.”69 Despite his best intentions, he had laid the groundwork for the extreme views that Reagan would bring to the White House. As Anne Cahn summarized in her book Killing Détente:
By the 1980 presidential election, the choice in foreign and defense policy was between that of the Carter administration, which favored the MX missile, the Trident submarine, a Rapid Deployment Force, a “stealth” bomber, cruise missiles, counterforce targeting leading to a first-strike capability, and a 5 percent increase in defense spending, and that of the Republicans under Ronald Reagan, who favored all of these plus the neutron bomb, antiballistic missiles, the B-1 bomber, civil defense, and an 8 percent increase in defense spending.70
Not only did Carter not fulfill his promise to sharply reduce defense spending, he significantly increased it, from $115.2 billion in his first budget to $180 billion in his final one.71 Nor was he apologetic about this reversal. During his reelection campaign, he even got into a proxy war with the Republicans over the issue. Appearing on the Today show in early July, Defense Secretary Harold Brown attacked the Republicans for cutting defense spending by more than 35 percent between 1969 and 1976, whereas the Carter administration had raised it by 10 percent during its time in office and planned to raise it an additional 25 percent during its second term. Former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird challenged Brown’s math but admitted that defense spending had gone up faster under Carter than under Nixon or Ford.72
From the Soviet vantage point, U.S. behavior was quite alarming. As future CIA director Robert Gates later admitted, “the Soviets saw a very different Jimmy Carter than did most Americans by 1980, different and more hostile and threatening.”73 At that point, Soviet leaders didn’t know what to expect from Carter. In late 1979 and early 1980, the U.S. early-warning system malfunctioned on four occasions, triggering combat alerts of U.S. strategic forces. The KGB believed that they were not malfunctions but deliberate Pentagon ploys to lower Soviet anxiety and response time during future alerts by lulling them into a false sense of complacency, thereby making them vulnerable to a surprise attack. The Soviets weren’t the only ones frightened by the episodes. Gates reported Brzezinski’s account to him of the November 9, 1979, incident in his memoirs: