The Cold War

by Robert J. McMahon

  Nixon’s arrival in the Soviet Union in May 1972, the first such visit by an American president since Roosevelt attended the Yalta summit twenty-seven years earlier, came close on the heels of his much ballyhooed journey to China that February. The two trips were closely linked in Nixon’s evolving grand strategy. Indeed, prior to the American president’s China trip the Soviets had been dragging their feet in approving the SALT agreement; following Nixon’s dramatic China foray, they acted with dispatch. Clearly, the Soviets did not want the Americans and Chinese to enter into a strategic partnership aimed against them; and, despite US protestations to the contrary, that was precisely what Nixon and Kissinger were seeking to do. It was the mounting Chinese fear of their Russian rivals that made a rapprochement with the once-hated Americans palatable to Mao and his top strategists. They, too, allowed geopolitical considerations to trump ideological convictions. ‘The leaders of China were beyond ideology in their dealings with us,’ observed Kissinger. ‘Their peril had established the absolute primacy of geopolitics.’ Although little of a concrete nature emerged from Nixon’s talks with Mao, Premier Zhou Enlai, and other Chinese officials, the symbolism of the trip proved extremely powerful. It seemed to herald a much less dangerous, less ideologically driven Cold War—and a much more diplomatically flexible and adroit United States.

  The highlight and principal fruit of the Moscow meetings was SALT I, signed on 26 May 1972. It actually comprised two separate agreements. The first, a formal treaty, stipulated that the United States and the Soviet Union could each deploy ABMs at two, but only two, sites. The second part constituted an interim agreement on offensive nuclear weapons. It froze the existing number of ICBMs and SLBMs possessed by each signatory, granting the Soviets a 3-to-2 lead in the former and a slight edge in the latter. Since MIRVs were not prohibited nor long-range bombers restricted, however, the United States maintained a marked superiority in total, deliverable nuclear warheads, about 5,700 to 2,500. Nixon and Brezhnev also initialled a broad ‘Basic Agreement’ under which both sides agreed to ‘do their utmost to avoid military confrontations and to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war’, pledged ‘restraint’ in their relations with each other, and forswore ‘efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly’. Although excessively vague and ultimately unenforceable, the guidelines served as a useful—and hopeful—set of behavioural benchmarks for each nation.

  The value of the SALT accords derived more from the political significance of superpower negotiation and compromise than from the specific provisions contained in the individual agreements. Although SALT I ‘did improve mutual understanding on at least some issues and for some time’, former diplomat and Soviet expert Raymond A. Garthoff emphasizes, it could not ‘dispel all suspicions or prevent later massive strategic misunderstandings’. SALT I certainly did not halt the arms race. In fact, the interim agreement, which had a duration of five years, placed just a handful of limits on each side’s nuclear arsenals, each of which continued to grow. A sharp spike in Soviet–American trade, which grew from $220 million in 1971 to $2.8 billion in 1978, served as one of the more concrete by-products of détente, along with scientific cooperation projects and expanded cultural exchanges (see Figure 8).

  8. Brezhnev and Nixon meeting during Brezhnev’s visit to the USA, June 1973.

  For those who longed for a genuine reduction in nuclear arms, hope lodged with future negotiations. Late in 1972, Soviet and American nuclear arms experts did open the next round of talks, dubbed SALT II. Disarray within the US government, however, as the Watergate scandals first weakened Nixon and then forced his resignation in August 1974, militated against any appreciable progress. In November 1974, Gerald R. Ford, Nixon’s successor, met with Brezhnev at Vladivostok to endorse a set of general principles to guide the SALT II negotiators. Yet no breakthrough appeared imminent, and the continuing negotiations were soon overshadowed by growing congressional scepticism about the value of the SALT process, mounting concern about Soviet actions in the Third World, and the upcoming US presidential election of 1976.

