Détente with the Soviet Union
Détente refers to the period of relaxed tensions and improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during the early 1970s, primarily characterized by a series of nuclear arms treaties. This approach emerged against the backdrop of the Cold War, which had previously fostered a climate of intense rivalry and military confrontation. The initial major agreement, SALT I, was signed in 1972, marking a significant diplomatic effort to control the arms race and reduce the threat of nuclear war. However, the concept of détente was met with skepticism and criticism, as many perceived it as a means for the Soviets to strengthen their military might while suppressing dissent within their own borders.
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, various treaties were attempted, including SALT II and later arms reduction talks under President Reagan. The legacy of détente was complex; it fostered some progress in arms control but was also marred by ongoing human rights violations in the Soviet Union. The eventual rise of Mikhail Gorbachev introduced new dynamics to the détente process, including a focus on openness and restructuring in Soviet society. Ultimately, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 signified a transformative shift in global politics, highlighting the enduring relevance of arms control and international cooperation in the post-Cold War era.
Détente with the Soviet Union
Date May 26, 1973-December 26, 1991
An important transitional stage in U.S.-Soviet relations marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
Locale Washington, D.C.; Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)
Key Figures
Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982), general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1966-1982George H. W. Bush (b. 1924), president of the United States, 1989-1993Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), president of the United States, 1977-1981Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin (b. 1919), Soviet ambassador to the United NationsMikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), general secretary of the Communist Party, 1985-1991, and president of the Soviet Union, 1990-1991Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909-1989), Soviet foreign minister, 1957-1985Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), special assistant for national security affairs, 1969-1975, and U.S. secretary of state, 1973-1977Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung; 1893-1976), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, 1935-1976Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), president of the United States, 1969-1974Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), president of the United States, 1981-1989Eduard Shevardnadze (b. 1928), Soviet foreign minister, 1985-1990
Summary of Event
When détente (literally, “relaxation”) became the prevailing framework of U.S.-Soviet relations in the early 1970’s, neither its meaning nor its implications were clear. On the surface, its most important result was a series of nuclear arms agreements—with corollaries in trade, education, space research, and more—between the United States and the Soviet Union, beginning with the first treaty that came out of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), signed by President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in May, 1972. At a deeper level, it reflected a new and more pragmatic turn in the long history of the Cold War; among European and Middle Eastern peoples, détente aggravated fears that the two superpowers would freeze their strategic options, thus precluding genuinely credible deterrence to protect them. By its very nature, détente, as manifested in SALT I, was encouraging to some and troublesome to others. Two other SALT treaties followed, culminating in the SALT III pact. SALT III was signed by President Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev in 1979 but was never ratified by the U.S. Senate because of Soviet suppression of Jews and dissidents.
From the beginning, the SALT treaties, and even the notion of détente between the vastly different nuclear age superpowers, appeared contradictory and one-sided to those who considered it another ruse by the communists to lull the United States into dangerous passivity. Others, notably Senator Scoop Jackson and exiled Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, believed that détente lowered the Soviet Union’s risks of conflict while allowing it to continue building up its military and suppressing all political and ideological opposition at home. That the Soviet Union signed the 1975 Helsinki Accords, thus ostensibly endorsing the section called “Basket III” that theoretically guaranteed basic human and civil rights in the contracting countries, did not convince those who questioned the Soviets’ sincerity.
In the longer historical perspective, détente was a significant chapter in the history of global politics. Fundamental changes have marked the world of diplomacy in the twentieth century, including a steady and dramatic reduction in the number of true world powers. In 1900, the power bases in world politics were multipolar: Germany, Austria-Hungary, czarist Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States all were engaged in empire building. Similarly, between the two world wars, Nazi Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the temporarily isolated United States occupied prominent positions as world powers. World War II, however, narrowed the field effectively to two major world powers—the United States and the Soviet Union—thus marking the advent of a bipolar world after 1945.
