"My Opinion of the Russians Has Changed Most Drastically..."

COVER STORIES

So saying, Carter angrily halts grain sales and postpones SALT in a series of retaliations against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan It was as though a time warp had plunged the world back into an earlier and more dangerous era. Soviet divisions had swarmed across the border of a neighboring country and turned it into a new satellite. Moscow and Washington were exchanging very angry words. Jimmy Carter accused Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev of lying, and the Soviets' TASS press agency shot back that Carter's statements were "bellicose and wicked." For Carter, the rapid series of events in Afghanistan seemed to provide a remarkable kind of revelation. Said he, sounding strikingly naive in an ABC television interview: "My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week [more] than even in the previous 2 1/2 years before that." He added that it was "imperative" that "the leaders of the world make it clear to the Soviets that they cannot have taken this action to violate world peace ... without paying severe political consequences."

What those consequences might be was the subject of week-long strategy sessions, and then on Friday night Carter set forth his response to the bold Soviet challenge. Appearing for 13 minutes on nationwide television, he delivered the toughest speech of his presidency. Warned Carter: "Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease." He denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as "a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people" and said that a "Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a stepping-stone to their possible control over much of the world's oil supplies."

Carter then announced that he was sharply cutting the sale to the Soviets of two kinds of goods they desperately need: grain and advanced technology. Contracts for 17 million tons of grain, worth $2 billion, are being canceled. Soviet fishing privileges in American waters are also being severely curtailed, as are new cultural exchange programs; Carter further hinted that the U.S. might boycott this summer's Moscow Olympics. To shore up Afghanistan's neighbors, Carter said that the U.S. "along with other countries will provide military equipment, food and other assistance" to help Pakistan defend its independence.

These actions were only the latest in an escalating series of retaliatory moves. Carter officially requested the Senate to postpone any further consideration of the U.S.-Soviet treaty to limit strategic arms, once the chief symbol of superpower detente. The U.S. and nearly 50 other countries then called for an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to condemn the latest Soviet aggression. That meeting convened on Saturday. And the U.S. summoned Ambassador Thomas J. Watson Jr. home from Moscow for consultations. (Not even during the crisis triggered by the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the American ambassador recalled from Moscow.)

Had a new cold war erupted between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? Not quite. At least not yet. But it seemed certain that the policy known as detente, which stressed cooperation between the two competing nuclear giants, had not survived the 1970s. The events of last week stood also as a grim reminder that it is not the American hostages in Iran that are the central object of U.S. foreign policy, but rather the potentially life-and-death relationship with the Soviet Union.

Afghanistan was an odd and remote focal point for such a U.S.-Soviet crisis. The snow-swept, mountainous land has few natural resources, and its Muslim tribesmen are more than 90% illiterate. Yet it was here that the Soviets chose to do something they had not done since World War II: in a blitzkrieg involving an estimated 50,000 soldiers, supported by tanks and helicopter gunships, the Soviet army crashed across the Afghan border to take control of a country that had not been a member of the Soviet bloc. By forcefully expanding its international sphere of direct control, the Kremlin in effect had violated a fundamental ground rule of East-West relations. In a meeting with his top aides, Carter said sternly that the Soviet invasion is "a quantum jump in the nature of Soviet behavior. And if they get through this with relative political and economic impunity, it will have serious consequences on the world in years to come."

In an attempt to mobilize a broad international condemnation of the Soviet action, the President telephoned half a dozen foreign leaders and cabled about 25 others, stressing to them how gravely the U.S. viewed the matter.

The U.S. made a special effort to rally the NATO allies. Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher flew to London to meet with high-ranking British, West German, French, Italian and Canadian diplomats, then on to a New Year's Day emergency meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The NATO allies agreed to review thoroughly their relations with the Soviet Union and to find ways to back countries near Afghanistan, particularly Pakistan, which is not only frightened by the increased proximity of Soviet army units but is also deeply troubled by the mounting chaos in neighboring Iran. They also decided to solicit support from Third World states for a U.N. declaration against Moscow. The U.S. received the strongest support from the British; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has been taking a tough anti-Soviet stand since coming to office last year. Though the French were less firm, a French diplomat later said, "Like the U.S., we feel strongly that Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is wrong."

