Chapter 5

THE SIXTIES

A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years [and] fought side by side with
the Allies . . . must be free and independent.

—Declaration of Independence, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, September 2, 1945

The Great Power game . . . had distorted the social-political development of the Middle East.

—Isaac Deutscher, New Left Review, June 23, 1967

Two overfed world powers have converted stupidity into armored divisions and atomic warheads. And we sit in
between. . . . At last we have understood the lesson of Prague.

—Günter Grass, Die Zeit, October 4, 1968

The storied half decade between 1963 and 1968 witnessed a fundamental change in the Cold War. The two
main contestants were faced with new actors and new issues unanticipated in 1945, including a revived and
restive Europe and a nuclear-armed France and China as well as even more independent Third World leaders.
There was also the global impact of the postwar baby boom, when the generation raised in an ideologically
divided world began to challenge Cold War ideas and structures.
The mid-1960s witnessed the climax of the postwar global economic expansion. Whether measured by
mounting raw-material, agricultural, and manufacturing production, or by high employment and consumption
levels, the growth between 1945 and 1965 had been nearly universal. Primary-producer countries had also
shared in this prosperity, increasing their annual gross domestic product by at least 4 percent in the 1950s. In
the 1960s—which the United Nations designated the First Development Decade—this figure rose to 5
percent and was even higher in the oil-producing countries. The Green Revolution in agriculture (the
application of technology, including irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, and disease-resistant, high-yield crop
varieties) increased the world’s food supply.
But the new global landscape also had darker sides. Increased food yields and improved transportation
networks led to steep population growth but also an alarming drop in local production. There were the first
warnings of a “Silent Spring”—the threat of industrial chemicals to the natural environment, made vivid in
Rachel Carson’s 1962 book by that name. Scientists feared the reduction in biodiversity as a result of applying
technology to agriculture. There were also significant economic and social consequences, including a rise in
class disparities in the countryside (wealthier farmers were better able to acquire loans and information, and
men had easier access to credit than women), the delay or cancellation of land-distribution programs, and the

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mass migrations of rural people to Third World cities that lacked houses, jobs, schools, medical facilities, and
social services for the new arrivals.
By the mid-1960s the Superpowers were experiencing the limits of their economic strength. The vast US
and Soviet expenditures on their conventional and nuclear forces, ambitious space programs, and expanding
weaponry deliveries to their allies and overseas clients increasingly diverted capital from civilian investment—
particularly from education, social services, public health, and infrastructure projects such as mass
transportation—and promoted inflation (which the Soviets were better able to hide), leading to the erosion of
the quality of public life in both the West and the East.
The Soviet Union, although faced with an acute contraction of its growth rate and productivity, in 1964
turned away from earlier efforts to modify its Stalinist economic structure. After Khrushchev fell, his
decentralized system of regional management was immediately dismantled. The much-heralded Kosygin
reforms of October 1965 restored the centralization of Soviet industries but also failed to alleviate the chronic
problems of waste and inefficiency, consumer shortages, and a dearth of quality goods for export abroad.
Government ministries continued to collect rents; allocate supplies; set production targets, wages, bonuses,
and prices; and restrain innovation and technological advances. In 1961 Soviet scientists, far more advanced
than the US in cybernetic research,* had proposed to create a unified national computer system to plan and
manage the communist national economy, but the Kremlin drew back, fearing the political and social
ramifications of public access to official information.
The United States too was experiencing economic problems, having lost its postwar dominance of world
trade to new rivals. The reduction of tariffs within Europe’s Common Market and the rising productivity of
its members contributed to America’s mounting dollar gap with Western Europe. The entry into the US
market of the homely and highly popular Volkswagen Beetle signaled a challenge to the powerful automobile
industry. Ex-enemy Japan, with its highly organized links between business and government and its freedom
from a major defense burden, was becoming Asia’s foremost economic power, which, by the mid-1960s, had
also begun to reverse its trade balance with the United States.
The world of the 1960s witnessed fighting on almost every continent. The brutal civil wars in the Congo,
Indonesia, and Nigeria and the border wars between India and its neighbors drew in outside powers but were
containable. However, the decade’s three major crises—the US war in Vietnam, the June 1967 Middle East
war, and the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring—emphasized the dangers of the new multipolar world.
All three involved bold local actors and indirect forms of combat that Washington and Moscow strove to keep
in bounds.

