Foreign and defense policies
The first crisis for Brezhnev's regime came in 1968, with the attempt by the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia, under Alexander Dubček, to liberalize the Communist system (Prague Spring). In July, Brezhnev publicly denounced the Czechoslovak leadership as "revisionist" and "anti-Soviet". Despite his hardline public statements, Brezhnev was not the one pushing hardest for the use of military force in Czechoslovakia when the issue was before the Politburo. Archival evidence suggests that Brezhnev initially sought a temporary compromise with the reform-friendly Czechoslovak government when their dispute came to a head. However, in the end, Brezhnev concluded that he would risk growing turmoil domestically and within the Eastern bloc if he abstained or voted against Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia.
As pressure mounted on him within the Soviet leadership to "re-install a revolutionary government" within Prague, Brezhnev ordered the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Dubček's removal in August. Following the Soviet intervention, he met with Czechoslovak reformer Bohumil Šimon (politik KSČ), then a member of the Politburo of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and said, "If I had not voted for Soviet armed assistance to Czechoslovakia you would not be sitting here today, but quite possibly I wouldn't either." The invasion led to a drop in the belief in the Communist system among Czechoslovaks and prompted a rise of Eurocommunism, which was critical of the Soviet Union.
Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union initially supported North Vietnam out of "fraternal solidarity". However, as the war escalated, Khrushchev urged the North Vietnamese leadership to give up the quest of liberating South Vietnam. After Khrushchev's ousting, Brezhnev resumed aiding the communist resistance in Vietnam. Under Brezhnev's leadership, the Soviet Union would ultimately ship $450 million worth of arms annually to North Vietnam over the course of the war.
The Lyndon B. Johnson administration privately discussed a diplomatic end to the conflict with the Soviets. Once that failed due to North Vietnamese rejection, they pursued a treaty on arms control, which did not materialize because of infighting in the Kremlin and the escalation of the war. Further attempts at reconciliation led to the Glassboro Summit Conference in the U.S., which, despite a friendly atmosphere, did not lead to any breakthroughs. U.S. President Richard Nixon visited Moscow in 1972 to, among other things, negotiate on the Vietnam War, but nothing was agreed upon. Ultimately, years of Soviet military aid to North Vietnam finally bore fruit when collapsing morale among U.S. forces compelled their complete withdrawal from South Vietnam by 1973, thereby making way for the country's unification under communist rule two years later.
Soviet foreign relations with the People's Republic of China quickly deteriorated after Nikita Khrushchev's attempts to reach a rapprochement with more liberal Eastern European states such as Yugoslavia and with the West. When Brezhnev consolidated his power base in the 1960s, China was descending into crisis because of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which led to the decimation of the Chinese Communist Party and other ruling offices. Brezhnev, a pragmatic politician who promoted the idea of "stabilization", could not comprehend why Mao would start such a "self-destructive" drive to finish the socialist revolution.
In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet leadership proclaimed the Brezhnev Doctrine: any threat to "socialist rule" in any state of the Soviet Bloc was a threat to all of them, and would justify the intervention. This new policy increased tension not only with the Eastern Bloc, but also the Asian communist states. By 1969, relations with other communist countries had deteriorated to a level where Brezhnev was not even able to gather five of the fourteen ruling communist parties to attend an international conference in Moscow. In the aftermath of the failed conference, the Soviets concluded, "there was no leading center of the international communist movement." Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine in the late 1980s, as the Kremlin accepted the peaceful overthrow of Soviet rule in all its satellite countries in Eastern Europe.
Later in 1969, the deterioration in bilateral relations culminated in the Sino–Soviet border conflict. The Sino–Soviet split had chagrined Premier Alexei Kosygin a great deal, and for a while he refused to accept its irrevocability; he briefly visited Beijing in 1969 in an effort to ease the tension between the USSR and China. By the early 1980s, both the Chinese and the Soviets were issuing statements calling for a normalization of relations between the two states. The conditions given to the Soviets by the Chinese were the reduction of Soviet military presence on the Sino–Soviet border, the withdrawal of Soviet troops in Afghanistan and the Mongolian People's Republic; furthermore, China also wanted the Soviets to end their support for the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Brezhnev responded in his March 1982 speech in Tashkent where he called for the normalization of relations. Full Sino–Soviet normalization of relations would take years, until the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power.
During his eighteen years as Leader of the USSR, Brezhnev's signature foreign policy innovation was the promotion of détente. According to Melvyn P. Leffler, Brezhnev’s geopolitical vision was shaped by his memories of the Second World War which led him to remain anxious about a war of such scale breaking out once more. In 1974, he confided to U.S. President Gerald Ford that he did not want to ‘inflict that on the people once again.’.’
