Exploring Ceausescu's warm relationship with the USA: Part 1.

Re-reading Riccardo Orizio's Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, I discovered an interesting little passage about Ceausescu from an interview with Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's former Moscow-friendly communist dictator. The author inquires about Jaruzelski's feelings on Reagan. His reply:

"My feelings about Reagan have been completely different at different times. At the beginning my opinion of his was decidedly negative. The sanctions he imposed on Poland after martial law were very painful. And for me, Reagan was simply a hypocrite. He recieved the Romanian dictator Ceausescu, who had been operating martial law for twenty years, with full honours, yet it took him only a few hours to decree an embargo against us when we were in the difficult position of having to declare a state of war."

I've never heard a sound, sensible explanation for the US government's warm treatment of Romania during the early Cold War. Yes, Ceausesu refused to take orders from Moscow so that he could implement his more stringent, nationalist version of communism (including a personality cult) at home, but this policy did not begin with Ceausescu, as Matei Calinescu, Thomas G. Pavel, Vladimir Tismaneanu, and Dorin Tudoran point out in an article for The New York Review of Books [1].

In fact, Ceausescu's predecessor, Gheorghiu-Dedj, was the one who began the policy of distance from Moscow-- how else to garner even the slightest support from a population in which no native communist movement existed, a population which feared and hated  "the Russians" beyond measure, a relatively new nation complicated by strong regional identity and a powerful postwar nationalism? Ceausescu merely stepped in and stepped up the movement for nationalist communism with his own additions, including the personality-cult inspired by a visit to North Korea, a deification of Romanian folk culture, and an aggressive purge of religious and intellectual influences that might tempt Romanians away from the new gods-- Ceausescu and the Party.

In this same article, Calinescu et al. suggest the true impetus for the Romanian revolution came with Gorbachev's renunciation of the Brezhnev doctrine. So long as Romanians believed the Soviets might send troops and take over in the case of local dissent or revolt, Ceausescu was safe. For few Romanians would prefer a Soviet dicatorship to their own homegrown, horrible one. To quote:

Paradoxically, even though Ceausescu became famous in the West as an anti-Soviet maverick, his horrendous regime was in fact protected, particularly during the Brezhnev years, but also thereafter, by the possibility of a Soviet intervention. Only during the last two or three years of utter desperation was a Soviet intervention—thought to be the only way to remove Ceausescu from power—contemplated with some ambiguous, rather bitter hope by some Romanians. Fortunately, such an intervention, which would have been a catastrophe for the national psyche of the Romanian people, was neither possible (from the point of view of the Russians) nor necessary.

So why did the Reagan administration choose to reward Ceausescu with Most Favored Nation status if not even his "maverick-dom" (pace Sarah Palin and John McCain) was original? [2] Part of the answer to this can be found in Romania's pro-Western trade policy. In 1971 Romania joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the following year it won admission to the IMF and the World Bank. In 1975 Romania gained most-favored-nation trading status from the United States. According to this country report on Romanian trade policy, things got interesting in the 1980's:

During the 1980s, however, trade relations with the West soured. Ceausescu blamed the IMF and "unjustifiably high" interest rates charged by Western banks for his country's economic plight. For its part, the West charged Romania with unfair trade practices, resistance to needed economic reform, and human rights abuses. In 1988 the United States suspended most-favored-nation status, and the following year, the EEC declined to negotiate a new trade agreement with Romania. Meanwhile, attempts to increase trade with the less-developed countries had also met with disappointment. After peaking in 1981 at nearly 29 percent of total foreign trade, relations with these countries deteriorated, largely because the Iran-Iraq War had cut off delivery of crude oil from Iran. 

Meanwhile, members of the Romanian diaspora, like Juliana Geron Pilon, protested Romania's MFN status in various policy papers, articles, and essays. Pilon noted that even the US ambassador to Romania, David Funderbunk, considered the MFN status to be a "swindle". [3] Diaspora members tended to focus on human rights issues in light of the Helsinki agreement-- at the time, it was a highly effective way in which to capture the US government and media attention, not to mention that it was a precondition for MFN status. Ceausescu's creation of the dread Securitate in 1966 did not earn him friends among the emigre community; this Securitate gained more power over time and made phone conversations with relatives and family in Romania nearly impossible during the 1980's [4]. The lobbying to end Romania's MFN status was eventually successful in only the most paltry sense of the word. On June 5, 1988, President Reagan announced that Romania's MFN status would not be renewed [5]. 

Text notes:

1. Gheorghiu-Dej, who ruthlessly eliminated his rivals (Ana Pauker, Teohari Georgescu, Vasile Luca) or savagely murdered them (Lucretiu Patrascanu), and who rejected the de-Stalinization initiated by the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1956), was actually the originator of "national Communism" in Romania, as a means to preserve the Stalinist structure of the party and its rule. Profiting from the Sino-Soviet split, it was Gheorghiu-Dej who started the nationalistic policies which Ceausescu continued, acquiring the reputation of an anti-Kremlin maverick. It was also Gheorghiu-Dej who, in his opposition to the Russians, and in order to acquire a measure of badly needed popularity, started the quasi-liberalization of the mid-1960s, from which Ceausescu profited to consolidate his power until 1971, the year when he felt secure enough to launch his own version of a Chinese-style mini-cultural revolution. 
2. For a detailed description of the Romanian effort to obtain and keep MFN status, see Romania versus the United Status by Roger Kirk and Mircea Raceanu.
3. See the excellent timeline of Ceausescu's activities at moreorless.com.
4. I remember the phone cutting off constantly. My mother would spend hours trying to make a call to her sister or her father-- 90% of the time, no luck. And when she did get connected, the calls were brief and circumspect. I remember watching her face contort as she tried to think of convoluted ways in which to inquire about health, food, living conditions, etc.
5. Fearing a bruise to his image as all-powerful ruler, Ceausescu apparently indiciated Romania's decision to renounce its MFN status prior to the passage of US legislation. There's something to be said for yelling, "I'm not playing" when it is clear you are going to lose. See Minton F. Goldman, Revolution and Change in Central and Eastern Europe, p. 274.