Bipolarism dominated the diplomacy of the Cold War years following World War II. Although the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin’s regime had been allied with the United States and Great Britain during the war, it was clear to most contemporaries of the war years that the alliance was one of convenience. At war’s end, the world split into two basic camps, one allied with the Soviet Union, one with the United States. Tension increased markedly as the Communist bloc was expanded by force in Eastern Europe and China. By the 1950’s, the Cold War had erupted into a real conflict in Korea (1950-1953) and in the military alliances of Western nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Eastern nations in the Warsaw Pact. Both sides ultimately were backed by the awesome power of nuclear weapons.
The Cold War, with its periodic military outbursts (the Bay of Pigs, Laos, Vietnam), had been characterized by military expenditures on both sides of the conflict throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. This arms race had been the most massive in all of human history. The Soviet Union had given top social and economic priorities to military spending during these decades, at the obvious expense of civilian, consumer-oriented production. At the same time, the United States had given top priority to its defense expenditures, at the expense of its own social needs. This had led since the late 1960’s to attempts by both Soviet and U.S. leaders to effect a rapprochement, or détente. The primary aim of this policy was to reduce the arms race and military tension in the world between the United States and the Soviet Union. In general, mistrust prevailed and worked against thorough cooperation. As long as the Soviet Union was ruled by an oppressive communist political structure, the United States and other supporters of détente had serious reservations, as did the Soviet leadership. Any concessions by one side or the other were viewed from the framework of national rather than mutual interest. Therein lay the greatest weakness of détente.
The first active application of the détente policy originated during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Although Nixon clearly initiated the policy, detailed negotiations were the work of Henry Kissinger, the key diplomatic figure of the Nixon presidency. Kissinger came to the administration from an academic background. A German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Kissinger had fully assimilated himself through the U.S. Army and as a student and faculty member at Harvard, where he gradually developed into an activist scholar who sought to influence foreign policy with his theory. He came to the public limelight through his friendship with Nelson A. Rockefeller. Based on his loyalty to Richard Nixon, once he entered Nixon’s administration, Kissinger came to dominate the foreign policy of the Nixon years, both as national security adviser and as secretary of state.
Nixon and Kissinger both had excellent credentials for redirecting United States policy toward the Soviet Union. Both were conservatives and archfoes of communism. If a liberal Democratic administration had proposed détente in earlier decades, it likely would have faced a massive Cold War onslaught in public opinion. Liberals, in effect, could not push for Soviet-U.S. agreements without suffering politically. A conservative such as Nixon, on the other hand, could strike up negotiations with the Russians without fanning domestic fears that he was “soft on communism.”
The key concept launched by Kissinger and carried through in the presidency of Jimmy Carter was the insistence of the United States on linkage in any agreements with the Soviet Union. “Linkage” meant that any trade agreement, exchange program, or credit—in effect, any concession—must be accompanied by (linked to) changes in Soviet policy. During the Kissinger years, the United States insisted on the elimination of ideology from Soviet foreign policy decisions. In negotiating the first treaties of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALTs I and II), the United States used its improved relations with Chairman Mao Zedong’s China as leverage with Brezhnev’s negotiators. In addition, the United States obtained Soviet aid in ending the Vietnam War through negotiations by tying the negotiations to SALT’s prospects.
After SALT I, the United States linked ties with the Soviets to human rights for people in the Soviet sphere, but this effort bore little fruit until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985. Official commitment to détente waned after Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. His successor, Gerald R. Ford, visited the Soviet Union and continued the SALT negotiating process, but with less success than Nixon and Kissinger had had. President Carter’s policy of upholding and reaffirming human rights had few tangible results in the short run, which contributed to the Senate’s refusal to ratify SALT II. The Soviet Union further eroded détente by deploying large numbers of its new, mobile SS-20 missiles targeted on all major European cities. That, more than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979, disillusioned Carter and prompted him to cancel U.S. participation in the Olympics in Moscow in 1980.