While sharing some similarities with approaches pursued during the Khrushchev Thaw, Brezhnev's policy significantly differed from Khrushchev's precedent in two ways. The first was that it was more comprehensive and wide-ranging in its aims, and included signing agreements on arms control, crisis prevention, East–West trade, European security and human rights. The second part of the policy was based on the importance of equalizing the military strength of the United States and the Soviet Union. Defense spending under Brezhnev between 1965 and 1970 increased by 40%, and annual increases continued thereafter. In the year of Brezhnev's death in 1982, 12% of GNP was spent on the military. This build up led numerous observers – including Western ones – to argue that by the mid-1970s the USSR had surpassed the United States as the world's strongest military power.
At the 1972 Moscow Summit, Brezhnev and U.S. president Richard Nixon signed the SALT I Treaty. The first part of the agreement set limits on each side's development of nuclear missiles. The second part of the agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, banned both countries from designing systems to intercept incoming missiles so neither the U.S. or the Soviet Union would be emboldened to strike the other without fear of nuclear retaliation.
In 1979, Henry Kissinger acknowledged that his policy of détente was faltering by the mid-1970s. The détente had rested on the assumption that a "linkage" of some type could be found between the two countries, with the U.S. hoping that the signing of SALT I and an increase in Soviet–U.S. trade would stop the aggressive growth of communism in the third world. This did not happen, as evidenced by Brezhnev's continued military support for the communist guerillas fighting against the U.S. during the Vietnam War.
After Gerald Ford lost the presidential election to Jimmy Carter, American foreign policies became more overtly aggressive in vocabulary towards the Soviet Union and the communist world. Attempts were also made to stop funding for repressive anti-communist governments and organizations the United States supported. While at first standing for a decrease in all defense initiatives, the later years of Carter's presidency would increase spending on the U.S. military. When Brezhnev authorized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Carter, following the advice of his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, denounced the intervention, describing it as the "most serious danger to peace since 1945". The U.S. stopped all grain exports to the Soviet Union and boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow. The Soviet Union responded by boycotting the 1984 Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles.
During Brezhnev's rule, the Soviet Union reached the peak of its political and strategic power in relation to the United States. As a result of the limits agreed to by both superpowers in the first SALT Treaty, the Soviet Union obtained parity in nuclear weapons with the United States for the first time in the Cold War. Additionally, as a result of negotiations during the Helsinki Accords, Brezhnev succeeded in securing the legitimization of Soviet hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe.
After the communist revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, authoritarian actions forced upon the populace by the Communist regime led to the Afghan civil war, with the mujahideen leading the popular backlash against the regime. To stabilize the situation, Afghanistan's leader Nur Muhammad Taraki visited Moscow and asked for a military intervention in March 1979. Brezhnev was against it and was ready only to send an additional 500 civilian and military specialists, doubling the current number. Taraki visited Moscow again in September, where Brezhnev cautioned him that his confrontation with another Afghanistan leader, Hafizullah Amin, could damage the revolutionary cause and urged for a reconciliation. Shortly after that, Taraki was assassinated on Amin's order. This, together with the Soviet desire to assert its influence in Central Asia, were the factors that led the Soviet Union to intervene.
The decision to invade Afghanistan was taken unanimously in December 1979 by the Politburo leadership, an unsubstantiated KGB report that Amin was a CIA agent was used as a justification. German historian Susanne Schattenberg writes that Brezhnev was no longer in charge of foreign policy due to his deteriorating health condition, allowing other members of the Politburo to lead him. The operation was expected to be swift and generate little opposition from the USA. The initial invasion was successful, and in February 1980, the Soviets started to consider withdrawal, with Brezhnev agreeing that it would take a year or two. Ultimately, the war dragged on far longer, lasting nearly a decade and involving hundreds of thousands of troops.
In the aftermath of the Prague Spring's suppression, Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union had the right to interfere in the internal affairs of its satellites to "safeguard socialism". This became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, although it was really a restatement of existing Soviet policy, as enacted by Khrushchev in Hungary in 1956. Brezhnev reiterated the doctrine in a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party on 13 November 1968:
When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.
Later in 1980, a political crisis emerged in Poland with the emergence of the Solidarity movement. By the end of October, Solidarity had 3 million members, and by December, had 9 million. In a public opinion poll organised by the Polish government, 89% of the respondents supported Solidarity. With the Polish leadership split on what to do, the majority did not want to impose martial law, as suggested by Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Soviet Union and other states of the Eastern Bloc were unsure how to handle the situation, but Erich Honecker of East Germany pressed for military action. In a formal letter to Brezhnev, Honecker proposed a joint military measure to control the escalating problems in Poland. A CIA report suggested the Soviet military were mobilizing for an invasion.
In 1980–81 representatives from the Eastern Bloc nations met at the Kremlin to discuss the Polish situation. Brezhnev eventually concluded on 10 December 1981 that it would be better to leave the domestic matters of Poland alone, reassuring the Polish delegates that the USSR would intervene only if asked to. This effectively marked the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Notwithstanding the absence of a Soviet military intervention, Wojciech Jaruzelski ultimately gave in to Moscow's demands by imposing a state of war, the Polish version of martial law, on 13 December 1981.
