TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83capmoy.4

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                                                                                January 2, 1984

MEN OF THE YEAR

The Vocabulary of Confrontation


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 notion 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