Linkage, the cornerstone of détente, seemed to have reached its limits. The Soviet Union would not eliminate ideological considerations in either its domestic or foreign policies until the advent of Gorbachev as Soviet leader in March, 1985, and even then, only on a limited basis. Despite the 1975 Helsinki Accords, Soviet suppression of dissidents continued almost unabated until Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) opened the door to glasnost (publicity or openness), which invited public discussion and criticism of government policies. Under Gorbachev, détente took new turns, notably a more intense U.S. and Soviet interest in arms reduction. President Ronald Reagan, an old-style Cold Warrior, moved from his first term’s blistering rhetoric, such as calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” to a more accommodating position. This was reinforced by his projected Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, popularly known as the Star Wars initiative), which aimed to protect the world from nuclear weapons through an elaborate system of space- and land-based lasers that would provide a shield against incoming missiles.
Reagan proposed the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, or START, to replace the faltering SALT agreements, but a series of Reagan-Gorbachev summits in the mid-1980’s foundered on Soviet fears that SDI would neutralize their nuclear deterrence and violate earlier SALT agreements. Nevertheless, the détente process continued as Gorbachev and his popular foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, pursued arms reductions, and the Reagan and subsequent George H. W. Bush administrations remained open to credible, adequately guaranteed and equitable reductions. The most important tangible products were the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of late 1987, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons; the first START agreement (START I) of July, 1991; and the START II agreement of January, 1993, negotiated by Bush and implemented early in the administration of President Bill Clinton. The Soviet Union was officially dissolved on December 26, 1991, with its East European Warsaw Pact allies already in disarray as communist regimes crumbled in that region. Détente outlived the Soviet Union, and the vision of a world safe from nuclear war again gained ground.
Significance
More than a declining Soviet system and U.S. vigilance, however, contributed to this radically new and unexpected twist of history. In retrospect, it is clearly important that Gorbachev and Shevardnadze made substantive changes of a scope that few would have believed possible in the early days of détente. The role that détente played in the overall process is not easy to estimate. What is clearer is that the long détente process contributed to new thinking about world peace and the national interests of the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allies. If the future of arms control has been uncertain in the post-Soviet period, there is little doubt that it will remain a pivotal concern of most nations, because of the continuing existence of thousands of nuclear weapons and the possibility that they might fall into the hands of states less restrained by Cold War considerations than the United States and the Soviet Union were for decades.
Bibliography
Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. Updated ed. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1991. A personal account of the origins and meaning of perestroika by its principal proponent. Contains sections on world peace and Soviet-U.S. relations, in which Gorbachev supports cooperation and arms reduction.
Kissinger, Henry A. American Foreign Policy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. Kissinger’s views of U.S. foreign policy and the global balance of power, reflecting his historical, issue-specific approach to diplomacy.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Diplomacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. A comprehensive analysis of diplomacy in early modern and recent periods. Extensive material on the period of détente and support for the approach, despite detractors’ arguments.
Landau, David. Kissinger: The Uses of Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. A sympathetic biography by a colleague and friend. Presents Kissinger as one of the most creative modern diplomatic theorists, with both academic and experiential credentials.
Loth, Wilfried. Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente, 1950-1991. New York: Palgrave, 2002. A thoroughly researched examination of the Cold War, including how it was contained and finally overcome.
Nixon, Richard M. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. Reprint. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. A comprehensive personal account of Nixon’s life and public career, in which the strongest elements are his foreign policy and détente. Shows his belief in a practical approach to peace, marked by mutual pragmatic agreements to avoid a nuclear war.
Ulam, Adam B. “Forty Years of Troubled Coexistence.” Foreign Affairs 64, no. 1 (Fall, 1985): 12-32. A masterful overview of détente, with a scholarly analysis of SALT I and its aftermath. Argues that détente was essentially pragmatic; rejects the notion that détente was simply a Soviet ruse.