ROBERT D. SCHULZINGER
President Richard M. Nixon declared in his inaugural address on January 20, 1969, that "after a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiations" with the Soviet Union.533 Privately, he told the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, that in the United States "whenever elections approached, political leaders were tempted to take a belligerent anti-Communist line," but that Nixon himself "did not consider such an approach to be in the interests of world peace or of Soviet-American relations."534
These conciliatory words toward America’s Cold War rival seemed surprising at the time, since Nixon had played important parts in Congress from 1947 to 1952 and as vice president fTom 1953 to 1961 in shaping confrontational American policies toward the Soviet Union and Communism. As president, Nixon put aside his earlier criticism of the Communist system, choosing to focus instead on expanding areas ofcommon interest between the Cold War rivals in order to promote what he characterized as a "structure of peace." He developed personal relationships with Soviet leaders, and the United States and the Soviet Union reached a series of agreements on arms control, commercial relations, and political cooperation that fostered a fragile detente between them.
Nixon and Henry Kissinger, a former Harvard University professor of government who became his national security adviser, later secretary of state, and his principal foreign-policy lieutenant, believed that the international situation had changed dramatically in the previous decade. The United States and the Soviet Union were no longer the only powers that
Mattered, as Europe and Japan recovered their strength, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) emerged as a growing challenge in the world Communist movement.
Nixon and Kissinger started detente as a recognition of the relative, not absolute, decline of US power and the growth of multipolarity. They responded to European desires for improved economic relations and reduced political tensions with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. They valued state sovereignty, and they believed that international stability required that great powers like the United States and the Soviet Union avoid interfering in the internal affairs of each other. This advocacy of the rights and responsibilities of great powers collided with a growing popular movement for human rights.
Detente succeeded at first, because it reduced popular anxieties about the dangers of war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet even as it enjoyed widespread popularity in the years 1971-73, its foundations were weakened by Nixon’s and Kissinger’s personalities. The two men manipulated others and worked in secrecy. Detente encountered opposition from both those who wanted a more forthright stand against abuses ofhuman rights and those who continued to fear Soviet military power. When Gerald R. Ford became president in 1974, detente was already losing popularity domestically. In the aftermath of the Communist victory in Vietnam, detente suffered even more. In fact, Nixon’s, Kissinger’s, and Ford’s realistic assessment of growing multipolarity did not rest on a belief in US decline. The Helsinki Final Act, so reviled when it was signed in 1975, actually helped set in motion forces that led to the demise of Soviet-style Communism.
World History