  Although tactically bold and imaginative, the Nixon and Ford administrations’ pursuit of superpower détente constituted a fundamentally conservative strategy for preserving a Pax Americana in a rapidly changing world. Nixon was haunted by the spectre of US decline. He worried that his nation had ‘lost the leadership position we held at the end of World War Two’ and might spill further ‘down the drain as a great power’. With the Soviet Union emerging as a military co-equal and America’s economic pre-eminence faltering, US policy-makers gambled, in the assessment of historian Daniel J. Sargent, that ‘through geopolitical manipulation’ Washington ‘could still dominate the Cold War international system’.

  But the forces of financial globalization and deepening trade integration steadily undermined the economic supremacy that had permitted US stewardship of the global monetary order over the past quarter-century. In 1971, the United States ran its first trade deficit since 1893. That alarming trend, combined with worsening balance-of-payments and an overvalued dollar, led Nixon to abandon the dollar–gold link that year, the keystone of the Bretton Woods financial system. By 1973, a new monetary order of floating currency values had supplanted Bretton Woods, confirming America’s diminished financial clout.

  A process of European détente unfolded in parallel with the move towards superpower détente—and proved more durable. Willy Brandt, elected West German Chancellor in October 1969, assumed the lead role. A former mayor of West Berlin, the charismatic Brandt sought a gradual lowering of barriers to trade and travel between East and West Germany and a less exposed and vulnerable position for Germany in the Cold War. To achieve those goals, he was willing to recognize the de facto existence of the East German state, a significant departure from the standard position of the Federal Republic’s political leaders. The first phase of Brandt’s Ostpolitik concentrated on securing agreements with the Soviet Union and some of its Eastern European allies. In August 1970, West Germany signed a treaty with the Soviet Union in which each country renounced the use of force and pledged to respect Europe’s existing boundaries as inviolable. Later that year, West Germany signed a similar agreement with Poland. A pact on Berlin followed. In September 1971, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France reached a quadripartite agreement that finally provided a legal sanction for the Western powers’ rights within and access to West Berlin. The crowning achievement of Brandt’s Ostpolitik came with the treaty between West and East Germany of December 1972. Each German entity recognized the legitimacy of the other, renounced the use of force, and pledged to increase trade and travel between east and west.

  European détente won popular acclaim on both sides of Europe’s Cold War divide, leading to a significant increase in trade between Eastern and Western Europe, greater individual freedom of movement across the putative Iron Curtain, and a significant calming of tensions in central Europe. The easing of Cold War fears and barriers also facilitated movement towards a general European peace settlement. In November 1972, a preparatory Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) opened in Helsinki to prepare the groundwork for such a settlement (Box 6). Those discussions ultimately produced a thirty-five-nation gathering at the Finnish capital in July–August 1975, attended also by the United States and the Soviet Union. The conferees accepted the symbolic codification of the territorial changes imposed on Europe after the Second World War, a goal long sought by Moscow.

  Box 6 The Helsinki ‘Final Act’

  The accords reached at Helsinki comprised three distinct elements, or ‘baskets’. The first declared the inviolability of existing European borders and enunciated the essential principles that were to govern interstate relations. The second covered economic, technological, scientific, and environmental cooperation. ‘Basket III’, which the Soviet Union had initially opposed, concerned basic human rights within nations; it called for, among other matters,
greater freedom of speech and information and the freer movement of people. The Soviet leadership went along with Basket III as an acceptable, if distasteful, trade-off, so long as they were simultaneously gaining the formal recognition of borders and increased trade flows that they craved.

  Yet there were vocal critics in the United States. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan, a presidential aspirant, excoriated President Ford for ‘putting our stamp of approval on Russia’s enslavement of the captive nations’. What disturbed Reagan and other conservative critics of the Helsinki Final Act—and the broader process of détente from which it sprang—was the growing tendency of the United States and other Western nations to treat the Soviet Union more as a great power whose interests needed to be accommodated than as an enemy state whose unwavering quest for global domination remained a clear and present danger. After acknowledging the growing domestic strength of détente’s opponents, Ford sought to reassure Brezhnev about SALT II’s prospects during a private meeting at Helsinki. ‘I can tell you very forcefully,’ the president said, ‘I am committed to détente and the American people agree with me.’ But developments in the Third World played into the hands of Ford’s critics.

