The Unhappy Presidency of Jimmy Carter

This chapter covers Carter’s initial angry exchanges with Brezhnev, SALT II negotiations, divisions within the administration over policy toward Moscow, and the Vienna summit held in 1979, with Carter’s controversial kiss with Brezhnev. It discusses the Soviet-Cuban offensive in Angola and Ethiopia, which installed pro-Moscow regimes in a region previously far removed from Soviet influence and which many in Moscow saw as a sign that the world balance was shifting toward the USSR but which later came to be viewed as imperial overreach, setting the stage for later collapse. The chapter concludes with the author’s experiences in the late 1970s in contacts with Soviet dissidents, refuseniks, and Moscow’s unofficial artist community.