The period of 1962-75 was when the Central European theater of the Cold War stabilized. The European status quo was affirmed, first, in a series of treaties with two German states, and, finally, by the Helsinki Accords. At the same time, arms-control agreements were signed, which, while not reducing armaments, put significant brakes on the arms race. The fear of nuclear war subsided. East-West ties of all sorts - economic, political, social, and cultural - expanded.
The Soviet leadership seemed to have learned the lessons of the almost disastrous Cuban missile crisis. Brezhnev’s ascendance meant moderation in foreign policy, and the achievement of detente. But detente did not remove competition in the Third World. If anything, Moscow’s growing international prestige, as well as its growing arms sales to developing countries, made the Soviet Union a more attractive ally for Third World leaders at a time when the United States was suffering a major defeat in Vietnam. As more opportunities presented themselves in the Third World, the Soviet Union gradually got sucked into conflicts. When African and Asian leaders employed Marxist revolutionary rhetoric and called themselves countries of a "socialist orientation," the Soviet Union, as the leader of the socialist camp, felt it had to respond.242
The fall of the last colonial empire - the Portuguese - at the very peak of detente triggered just such a Soviet response in Angola. The USSR and the United States came to support two opposing sides in the civil war there, and China also meddled in the strife to thwart Soviet influence in Africa. When the Cubans pushed the Soviets to widen their military involvement in the civil war, and the first battles were won by the faction favored by the Kremlin, Brezhnev took that to confirm that class struggle could proceed in the Third World while superpower relations improved.243 In reality, however, the Soviet role in Angola strengthened the perception in the United States that the Soviet Union was using detente to lull the West into a false sense of security while driving for global dominance.
A truly cooperative relationship between East and West required a deeper consensus on basic values and principles that would not be within reach for another ten years. Such a consensus, as detente had shown, could not come about while the two main ideologies - capitalist democracy and Communism - continued to clash. Only after 1985 would Mikhail Gorbachev transform the Soviet approach to international relations, reining in the ideological clergy and the military-industrial complex, and resisting temptations to expand Soviet power in the Third World. Until then, the conflict would not only continue but worsen. As Robert Gilpin pointed out in his analysis of US-Soviet relations, "in the absence of shared values and interests, the mechanism of peaceful change [had] little chance of success.”4°
40 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 209.
World History
