Detente was a cooperative superpower effort to reverse this trend, but also a competitive superpower attempt to regain the advantage in the Cold War. It
Was, thus, the first grand strategy to reflect common interests in Washington, Moscow, and the capitals of their respective allies - beyond the obvious desirability of avoiding a nuclear holocaust. But detente was never meant to end the Cold War: instead its designers sought to set rules for what they all understood would continue to be a contest. What none had anticipated was that setting rules would sharpen the conflict.
By 1969, all sides had an interest in cooling off the Cold War. The Americans were failing in Vietnam. The Soviet Union had suppressed the "Prague spring," but only by alienating ideological allies elsewhere. Sensing the unlikelihood of reunification, West and East Germans had begun easing tensions across the walls that divided them. And in China, Mao Zedong had convinced himself that the Soviet Union was now a greater threat to his country’s safety than the United States would ever be: his diplomatic revolution was about to overshadow - though not yet end - his cultural revolution.
These converging circumstances made it possible for the new president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, and his assistant for national security affairs, Henry Kissinger, to make the most radical shift in American grand strategy since NSC-68. They had several objectives: to get the United States out of Vietnam without appearing to have been forced out; to engage the Soviet Union in negotiations on arms control, economic contacts, and the management of Third World conflicts; to open relations with China as a way of applying pressure in Moscow, and to restore presidential authority at home. By the end of 1972, it all seemed to have worked: Nixon had traveled to Beijing and Moscow, signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the USSR, come close to a Vietnam ceasefire, and won reelection triumphantly. It looked as though the Americans had become grand strategic wizards.
But the wizardry rested on shaky foundations. The Nixon-Kissinger strategy required a carefully controlled "linkage" of inducements with constraints - of sticks with carrots - leaving little room for leaks to the press, complaints from critics, or congressional oversight. It implied an equal distribution of calculable benefits to the United States and the Soviet Union, but their rivalry had long been propelled by incalculable fears. It expected saintliness on the part of the superpowers - that they would resist Third World temptations - but it did nothing to prevent Third World regimes from continuing to offer them. And it conflated stability with justice: the relief that would come from lessening the danger of nuclear war, Nixon and Kissinger believed, would overcome whatever resentments would arise from locking the Cold War stalemate into place.
None of these assumptions held up. Domestic critics assailed the Nixon administration for giving away too much on strategic arms, and for not having done enough for human rights. The president’s insistence on centralizing power led to abuses of power, with the Watergate crisis forcing his resignation in August 1974. Meanwhile, Nasser’s successor in Egypt, Anwar Sadat, had tempted the United States by expelling Soviet advisers from his country: when Washington failed to seize this opportunity, he attacked Israel, forcing an American-imposed settlement from which Kissinger excluded the USSR - a bitter humiliation for Moscow. That left Kremlin leaders with little sympathy for Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, when he and Kissinger tried to save South Vietnam fTom a North Vietnamese invasion in the spring of 1975, or when they sought to prevent Cuban and Soviet intervention on behalfofMarxist rebels in the former Portuguese colony of Angola later that year.
American unilateralism in the Middle East was not the only reason, though, that the Soviet Union went on the offensive in the Third World. Brezhnev worked hard for detente and wanted it to succeed; but within the Soviet Communist Party and especially the emerging regional institutes - Moscow’s equivalent of think tanks - a new generation of experts was insisting that this was the time to seize the initiative. The United States had shown itself unexpectedly irresolute in Vietnam. The USSR now had the naval and air strength to project power into distant parts ofthe world. The Cuban revolution had shown that Marxism-Leninism could thrive in "developing" countries, and the Cubans themselves had become adept at playing Ho Chi Minh’s game: embracing causes - Angola was an example - which Moscow could not easily disavow. Perhaps history was again moving toward revolution, this time in Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and Latin America.
So while the plans of Nixon and Kissinger, by the mid-1970s, had fallen into disarray, so too had those of the Soviet Union. The international Communist movement had long ceased to be monolithic; now leadership in Moscow was becoming pluralistic. Detente, which began as a joint superpower effort to stabilize the Cold War, instead destabilized the priorities of both superpowers. It was not even clear anymore what each side’s grand strategy was, much less how one might measure its effectiveness. The resulting confusion left a vacuum in which the long-obscured ecology of the Cold War - the environment within which all of its antagonists operated - began to manifest itself.
World History
