TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83capmoy.4

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                !-3Gn%Éî                                            $««The Vocabulary of Confrontation

January 2, 1984

Four decades of ups and downs, seen through a special lexicon

It is an adversary relationship unique in history and, appropriately,
an entire new vocabulary has been created to describe it.  Some of the
words are little more than political science jargon; many have become
household terms.  Together, they offer a surprisingly complete record
of the ups and down that have marked U.S.-Soviet relations in the 38
years since the two countries emerged as superpowers.  The main
entries in the U.S.-Soviet lexicon:

Cold War:  neither war nor peace; a rivalry kept in check by fear of
nuclear war.

Memories of the exuberant meeting of Soviet and U.S. soldiers at the
Elbe River in April 1945 faded rapidly from American minds as the
U.S.S.R. moved to consolidate its control over the countries of
Eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army.  Coined in
1946 by Herbert Bayard Swope, a journalist and sometime speechwriter
for Philanthropist Bernard Baruch, the term cold war became synonymous
with the tensions of the post-World War II era.  During a speech in
Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., in 1946, Winston Churchill
provided another image for the new age.  "From Stettin on the Baltic
to Trieste on the Adriatic," he said, "an iron curtain has descended
across the Continent.

The first major battle of the cold war was waged over an isolated
Western outpost behind Churchill's curtain:  Berlin.  In June 1948,
the Soviets blocked all water, road and rail links to the city in an
effort to prevent the Allies from setting up a unified government in
the Western-controlled zones of postwar Germany.  For the next ten
months, U.S. Air Force C-54 and C-47 cargo planes landed at West
Berlin's Tempelhof Airport every three minutes, ferrying as much as
12,940 tons a day of food and fuel into the besieged city.  The
Soviets finally capitulated, but by the end of 1949 the West had new
cause for worry; the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb, ending the
U.S. nuclear monopoly.

Containment:  a policy aimed at checking the expansion of a hostile
power or ideology by political, economic or military means.

The swift Western response to the Berlin blockade reflected postwar
thinking about how to manage the Soviets.  Writing in Foreign Affairs
under the pen name "X" in 1947, George Kennan, then head of the State
Department's policy planning staff, argued that the West should
"contain" the U.S.S.R. by countering Soviet pressure at crisis spots
around the globe.  But Kennan later denied paternity of any
"containment" strategy.   It was President Harry Truman who made it
the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.  In requesting $400 million in
military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, which were threatened
by Communist expansion in 1947, he boldly affirmed the Truman
Doctrine: the U.S. was prepared "to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside
pressures."  The Truman Administration also provided more than $13
billion in economic assistance to the nations of war-shattered Western
Europe through the Marshall Plan and established the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO one month before the Berlin blockade was
lifted.  Truman did not send Americans to China to prevent a Communist
victory in 1949, but the following year he dispatched U.S. troops to
block a Communist takeover of South Korea.

Brinkmanship:  a strategy in which a nation displays its willingness
to risk war if an adversary does not back down.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953 determined to be
more aggressive in checking the spread of Communism.  Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles summed up this approach when he told LIFE
magazine in 1956 that "if you are scared to go to the brink, you are
lost."  Still Eisenhower and Dulles backed away when Soviet tanks
rumbled into Budapest later that year to crush the Hungarian uprising.
Eisenhower contributed another idea when he invoked the domino theory
in 1954 to justify U.S. economic aid to South Viet Nam.  The nothing
that the fall of one nation to Communist control would send adjacent
countries toppling like dominoes lined up in a row was used in the
1960s to explain U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam.

Peaceful Coexistence:  the idea that countries with conflicting
ideologies can live together without waging war.

Nikita Khrushchev and the collective leadership that emerged after
Stalin's death in 1953 used the term peaceful coexistence to signal
the Kremlin's interest in improving diplomatic contacts with the
world.  "Neither we nor the capitalist states want to make a trip to
Mars, so we shall have to exist together on one planet," Khrushchev
said during a vis to India in 1955.  As he dismantled Stalin's
apparatus of terror at home, the Soviets took their own word for the
period from the title of a popular novel:  The Thaw.  The withdrawal
of Soviet occupation forces (along with those of the Western allies)
from Austria in 1955 seemed to belie the post war axiom that
Communists never give up any territory they hold  In an equally
auspicious sign of improved East-West relations, Eisenhower traveled
to a Geneva summit that year for the first face-to-face meeting
between Soviet and American leaders since Truman had met Stalin at
Potsdam in 1945.

Portly and unpredictable, Khrushchev let an indelible imprint on the
American consciousness when he blustered his way across the U.S. in
1959, hobnobbing with New York multimillionaires, Hollywood stars and
Iowa farmers.  But in May 1960, before Eisenhower could return the
visit, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane flying about
65,000 ft. above their territory.  Khrushchev demanded an apology from
Eisenhower; a few months later, he showed his anger by pounding his
shoe on his desk at the U.N. General Assembly.

