Thirty-five years ago, on February 22, 1980, U.S. Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr. (R-Md.) issued a statement from the Senate floor and urged the U.S. to pre-empt the Soviet Union’s expected post-Afghanistan peace offense.
Sen. Mathias recommended placing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the top of the State Department’s review of U.S. policy at a meeting of the 35 Helsinki Accords nations later that year in Madrid, because “it is an act which menaces all Europe and all principles the Helsinki Accords promulgated.”
In a separate letter to Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Sen. Mathias said, “it is important that the United States do all within its power to teach the Soviet Union that history cannot be rewritten with impunity; that it must face up to the consequences of its acts in Afghanistan.” The Soviet Union “every day violates the spirit of the Helsinki undertakings,” adding that the USSR “defies the Helsinki principles,” and the Madrid meeting should lay bare “the Soviet record of defiance” before the world.
In Madrid, Sen. Mathias said, the United States “must hold the Soviet Union to account for its continuing savage disregard of the Helsinki undertakings on individual freedom… But beyond the well-known Helsinki provisions on human rights and the guarantees Leonid Brezhnev signed to refrain from the threat or use of force, to respect the inviolability of frontiers, to refrain from occupying other nations’ territories or interfering in their national affairs, and to fulfill ‘in good faith obligations under international law.’”
“The promise to respect international law and the United Nations Charter is not confined by geography,” he added. “And it is that promise – among others which the Soviet Union violated in Afghanistan.”
Sen. Mathias criticized the Carter administration’s inability to frame a strategic foreign policy for the United States.
Source: “Sen. Mathias scores Soviets on Afghanistan, human rights,” The Ukrainian Weekly, March 9, 1980.