One of the fundamental questions was why the Soviets had suddenly torn the fabric of U.S.-Soviet relations and international order by such an undisguised invasion. Moscow had its own rationale. According to the Soviet-government daily Izvestia, the U.S.S.R.'s troops had saved Afghanistan from being subverted by the CIA and turned into an American base. Other Soviet versions said the U.S. had teamed up with Pakistan, China and Egypt to carry out "primarily anti-Soviet designs." They described leftist President Hafizullah Amin, who was executed four days after the Soviet invasion began, as a tyrant working for the CIA.

When Carter used his hot line to send Brezhnev a tough protest about the invasion on Dec. 28, the Communist leader claimed that the Soviets had been invited by President Amin to protect the nation from an unnamed outside threat. It was this lame explanation that an infuriated Carter later denounced as "completely inadequate and completely misleading." Indeed, the Administration was acquiring evidence that the Soviets had masterminded the entire coup that had led to the crisis (see following story).

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was condemned not only by Western leaders but by numbers of Third World countries, including Egypt, Tunisia and the Sudan. The Saudi Arabia-based Islamic World League declared that "the Communist aggression aims at eliminating the Muslim presence in Afghanistan. In Turkey, which has been plagued by mounting economic problems and political instability (see WORLD), military leaders alluded to the Afghanistan crisis when they warned rival civilian politicians to start working together or face overthrow.

Even Iran's fanatical leaders denounced the Soviet invasion. During an audience with the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, Soviet Ambassador to Iran Vladimir Vinogradov tried to explain that his country had moved in Afghanistan against CIA and Zionist agents--two specters that Khomeini himself routinely invokes to justify his own actions. But the Soviet apparently got nowhere. A member of Iran's clerical establishment later said that the Ayatullah sharply told the envoy that "Brezhnev was stepping into the Shah's shoes and was heading for the same catastrophe that befell the ex-dictator. He said that the Soviets would come to grief if they remained in Afghanistan."

If anyone in the Administration could have smiled during last week's crisis, it was National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has long been trying to get Carter to take a tougher stance toward the Soviets, and who has long been paying particular attention to Afghanistan. Since July, he has regarded the leftist Afghanistan regime as vulnerable to the Muslim insurgents, and he has even enjoyed hinting, without saying so, that the U.S. might covertly aid those insurgents. To reporters and other visitors, he would recite statistics from secret cables that littered his desk. He could tick off the casualties the Soviets were suffering and would detail the number of coffins flown in to remove the dead.

Nor was Brzezinski alone. U.S. intelligence knew that Moscow had sent huge shipments of tanks, artillery and other weapons to the Kabul regime but that this failed to stop the rebellion, and that by midsummer the Afghan army had begun to crumble. Desertions cut it from a high of about 150,000 men to about 50,000. U.S. intelligence knew that Moscow sent a high-level military delegation to Kabul in August, headed by General Ivan Pavlovsky, chief of Soviet ground forces. U.S. intelligence knew that Pavlovsky reported after a two-month study that Afghanistan was falling apart and that the Soviet army could restore order quickly.

Nor was Brzezinski alone in arguing that the idea of detente would not prevent the Soviets from acting aggressively to maintain what they regard as their national interests. Other hard-liners within the Administration argue that the U.S.S.R. has repeatedly violated detente's main charter, the "Basic Principles of Relations" between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev at their Moscow summit in May of 1972. This communique stated that the two superpowers "will always exercise restraint in their mutual relations" and that "efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly, are inconsistent with these objectives."

It would be difficult to reconcile this pledge with Moscow's ferrying of 6,000 Cuban troops to Angola in 1975 and its shipment of thousands of military "advisers" and enormous quantities of weapons to Ethiopia three years later. During the final months of the Shah's reign in Iran, moreover, Persian-language broadcasts beamed at Iran from inside the U.S.S.R. were inflaming an already tense situation by charging, among other things, that "the dangers facing the Iranian people are coming" from the U.S.

In reviewing these and other Soviet actions, a report released by Washington's Brookings Institution this fall concluded that "the significance of Soviet armed forces as a tool of diplomacy has loomed larger." Harvard Political Scientist Samuel Huntington agrees, noting that "detente has been dying for a very long time. What we are witnessing now is the final nail being driven into the coffin." Says Duke University Political Scientist Ole Holsti: "The invasion of Afghanistan has driven home the fact, more than anything since World War II, that whatever the Soviets mean by detente, or anything else, they are prepared to take hard action where they view the opportunity with a relatively low risk."