Eyeball to Eyeball:  a diplomatic crisis that threatens to escalate
into war.

President John F. Kennedy had come to office criticizing Eisenhower's
failure to check the advance of Communism in Cuba.  For  Kennedy's
effort to roll back Soviet influence ended in disaster in April 1961
at the Bay of Pigs.  It was there that 1,300 CIA-trained Cuban exiles
failed to invade the island and spark a movement that would bring down
Fidel Castro.

The West's commitment to Berlin was tested in August 1961, after the
East Germans put up a wall to keep their people in.  But the boldest
Soviet bloc challenge came in the fall of 1962.  Khrushchev gambled
that he could shift the global balance of power by secretly building
some 40 launch pads for medium range missiles in Cuba.  After U.S.
surveillance planes spotted the new installations, Kennedy told the
Soviets that a nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation
in the Western Hemisphere would be considered "as an attack by the
Soviet Union in the U.S."  He ordered a naval quarantine of the
island.  After a tense 13 day confrontation, Khrushchev decided to
withdraw the weapons.  Said Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "Eyeball to
eyeball, they blinked first."

Detente:  the relaxation of tensions between nations.

The word was borrowed from the French, but the West Germans ushered in
the new age in East-West relations with their own version.  Ostpolitik
(literally Eastern policy). Its architect, Chancellor Willy Brandt,
made a historic visit to Moscow in 1970 and signed a nonaggression
pact with the Soviet Union.  About this time, President Richard Nixon
indicated to the Soviets that he would be willing to engage in
negotiations aimed at limiting the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals.
With the help of Henry Kissinger, Nixon also played his "china card"
and traveled to Peking, putting Moscow on notice that the U.S. was
prepared to deal with a country that shared in tense, 4,200-mile-long
border with the Soviet Union.

During the Moscow summit in 1972, Nixon and Soviet Leader Leonid
Brezhnev signed the SALT I pact and in a joint communique pledged to
refrain from "efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of
the other, directly or indirectly."  The high point of detente, in a
literal sense, came in 1975, when Soviet and American spacemen linked
up and shook hands 140 miles about the globe during a joint space
mission.  Meanwhile, troubles back on earth threatened to end the era
of good feeling.

Linkage:  a policy that ties progress on one front to developments in
other areas.

In 1974 Congress attached the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade
Reform Act and said in effect that favorable trade concessions to the
Soviet Union would be granted only if the Kremlin realized its
restriction on Jewish emigration.  Moscow balked.  That year,
President Gerald Ford flew to Vladivostok to pursue arms-limitations
talks with Brezhnev.  In 1975 the two leaders met again at the
Helsinki summit of 35 nations to sign an agreement that recognized
Europe's postwar boundaries and stressed the importance of increased
human contacts between East and West.  But the Soviets had stepped up
their involvement in Angola and South Yemen, as they would later in
Ethiopia, causing Americans to wonder if detente was a one-way street.
As the 1976 election campaign began to heat up, Ford declared: "I
don't use the word detente any more."  Instead he advocated "peach
through strength."

President Jimmy Carter came to office committed to advancing human
rights and wrote a letter to Nobel Peace prizewinning Physicist Andrei
Sakharov, a leading Soviet dissident.  The Kremlin responded in anger,
and less than two months later the Soviets also rejected the
Administration's new ideas on arms control.  Carter and Brezhnev
eventually met in Vienna to sign a SALT II pact in June 1979.  But as
Carter struggled to get congressional approval for the treaty, the
Soviets marched into neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979.  Said
Carter: "My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last
week than even the previous 2 1/2 years."  After the invasion, Carter gave
up attempts to ratify SALT II and called for an international boycott of the
1980 Moscow Olympics.  The President also slapped restrictions on
high-technology transfers to the Soviet Union; his embargo on grain sales was
lifted by President Reagan in April 1981.

Deadlock:  a stalemate characterized by a high level of frustration.

Coming to office on a conservative groundswell, President Ronald
Reagan made no secret of his feelings about the Soviets.  In a
statement issued in September 1983, Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov railed
against the "outrageous militarist psychosis" in the U.S. and accused
the White House of resorting to "what almost amounts to obscenities
alternating with hypocritical preaching about morals and humanism" in
describing the Soviet Union.  The Reagan Administration has spoken in
terms that echo containment, brinkmanship, and eyeball to eyeball.
Despite its abusive rhetoric, Moscow persists in claiming that it
wants to uphold detente.  The relationship may once again have
changed, but the language of confrontation has not.

--By John Kohan