While Jackson’s amendment to the congressional resolution in support of SALT indicated that not everyone favored Nixon’s approach to the Soviet Union, detente was popular in the United States in 1972. Improved relations between the two superpowers promised a more peaceful and more prosperous world. From 1971 to 1974, the two countries completed more than ten pacts dealing with World War II debts, shipping, taxes, and grain purchases. The most significant of these was the October 1972 bilateral trade agreement under which they opened commercial and trade offices in the other nation’s capital and the Soviet Union promised to pay its $772 million World War II Lend Lease debt over the next thirty years. The United States promised to extend most-favored-nation (MFN) status to the Soviet Union. (MFN status, a position enjoyed by most US trading partners, meant that the United States would grant a most-favored nation the lowest tariffs it extended to any other country.) But the Soviet Union would become a most-favored nation only with congressional approval.
Congress grew increasingly unhappy with Nixon’s conduct of commercial relations with the Soviet Union in 1972 and 1973. Word spread that the Soviet Union had purchased one quarter of the American wheat supply, in part by using commercial credits supplied by the United States under its trade agreement. Wheat prices shot up in the United States and critics charged that the Soviets had engineered a "Great Grain Robbery" with the Nixon administration’s connivance or negligence.
Unhappiness with the grain deal contributed to anti-detente sentiment. This hostility grew when the issue of Soviet mistreatment of its own citizens roused attention. In October 1972, Senator Jackson gained the support of seventy-two of his colleagues to pass an amendment to the Trade Reform Act that would deny the Soviet Union MFN status unless it permitted free emigration of its citizens. The issue of emigration from the Soviet Union had become embroiled in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies gave political and military support to the Arab nations after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Coinciding with this Communist support of the Arab side had been a rise in anti-Semitism throughout the Eastern bloc, which had prompted many Jews within the Soviet Union to seek to emigrate to the United States or Israel. Between 1968 and 1972, the number of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union had exploded from 400 to 35,000 per year. Then, in August 1972, the Kremlin imposed a steep tax amounting to thousands of dollars on anyone wishing to leave.
In April 1973, Congressman Charles Vanik (D-Ohio) introduced in the Houses of Representatives an amendment to the trade bill similar to the one Jackson had sponsored in the Senate. It passed in December by a wide margin. This Jackson-Vanik amendment went through several revisions until both houses of Congress finally adopted it as part of an omnibus Trade Reform Act in 1974. The Soviet Union reacted angrily. It cut the number of Jewish emigrants from 35,000 in 1973 to 20,000 in 1974. It also canceled the 1972 trade agreement with the United States. The Jackson-Vanik amendment directly challenged the Nixon administration’s policy of disregarding the Soviet Union’s internal affairs or its restrictions on human rights. The amendment and the large issue ofthe Middle East played major roles in undermining detente throughout the rest of Nixon’s term.
World History