Holsti's view is seconded by most experts. They feel that the Kremlin carefully calculated the risks before giving the orders for its troops to swoop into Afghanistan. Though it could easily anticipate diplomatic friction with Washington, it could also believe that there was almost no danger of U.S. or other Western military opposition to the move. Says Huntington: "Moscow saw an opportunity. We were distracted in Iran as we were distracted in the Middle East in 1956 when the Soviets made their move on Hungary. This is their way of doing things."

The Kremlin's leaders also probably concluded that they had little to lose by a blow to their relations with Washington. They have been saying for some time that detente has brought them few benefits. They have never obtained, for example, the kind of economic rewards that they had expected from detente. One reason for this has been that Congress has made trade liberalization and credits conditional on Moscow's promising to relax its emigration restrictions. The Kremlin has balked at making such a pledge, complaining indignantly that such conditions constituted unacceptable interference in its internal affairs. The Soviets took the same pained view of Carter's very vocal human rights campaign.

SALT also was no obstacle to the Soviet invasion, for Moscow probably concluded that the arms treaty had no chance of winning Senate approval, at least during this presidential election year. Reports TIME Moscow Correspondent Bruce Nelan: "All along there has been extreme resentment in the Kremlin that the U.S. Senate was giving the U.S.S.R. grades on deportment and was threatening to kill SALT II unless Moscow behaved. Moscow was also upset by NATO's decision in December to deploy in Western Europe, by the mid-1980s, new atomic-tipped missiles capable of striking targets in the Soviet Union. Thus SALT simply was not all that important any more. Carter, meanwhile, had gone ahead and increased the U.S. defense budget and okayed the MX mobile missile (in response to the decade-long Soviet military buildup). Irritating Moscow too was the prospect that while it was not going to get most-favored-nation trading benefits from Washington, it seemed certain that Peking was going to get them. That would violate the principle of'evenhanded' treatment of the two Communist powers, which Carter had promised when he normalized relations with China.

"Taken together, these developments created an atmosphere in which the Soviets felt no particular need to be cautious. Some well-informed Soviet sources privately admit that the Kremlin had become disenchanted with the course of detente and had decided to thumb its nose at the U.S. Had Afghanistan not come along, say these Soviet insiders, something else probably would have happened to permit Moscow to demonstrate that it no longer felt restrained by detente."

Moscow's primary purpose in invading Afghanistan, most experts agree, was simply to tighten its control of that rebellious country. The tide of Islamic fervor, which had already shaken Iran, was now threatening Afghanistan. Unless it were checked, might it not also spread across the border into the Soviet Central Asian Republics and stir unrest among their substantial Islamic populations? Thus Soviet leaders probably felt that they had only two options: 1) to allow a Moscow-leaning socialist state on their border to dissolve into chaos and possibly pass into the hands of Muslim fanatics or 2) to move forcefully to take control of events. A Soviet foreign affairs analyst told TIME'S Nelan that "it was not easy for us to make this decision, but we were committed in Afghanistan from the beginning." Employing a rationale heard frequently in Washington in the 1960s to explain the growing U.S. presence in South Viet Nam, the Soviet official added: "Whether we like it or not, we have to liva up to our commitments. We can't wash our hands of them. There was no other choice." To describe this Soviet use of military force to restore hegemony over Afghanistan, the British embassy in Moscow, in a cable to London, used the strange term defensive aggression.

Besides securing a hold on Afghanistan, the Soviets may have had other reasons to launch their invasion. For one, the invasion could be part of a long-range strategy to gain influence over Pakistan, Iran and other Persian Gulf nations. Says a senior British official: "The Soviets have a vested interest in getting an influence in Iran. The prize in political, economic and military terms would be enormous. It would, place them in a position of being able to turn off the oil tap for Western consumers almost at will when the oil shortage starts to really bite later in the 1980s." It would also put them in a position of having immediate access to the gulf's rich petroleum reserves when, in the next few years, the U.S.S.R.'s domestic output of oil is expected to start falling short of its internal needs.