  Détente under siege

  Détente never could live up to the high hopes engendered by the Moscow summit. The solemn pledges of the ‘Basic Agreement’ on superpower conduct failed to prevent the repeated clash of US and Soviet interests—in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Africa, and elsewhere. Continuing Soviet–American conflict in the Third World, moreover, eroded support for détente within the United States. Conservative critics, many of whom had never tempered their ideological antipathy towards communism and their fundamental distrust of the Soviet state, charged that détente simply provided a cloak of legitimacy for Moscow’s unaltered expansionist designs. A few even provocatively equated détente with appeasement. Liberal critics, for their part, complained of détente’s amorality, especially its dismissal of human rights abuses. Technological advances further compounded the challenge faced by détente’s proponents, since each advance rendered the achievement of balanced, verifiable, and mutually acceptable arms control agreements that much more elusive. In a bow to the swelling ranks of détente’s opponents, President Ford, in 1976, actually banished the very word itself from the administration’s vocabulary.

  The Middle East War of October 1973 was one of the first major events to drive home détente’s limitations. Anwar al-Sadat, who became Egypt’s president following Nasser’s death in 1970, worried that the thaw in superpower relations might block progress on his overriding policy goal of retrieving land lost to Israel in the disastrous 1967 war. In 1972, he expelled Soviet advisers from Egyptian soil, partly to register his disapproval with the shifting policy orientation of his principal patron. Then, on 6 October, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israel in a bold effort to seize the military and diplomatic initiative. After initial battlefield setbacks, Israel soon recovered and gained the military upper hand. The Israeli counter-offensive was bolstered by the Nixon administration’s decision to resupply equipment damaged or destroyed in the early fighting. That resupply effort intensified after the USSR, for its part, began to resupply the Egyptians and Syrians. Though the mirror image of Washington’s assistance to its long-term ally, Soviet actions appeared to Nixon as a dangerous threat—not just to Israel but also to détente. ‘Our policy with respect to detente is clear,’ Kissinger warned publicly. ‘We shall resist aggressive foreign policies. Detente cannot survive irresponsibility in any area, including the Middle East.’

  The international dimensions of the crisis precipitated by the third Arab–Israeli war were further widened by an Arab oil boycott of the United States in punishment for its pro-Israel policies, a move that struck directly at the economic self-interest of America and its chief allies. The boycott also drove home the growing vulnerability of the energy-dependent West to the oil-producing states of the global South.

  The Middle East crisis took on more direct East–West overtones when Brezhnev called for the immediate deployment of a joint US–Soviet peacekeeping force, threatening unilateral Soviet action if necessary. The Russian leader, frustrated by Israel’s failure to honour an agreed-upon cease-fire, and concerned that Egypt’s surrounded army might be crushed by Israeli forces in the Sinai desert, made his appeal directly to Nixon. In the throes of the rapidly worsening Watergate scandal at the time, Nixon judged Brezhnev’s gambit a major challenge to US interests in a vital, oil-rich region, and one that demanded a vigorous response. Consequently, he told the Soviet general secretary that the United States considered the prospect of unilateral Soviet action ‘a matter of the gravest concern involving incalculable consequences’. To underscore his seriousness, Nixon, following Kissinger’s advice, placed US conventional and nuclear forces on worldwide alert, the first such alert since the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Diplomatic pressure on Israel to accept a cease-fire soon defused the crisis. By 27 October, the war was over, the US-led search for a peace settlement already entering into high gear. Yet it had left a mark. If the Soviets and Americans could nearly come to blows over a regional dispute, what value did the Basic Agreement have? And, for all the high-minded rhetoric of détente’s architects, how much closer had the world actually moved to the peace and stability they promised?