THE COLD WAR AND VIETNAM

The US intervention in Vietnam was not inevitable. It evolved from the vacuum left by the collapse of Japan’s
Asian empire, followed by the communists’ victory in China, the Korean stalemate, and France’s defeat in
1954. But it also grew out of the Cold War decisions of three US presidents: Truman’s to move away from
Roosevelt’s anticolonialism and back the French, Eisenhower’s to block the Vietnamese national elections in
1956 and prop up the Diệm regime, and Kennedy’s to increase the number of US military advisers, Special

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Forces, and CIA agents in South Vietnam. All three intended to transform Vietnam into a “proving ground
for democracy in Asia.”
By the 1960s American power in the world was no longer unchallenged. To be sure, despite Castro’s
survival, Latin America remained a secure US preserve.† But a cash-strapped United States was facing restive
NATO allies in Europe, whose confidence in the US nuclear shield was diminishing and who were expressing
more independent views on their defense against a Soviet attack.
Political conditions on the other side had also changed significantly as a result of the Sino-Soviet rupture.
In the late 1950s Mao, resentful of Moscow’s refusal to support China’s atomic weapons program, condemned
Khrushchev’s abandonment of the doctrine of revolutionary warfare and his pursuit of peaceful coexistence.
Khrushchev, a critic of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and belligerence toward his neighbors, in 1960
suddenly withdrew Soviet experts and reduced Soviet assistance to China. After the split became public at the
Twenty-Second Soviet Party Congress in October 1961, Mao openly mocked Khrushchev’s retreat during the
Cuban missile crisis, complained of Moscow’s pro–New Delhi stance during the 1962 Sino-Indian border
conflict, and denounced the test-ban treaty as a means of preventing China from developing its own nuclear
weapons. By the end of 1963 the two communist giants were openly competing for leadership of the
revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
North Vietnam, caught between its two rival patrons, whose differences it had tried and failed to resolve,
chose initially in the summer of 1963 to side with nearby China over the more distant Soviet Union; Beijing
responded with promises of full support against US aggression. North Vietnam’s decision coincided with the
growing political crisis in the south that climaxed in the November coup and murder of Diệm. Hanoi now
had to decide between continuing its cautious infiltration policy aimed at creating a neutral South Vietnam
that would eventually unite with the north (which Moscow and Beijing supported) and an interventionist
policy to aid their Viet Cong comrades, which risked a war with the United States. In early 1964 the hard-
liners prevailed in Hanoi, deciding to conduct large-scale operations and preparing to send whole regiments of
troops and supplies over the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam.
That spring, with the Viet Cong controlling 40 percent of its territory, South Vietnam appeared doomed.
But Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was determined to reassure America’s Asian allies—particularly
those he had encountered during his May 1961 journey on behalf of President Kennedy*—of Washington’s
resolve to protect them against communism. A novice in international diplomacy who was determined to
produce major US domestic reforms, which he labeled the Great Society, Johnson deferred to his hawkish
advisers and ignored the naysayers.* The president resolved to make South Vietnam the principal focus of
America’s renewed Cold War struggle in order, like his predecessors, to prevent falling dominoes in Southeast
Asia and a victory for China. However, while continuing Kennedy’s covert war against North Vietnam and
preparing for military action nine thousand miles from the US mainland, Johnson had first to stand for
election in November 1964, and he did so, ironically, as the peace candidate.†
Three months before the presidential election Johnson had already obtained his justification for going to
war. From the beginning of 1964 the US military had taken over direction of the CIA/South Vietnamese
covert commando attacks against North Vietnam as well as naval intelligence gathering in the coastal areas
(known as DESOTO patrols). On August 1, 1964, shortly after a South Vietnamese commando attack on