Beyond any specific and immediate goals, the Soviets may also have intended their invasion of Afghanistan to demonstrate to Pakistan and Iran what happens to unruly neighbors. This is a message that Moscow may be particularly interested in sending to China in an effort to restrain Peking's maneuverings both in Southeast Asia and along the 4,500-mile Sino-Soviet frontier. Beyond that, the Soviet message is addressed to the whole world, for all international relations still depend partly on various nations' judgments about other nations' ability and willingness to use force. Regardless of the issues or moralities involved, a nation that does occasionally assert itself is often subsequently treated with greater care.

Who is making such decisions in Moscow? Because Brezhnev has been such a staunch supporter of the SALT treaty that he signed with Carter in Vienna last June, there was some ominous speculation that the ailing Soviet leader might now be acting under pressure from younger and more aggressive officials, or even that the long anticipated process of changing Soviet leadership might already be 5 under way. Most Soviet experts discounted such speculation, however. Said one West German Foreign Ministry analyst: "There is no evidence to indicate that Brezhnev has lost 8 control in Moscow." A Western expert in Moscow said: "Remember, this is basically the same leadership i that went into Czechoslovakia."

Confronted by the new Soviet challenge, the top White House priority was to figure out an immediate U.S. response. Neither verbal outrage nor diplomatic pressure would suffice. Indeed, when before Christmas Soviet forces were detected massing for a possible Afghanistan invasion, Ambassador Watson delivered several warnings to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. They were ignored until Christmas Eve, when Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor Maltsev coolly informed Watson that the invasion was about to begin. Said a senior U.S. planner: "There wasn't anything we could have said at that point that would have deflected them."

Last week, therefore, Washington clearly had to consider more direct and tough measures, although one Administration aide admitted that "we don't have any trump card that will force the Soviets out of Afghanistan." Carter realized that this crisis differed radically from that in Iran. If the hostage situation played to his strengths--patience, caution and carefully calibrated movements--the Soviet invasion called for something else. For guidance, Carter dusted off a 150-page analysis that had been prepared in 1968 by State Department experts on the possible U.S. reactions to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Reports TIME Correspondent Johanna McGeary: "The President was deeply struck by what he read in that report. When he met Thursday afternoon with his top aides in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, he reminded them that what had dissipated the impact of the Western reaction to the Soviet aggression of 1968 was the dilatory pace of U.S. leadership. An original impulse for a firm, internationally backed retaliation had 'tailed off until it was 'too late' because of endless, benumbing maneuvers at the U.N. This time, said Carter, the U.S. would have to be more aware of the 'tradeoff between bringing others aboard and taking unilateral U.S. action.' The President almost seemed to be warning himself that too much time must not be squandered in searching for an ailied response to the Kremlin."

Earlier in the week, the Administration had made its relatively easy decisions: recall Ambassador Watson, move in the U.N., and rule out the use of U.S. troops. A bit trickier was SALT II, to which Carter has been deeply committed and which was to be debated when the Senate reconvenes on Jan. 22. But Carter decided to seek postponement of that debate.

The delay, wrote the President in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia, would allow the White House and the Congress to "assess Soviet actions and intentions, and devote our primary attention to the legislative and other measures required to respond to this crisis." Carter emphasized that SALT's eventual approval by the Senate would be "in the national security interest." The request for a delay was greeted with relief by SALT supporters, a number of whom had feared that there was no chance the arms pact could now win the two-thirds vote required for passage.

Perhaps the most difficult decision was that concerning a grain embargo. Such a move would represent the painful reversal of a policy, based in great part on his moral principles, that food should not be used as a weapon. Halting the enormous grain shipments to the U.S.S.R., moreover, could erode the President's political support among farmers.

In the Roosevelt Room, the Secretaries of State, Defense, Agriculture and Commerce presented their views on an embargo. Then the President confided that he was leaning toward that drastic move, but wanted to postpone a final decision until Friday so that he could, as he said, "sleep on it." Later, Carter's aides concluded that the danger of a political setback in Iowa would be offset by the image the President would project: a tough leader willing to put national security needs above the "parochial" farm interest. After Carter's TV address, an aide described the gram cutoff and accompanying measures as "the strongest action taken by the U.S. against the Soviets in 20 years."

