The Johnson administration sent U.S. combat troops to
South Vietnam in 1965 in an effort to prevent the expansion
of communism in Southeast Asia. Washington’s
primary concern, however, was not Moscow but Beijing.
By the mid-1960s, U.S. officials viewed the Soviet Union
as an essentially conservative power, more concerned
with protecting its vast empire than with expanding its
borders. In fact, U.S. policy makers periodically sought
Soviet assistance in achieving a peaceful settlement of
the Vietnam War. As long as Khrushchev was in power,
they found a receptive ear in Moscow. Khrushchev had
sternly advised the North Vietnamese against a resumption
of revolutionary war in South Vietnam.
After October 1964, when Khrushchev was replaced
by a new leadership headed by party chief Leonid Brezhnev
(1906 –1982) and Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin
(1904 –1980), Soviet attitudes about Vietnam became
more ambivalent. On the one hand, the new Soviet leadership
had no desire to see the Vietnam conflict poison
relations between the great powers. On the other hand,
Moscow was anxious to demonstrate its support for the
North Vietnamese to deflect Chinese charges that the
Soviet Union had betrayed the interests of the oppressed
peoples of the world. As a result, Soviet officials voiced
sympathy for the U.S. predicament in Vietnam but put no
pressure on their allies to bring an end to the war. Indeed,
the Soviets became Hanoi’s main supplier of advanced
military equipment in the final years of the war.
Still, Brezhnev and Kosygin continued to pursue the
Khrushchev line of peaceful coexistence with the West
and adopted a generally cautious posture in foreign affairs.
By the early 1970s, a new age in Soviet-American relations
had emerged, often referred to by the French term
détente, meaning a reduction of tensions between the two
sides. One symbol of the new relationship was the Antiballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty, often called SALT I (for
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), signed in 1972, in
which the two nations agreed to limit their missile systems.
Washington’s objective in pursuing such a treaty was to
make it unprofitable for either superpower to believe that
it could win a nuclear exchange by launching a preemptive
strike against the other. U.S. officials believed that a
policy of “equivalence,” in which there was a roughly
equal power balance on each side, was the best way to
avoid a nuclear confrontation. Détente was pursued in
other ways as well. When President Nixon took office in
1969, he sought to increase trade and cultural contacts
with the Soviet Union. His purpose was to set up a series
of “linkages” in U.S.-Soviet relations that would persuade
Moscow of the economic and social benefits of maintaining
good relations with the West.
A symbol of that new relationship was the Helsinki
Agreement of 1975. Signed by the United States, Canada,
and all European nations on both sides of the Iron
Curtain, these accords recognized all borders in Central
and Eastern Europe established since the end of World
War II, thereby formally acknowledging for the first time
the Soviet sphere of influence. The Helsinki Agreement
also committed the signatory powers to recognize and
protect the human rights of their citizens, a clear effort by
the Western states to improve the performance of the Soviet
Union and its allies in that area.
World History