  The final stages of the Vietnam War brought similar questions to the fore. Certainly détente offered no respite to America’s travails in Indo-China. Nixon had hoped, initially, that rapprochement with both Moscow and Beijing might enable the United States to negotiate its way out of Vietnam with its honour and credibility intact. It had not worked that way. North Vietnamese negotiators proved unwilling to trim their long-sought political goals simply to meet the needs of a superpower in obvious retreat. The Nixon administration’s periodic tactical escalations of the war similarly failed to break the negotiating logjam. Washington and Hanoi finally reached a peace settlement in January 1973, but while it allowed for the final withdrawal of US troops, the agreement brought no end to the fighting. In early 1975, North Vietnam launched an offensive against South Vietnam that led to the stunningly rapid collapse of a regime that over 58,000 Americans had died trying to protect from communism. The Ford administration’s impotence in the Saigon government’s final days, an impotence forced upon it by a Congress and public unwilling to countenance any additional commitments in Vietnam, certainly tarnished America’s prestige as a global power. In subtle ways, too, the Vietnam debacle, with its searing images of a North Vietnamese invasion spearheaded by Soviet-made tanks, further exposed the limitations of superpower détente.

  Developments in Angola, one of the more controversial and complex international flashpoints of the mid-1970s, wreaked additional damage on détente. Civil war among three competing factions broke out in the former Portuguese colony following Lisbon’s grant of independence in November 1975. The involvement of Cuban troops on the side of the leftist Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which was battling more moderate, pro-Western factions backed covertly by the United States (and China), created a kind of proxy war in the West African territory. Kissinger, the consummate geopolitician, insisted that the Angolan conflict must be seen in East–West terms: as a test of will and resolve between Moscow and Washington, with weighty global implications. It was a test, he argued, from which the Soviet Union might draw unfortunate conclusions about the waning strength of a competitor that seemed substantially weakened by the cumulative impact of Nixon’s forced resignation, defeat in Vietnam, and the ongoing congressional revolt against the imperial presidency. Yet the Ford administration’s appeal to Congress for stepped-up covert aid for its favoured Angolan factions failed. Legislators blanched at the notion of another Third World intervention so soon after Vietnam. Détente could not ‘survive any more Angolas’, warned Kissinger. Conservative critics found additional evidence in the Angolan affair to support their view that détente of
fered one-sided benefits to a still-expansionist Soviet Union.

  That indictment gathered force throughout the mid- and late 1970s, advanced by a collection of well-placed intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and former government officials. Exhibit A for the anti-détentists was what seemed a continuing pattern of Soviet adventurism throughout the Third World. Exhibit B was what they claimed to be a deeply flawed process of arms control negotiations. Along with Democratic Senator Henry Jackson, Paul Nitze, an ardent anti-communist and former head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the Truman administration, emerged as a leading spokesman for the anti-détentists. After resigning from the SALT II negotiating team, Nitze penned a stinging rebuke in the January 1976 issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairs. ‘There is every prospect that under the terms of the SALT agreements the Soviet Union will continue to pursue a nuclear superiority that is not merely quantitative but designed to produce a theoretical war-winning capability,’ he warned. ‘If and only if the United States now takes action to redress the impending strategic imbalance can the Soviet Union be persuaded to abandon its quest for superiority and to resume the path of meaningful limitations and reductions through negotiation.’

  The logic upon which this critique rested was rather dubious. Many nuclear specialists dismissed the notion that the Soviet Union was driving for nuclear superiority. They also disputed the related proposition that their heavier ICBMs might over time give the Soviets the ability to carry more nuclear warheads on their missiles, with greater ‘throw weight’, thereby permitting them to ‘win’ a nuclear confrontation with the United States. Kissinger responded to such doomsday scenarios with pained exasperation. ‘What in the name of God is strategic superiority?’, he implored. ‘What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?’ One suspects that behind the alarmism expressed by Nitze, Jackson, Reagan, and other critics of détente lay something other than the byzantine intricacies of counting overall nuclear warheads and measuring total throw weights. At a more fundamental level, these critics simply could not accept the very concepts of parity and sufficiency upon which détente was based. For diehard Cold Warriors, only strategic superiority—in every phase of nuclear and conventional weaponry—stood as an appropriate goal for the United States when dealing with so implacable and so inherently untrustworthy an adversary as the Soviet Union.