All this done, the Administration must now decide on a longer-range strategy to counter the Soviet Union's initiatives in Central and Southwestern Asia. "Act tough" was the predictable advice offered by one of Peking's diplomats at the U.N. "Teach the Soviets a lesson, that's what you've got to do," said he, making a karate chop. "If you don't, the big bear reaches out for more." But overreaction could be as dangerous as retreat. Not only might too bellicose an American policy provoke a superpower confrontation, but it would greatly concern U.S. allies situated near the U.S.S.R. and perhaps prompt them to seek their own accommodations with the Kremlin. What the Administration needs is a package of balanced moves to check Soviet expansion by making it more costly without directly threatening the U.S.S.R.

One way of achieving this, many analysts believe, would be to make . the current Soviet offensive in Afghanistan as difficult as possible--in short, help it become the Kremlin's version of America's Viet Nam. While the problems that would be faced by Soviet troops fighting in a country just across the Soviet border could hardly equal those confronting G.I.s embattled 10,000 miles from the U.S. (to say nothing of the Soviet regime's ability to crush all domestic antiwar criticism), the Afghanistan adventure could become more than Moscow bargained for. One thing the U.S. could do, suggests Dimitri Simes, a Russian emigre who is a Soviet affairs expert at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, is to launch a well-orchestrated political effort to internationally portray and publicize the Afghan rebels as a national liberation movement. Even without such prompting, anti-Soviet demonstrations broke out last week in Turkey, India, Sudan, Indonesia, Iran and the U.S.

What would be most costly to the Soviets would be to assure that the rebels have a sufficient and steady supply of arms and ammunition. A number of experts suggest that the U.S. provide such supplies, not directly but through Pakistan, China and perhaps other third parties. The Administration has been considering this, but refuses to confirm or deny whether it has already been providing such support.

Just how much help the Afghan rebels have been getting is a matter of some controversy. Moscow has claimed that Pakistan has been backing the Afghan insurgency with arms and men and that some supplies have come from the U.S.A senior Communist Party official in Moscow told TIME'S Nelan that "Carter was warned about the situation and knew of its possible outcome. We approached him and his advisers confidentially, asking them to take measures to curb the activity of the groups of Afghans based in Pakistan, or at least stop arming them, and to call upon the Chinese to do the same." Western intelligence sources in fact confirm that some arms have been trickling into Afghanistan from China.

In any new strategy to counter Soviet aggression in Central Asia, Pakistan would need to be militarily strengthened. This strategically situated land, which not only borders Afghanistan but also touches Iran and fronts on the Arabian Sea, is itself highly unstable, plagued by internal political and economic problems. While the U.S. and Pakistan at one time had such close ties that many Pakistanis referred to their country as the 51st state, relations have been chilly since the 1971 war with India over Bangladesh. The military regime in Pakistan has been angered by Carter's human rights campaign, and by Washington's refusal to provide military aid so long as Pakistan balked at renouncing nuclear weapons. The Administration began moving rapidly last week to improve relations with Pakistan, even before Carter announced his determination to assist the country. The White House congressional liaison staff met with leaders on Capitol Hill to work out a possible budget request to provide military aid to Pakistan. It was clear that such aid would no longer be blocked by the issue of Pakistan's atomic potential. Said an Administration official: "Our concern about [nuclear] nonproliferation is being overwhelmed by the threat to the future of Pakistan and the subcontinent."

A change in U.S. relations with China could also be a critical part of a new U.S. policy of containing the Soviet Union. China was enraged by the invasion of Afghanistan. Peking's People's Daily declared that "escalation of the Afghanistan intervention will only result in the spread of the flames of armed rebellion into a conflagration, and Moscow will get its ringers burned."

One of the major questions facing the Administration is whether to establish a more formal security tie with Peking. This is to be high on the agenda of Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who is in China this week on the first visit there by a Pentagon chief. He is to reiterate, under instructions from Carter, that the U.S. and Peking have a common interest in blocking Soviet expansion in Asia. Brown then is to sound out his hosts on ways in which their two countries might work more closely toward this goal. A tighter Washington-Peking relationship is not without significant hazards. Duke's Holsti warns against any substantial military assistance to Peking, and says: "The danger is in thinking that because the Chinese and Soviets obviously have poor relations with each other, we therefore share all of the common interests with the Chinese. We don't." Administration analysts who have observed Soviet anger at every stage of the Sino-U.S. rapprochement are concerned about how the Kremlin might respond if Peking were to receive sophisticated U.S. weapons. It is just possible, say some of these experts, that Moscow could launch a pre-emptive strike against China.

