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“Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden”: the United States, the Horn of Africa and the Demise of Detente

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“Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden”: the United States, the Horn of Africa and the Demise of Detente “Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden”: The United States, The Horn of Africa and The Demise of Detente. Louise Prentis Woodroofe London School of Economics and Political Science PhD International History UMI Number: U615656 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U615656 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract The decade of the 1970s, despite representing the era of detente, superficially appeared to be one of Soviet successes and American setbacks. From Vietnam to Angola, the USSR seemed to be gaining Marxist friends in the Third World. Because of this, the Soviet Union wanted the United States to recognize it as an equal power in the world. With such acknowledgement, the Kremlin believed that negotiations to limit the arms race would then be mutually beneficial. On the other hand, President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger interpreted detente as a series of agreements and compromises to draw Moscow into an international system through which the United States could exercise some control over Soviet foreign relations, particularly with the Third World. These differing interpretations would prove to be the inherent flaw of detente and nowhere was this better illustrated than in the conflict in the Horn of Africa in 1974-78. This dissertation aims to trace the responses of the Ford and Carter administrations to events in the Horn of Africa and their ultimate effect on Soviet- American bilateral relations. Through archival research at the Ford and Carter Libraries, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Security Archive, and interviews with key participants, it will discuss the formation of American policy toward the Horn and how disagreements over the region influenced superpower detente, causing President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to claim that “SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden.” My particular focus will diverge from previous authors in its emphasis on the Horn of Africa conflict being the catalyst that exposed the failure of detente and a decisive element in President Carter’s transition from favouring conciliation to choosing confrontation with the Soviet Union. 2 Table of Contents Abstract p. 2 Acknowledgements p. 4 Introduction p. 6 Chapter I. “I Hadn’t the Foggiest Idea.” p. 29 Chapter II. “Why Just ‘Wait and See’?” p. 73 Chapter III. “We Have Expressed Our Concern to the Soviets.” p. 114 Chapter IV. “Where the Two of Us Part”..................................................................... p. 149 Chapter V. “No Soviet Napoleon in Africa” p. 187 Conclusion p. 228 Map of the War in the Ogaden 1977-1978 p. 243 Bibliography p. 244 3 Acknowledgements I owe several institutions and individuals sincere gratitude for their support throughout the research and writing of this dissertation. To begin with, I received financial assistance in the form of studentships and travel grants from the International History Department at the London School of Economics. Additionally, the delightful and generous staff, especially Helmi Raaska, at the Gerald Ford Library provided research help and funding for my visit to Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations kindly awarded me the Samuel F. Bemis Research Travel Grant that aided a research trip to Ethiopia. On that trip, I received generous assistance from Aklilu Yilma at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. Lastly, I would like to thank the staff at the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Georgia, the Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Division in New Haven, Connecticut and the American National Archives I & II in Washington, DC and College Park, MD for their help during my research visits. I am indebted to the entire International History Department at LSE for creating such a stimulating atmosphere to study. The staff, Carol Toms, Nayna Bhatti and Sue Collier provided logistical support, ensuring the process was a smooth one. Additionally, Drs. Nigel Ashton, Robert Boyce and Kristina Spohr-Readman have all read sections of this dissertation and provided valuable council during the writing phase of this project. Moreover, I have been lucky enough to have worked with an amazing group of scholars at the always exciting Cold War Studies Centre. A special thank you goes to the staff, the co-directors Profs Michael Cox and Odd Ame Westad, the managing director Dr 4 Svetozar Rajak, and the other assistants, Lisa Aronsson, Elizabeth Benning, Jeff Byrne, Martin Gonzalez, Tanya Harmer, and Robert Kelley. I am also grateful to the Editorial Board of the journal Cold War History, for giving me the opportunity to act as a co- Managing Editor for several years. Throughout the editing process, many of my peers have read and commented on various sections of the completed work. Dr. Alex Wieland, Tanya Harmer, Stephanie Hare-Cuming, and Erica Wald have all provided generous feedback at different times in the writing process. In particular, Dr. Garret Martin accepted with good humour my requests for last minute proofreading and was always willing to open a bottle of Burgundy with me after particularly frustrating days. Of course, my greatest academic debt is reserved for my thesis adviser, Prof Odd Arne Westad. His own work stands as an inspiration, but I also must thank him for his calm demeanour and ability to guide me to the bigger picture. Finally, I am incredibly grateful to my family for their love and support throughout my academic career and indeed my life. My sister, Molly, opened her home in Washington, DC to both my peers and me as we combed through the area’s archives. My parents, Robert and Sally Woodroofe, will be palpably relieved that I have finished, but I thank them both, for without them, none of this would have been possible. To my family, I dedicate this dissertation. 5 Introduction In 1977, the United States and the Soviet Union were still engaged in an era of detente, a reduction of tensions between the superpowers largely developed at the start of the decade by former US President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bilateral relations were certainly struggling when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as President of the United States in January of the year, but the two countries had every hope that the new American President and the old Soviet leader would inject new life into the proceedings. In addition to problems over issues of trade and human rights, detente had suffered because of disagreements over Third World events in Chile, the Middle East and most recently Angola. Furthermore, the term had become highly controversial in the United States as the successive Republican administrations’ foreign policy came under attack from both the left and the right of the political spectrum to the point that President Ford dropped use of the expression during the 1976 election campaign. Still, Moscow and Washington desired progress on the joint communique on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) signed by Brezhnev and President Gerald Ford in Vladivostok on 23 November 1974 and both sides entered negotiations in good faith. Detente was meant as a comprehensive reduction of tensions, targeting such diverse issues as arms control, trade, technology, the division of Europe and the competition for the Third World. However, Nixon and Brezhnev, because they could not agree on the last issue, coated over their differences and attempted to make progress in areas where they could find accommodation to the other’s point of view. It was because of this ambiguity that detente disintegrated over the Third World. First, the Soviets felt 6 that they lost a key ally in Chile when a Western-leaning military coup ousted the democratically elected socialist President, Salvador Allende in 1973. That same year, the superpowers had relied on the hotline to successfully bring about a ceasefire in the October Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in which US ally Israel had beaten the Soviet Union’s Arab allies. However, the United States had then proceeded to exclude the Soviet Union from subsequent peace talks. Moscow, hoping that detente would mean that Washington would recognize it as an equal power, had felt bruised by these instances, but not to the point that it was ready to denounce detente. For the United States, frustration over the failings of detente came to the forefront in 1975-76 during the next major competition in the Third World. In Angola, with the support of Cuban troops, the Soviets were able to achieve their desired outcome when the Marxist MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) defeated the US backed FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Given that Kissinger had intended detente as a means of influencing Soviet behaviour in the Third World, the case of Angola demonstrated to the US government and the American people that their version of detente was not working. These previous crises in the Third World raised the stakes of the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to the point that neither side was prepared to see another client lose. The scene was thus set for a confrontation over the next Third World flare-up.
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