At bottom, detente failed because the two sides had incompatible expectations.35 The United States saw the easing of tensions as a way to maintain the status quo in the face of American weakness; the Soviets saw it as a way to attain equal status and gains in the Third World. Although a variety of calculations, miscalculations, and accidents were at work, even under the best circumstances detente could not have brought the Cold War to an end because the United States and the Soviet Union, being founded on such different principles, were inherently a threat to each other as long as they were what they were. For the Soviets, there were then real limits beyond which detente could progress if it meant restraining itself in the Third World; the policies that were dictated by the Soviet conception of its interests and duties meant that it would be hard to maintain good relations for long in the face of US resistance.
It remains unclear whether Nixon and Kissinger pursued detente in truly cooperative terms and thought that it might be semi-permanent. This is the view expounded by Kissinger in the first two volumes of his memoirs and vigorously attacked by Raymond Garthoff, who argues that the administration never ceased pursuing unilateral advantage. 36 In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, however, Kissinger dropped his earlier stance and endorsed Garthoff s, using the third volume of his memoirs to argue that he saw detente as a way ofgaining breathing space until the public would support a harder line, and claiming that the United States made no concessions in the hope of establishing long-run cooperation. For our purposes, what is crucial is that Kissinger’s second view implies that the USSR remained a revolutionary power, driven by its ideology and identity. Whether or not the latter view was correct, to the extent that American policymakers believed it, detente in fact could not have been permanent.
From the start, detente was opposed by neoconservatives who argued not only that the United States was getting the worse part of the bargain, but that the very notion of detente was flawed because it abandoned America’s deepest ideals of supporting the forces of freedom throughout the world. Although some of the critics were opportunistic in seeking their own domestic political advantage, their stance was effective because it represented a strong reaffirmation of American identity and the parallel claim that the Soviets were driven by theirs. A detente that accepted a Communist Soviet Union was a betrayal of American values and would at most buy a temporary respite since it could not tame the expansionist Soviet policy that stemmed from its identity. Furthermore, such a policy would sacrifice domestic support because even if Kissinger, Nixon, and Gerald Ford were realists, the bulk of the American population remained truer to traditional American values.
Jimmy Carter’s presidency embodied and magnified the contradictions in Kissinger’s views. On the one hand, Carter and some of his advisers thought the United States had exaggerated the Soviet threat and believed that there was a great deal of common interest that could be realized through diplomacy - the United States and Soviet Union were, after all, normal states. On the other hand, he and others in his administration believed that the Soviet Union would press the United States wherever possible throughout the world, yet was vulnerable because its domestic system, which drove its foreign policy, was increasingly recognized as a failure. While this view was skeptical about detente, it recognized that a crucial lever could be American insistence that the Soviet Union grant human rights to its citizens. It appears that Carter’s stance here was simultaneously instrumental and principled.
But even had Carter ignored human rights, detente probably would have failed. The Soviets saw a number of opportunities to support movements and states in Africa that they believed to be progressive, if not revolutionary. The United States was being forced to grudgingly acknowledge Soviet equality, and even if the Soviet moves harmed relations with the United States, this was a price worth paying. Some of the gains came in traditional power-political terms, but at least as important was the Soviet feeling that they could not be true Soviets if they abandoned the progressive cause. This played a role in the dispatch of troops to Afghanistan that gave the coup de grace to detente. The potential loss was not only of a client on their borders, but that a potentially socialist state would revert to the forces of reaction.
World History