One essential condition for any global U.S. strategy is adequate military strength. Many experts believe that the Soviets have been tempted to become increasingly adventurous in part because the Pentagon has lost its clear-cut global strategic superiority. This has followed from nearly a decade of tight U.S. defense budgets, but the trend is now being reversed by Carter's call for an annual 4.8% real increase in Pentagon spending over the next five years. More immediately, the U.S. could improve its military posture in the Middle East by obtaining bases there. Egypt and Israel have already offered use of their faculties; in the Indian Ocean region, Oman, Somalia and Kenya have indicated that they would be receptive to a U.S. request for bases. Currently, the only U.S. military installation in the Indian Ocean is an airstrip on the tiny island of Diego Garcia, about 1,000 miles off India's coast.

But it would be beyond the nation's ability to re-create the situation that prevailed from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, when the U.S. enjoyed widely recognized global military and economic superiority. That was an unnatural condition, reflecting the special post-World War II circumstances, and it could not have been expected to last indefinitely. The fact that the U.S. now has slipped from its former position as the only real superpower merely reflects historical developments over which Washington had little, if any, control. Among them: the economic recovery and boom in Western Europe and Japan, the formation of the oil cartel and the Kremlin's determination to attain military parity with the U.S. Dimitri Simes points out that potential Third World targets for Soviet intervention have existed since the decolonization movement of the early 1960s. What has changed has been Moscow's military ability to take advantage of such opportunities. Says Simes: "The Soviet leaders are still prudent and conservative men. But what seems prudent in 1980 would not have been prudent in 1961."

Though there can be no going back to the heady days of the 1950s, it probably would be just as impossible to restore the balmy era of U.S.-Soviet detente that marked the early 1970s. Detente has actually been disintegrating for five years, with the U.S. bearing a fair share of the responsibility. In addition, the zigzags of the Carter Administration unquestionably have confused and worried the Soviets--from the toughness of the first Cyrus Vance SALT proposals in 1977, and Carter's outspoken human rights policy, to the cancellation of the B-1 bomber, delay of the neutron bomb and the strong Administration support for SALT II as finally agreed upon.

In the wake of the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan, against a backdrop of the Kremlin's continuing nuclear and conventional military buildup, the U.S. must redefine its role in the world and especially its relationship with the U.S.S.R. Columbia's Soviet affairs specialist Seweryn Bialer fears "the worst possible situation is when the U.S.S.R. feels that it has nothing to fear from the U.S. and nothing to hope for from the U.S." In the current situation, Bialer urges that "the Soviets should have more to fear from us than they do."

As Washington feels out its new relationship with Moscow, there is no need for haste. Jody Powell has stressed that the White House does not "want to make sweeping statements about the ultimate nature of the relationship when we are clearly in midstride of a grave international crisis." It would make sense, for instance, to wait and see what happens in Afghanistan. Western experts in Moscow predict that the adventure will cost the U.S.S.R. more dearly than it had expected, in men, in material and most of all in world esteem.

Another reason for Washington to go slow in revamping its basic policy toward the Kremlin is that Moscow will soon be facing a time of great decisions as the current aging and ailing leadership is replaced. Any U.S. policy will have to take the Kremlin's new leaders into account. Warns Sovietologist Simes: "As they consolidate their power, they will be tough and ruthless, particularly domestically and in Eastern Europe." Harvard's Huntington agrees that there is "not a very happy period" ahead for U.S.-Soviet relations. Says he: "The Soviets obviously believe that the time has come for them to assert themselves on the global scene and to capitalize on the military might that they have been building up for so many years."

Although the U.S. is no longer the globe's sole superpower, it still is one of two superpowers and, more important, is the leader of the industrial democracies. It is looked to for guidance and protection by many developing countries. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has challenged not only the U.S., but also that portion of the world sharing America's values and aspirations. The problem is not so much one of U.S. strength--the U.S. is strong indeed--but of applying this strength in ways that make us seem effective, seem wise, and seem responsible leaders of the free world.

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