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two islands, the US destroyer Maddox entered the Gulf of Tonkin for the purpose of collecting electronic
intelligence. The next day, as it approached the island of Hon Me, it encountered three North Vietnamese
torpedo boats whose signals had been intercepted. The Maddox fired, damaging only one of them. Two days
later, the Maddox, now joined by a second intelligence vessel, C. Turner Joy, again fired on what appeared to
be approaching enemy ships, although no evidence has ever been found of a second North Vietnamese
interception.
Although neither US ship had been hit and there were no casualties, Johnson immediately ordered a
retaliatory bombing raid against North Vietnamese naval bases. Evoking America’s dread of surprise assaults,
Johnson appealed for public support against an “unprovoked attack” in international waters. After Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara assured Congress that the US Navy had “played absolutely no part in, was not
associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any,” Johnson on August 7,
1964, won near-unanimous Senate approval for a resolution authorizing him to use US military force to
defend the freedom of South Vietnam, a measure his administration had prepared earlier in the spring. The
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution enabled Johnson to spurn proposals that fall for another Geneva conference to
achieve a negotiated settlement over Vietnam.
Shortly after his overwhelming electoral victory, Johnson moved quickly to rescue South Vietnam from an
imminent collapse. In 1965 he launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against
North Vietnam, and by the end of the year he had dispatched 180,000 combat troops as well. Although this
dramatic escalation contained several cautious elements,* Johnson had transformed South Vietnam into a
Cold War struggle and one of the longest and most divisive wars in US history.

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Map 10. Major sites of the US war in Vietnam, 1964–1973.

Johnson’s decision was based on several problematic assumptions. The first was that the American people—
stirred by Kennedy’s ringing rhetoric but also increasingly sensitive to social and economic injustices in
America and around the globe—would sustain a prolonged, distant, and costly war on behalf of an unpopular
client regime and against a nationalist movement seeking to unify the country. The second was that
Washington’s allies would endorse a struggle that diverted America’s attention and shrinking resources from
the defense of Europe. And the third was that the Soviet Union—now in open competition with China,
which strongly supported North Vietnam—would remain on the sidelines.
Even more questionable was Johnson’s fourth assumption: that the North Vietnamese leadership would
succumb to US power and abandon their resolve to unify the entire country. Hence the president escalated
America’s involvement with an intensified bombing campaign against Hanoi (which thwarted a late-1966
peace initiative), increased the number of US troops (which by the end of 1967 reached a half million

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soldiers), and gave full support to the strongman General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu as South Vietnam’s president.
Thereupon North Vietnam, disregarding Beijing’s and Moscow’s advice to conduct guerrilla warfare, aimed at
a conventional military victory. On January 30, 1968, the first day of Tet (the Lunar New Year festival), the
North Vietnamese offensive began, spreading by April to the entire country (including attacks on the US
embassy and the presidential palace) and continuing until August. Despite its ultimate military setback, heavy
losses—some fifty thousand deaths—and failure to foment an uprising against the Thiệu regime, North
Vietnam had achieved a major propaganda and political triumph. The searing images of the casualties and
devastation in Saigon and Hue and in the dozens of seized provincial capitals—widely disseminated in the US
press and on television—stunned the American public, belying the Johnson administration’s predictions of a
winnable war.*
Facing mounting criticism from America’s Cold War architects and from Congress, the press, and the
public—as well as damage to his Great Society program—Johnson now recognized that he could neither send
more troops nor bomb North Vietnam into submission. He became the first US president to leave office over
an unwinnable Third World conflict. On March 31, 1968, Johnson issued the startling announcement of his
withdrawal as a candidate for reelection and the discontinuation of the bombing. He also offered
unconditional peace negotiations, which an exhausted North Vietnam readily accepted. The Republican
candidate Richard Nixon, who was victorious in November, had hinted at a peace plan that would end
America’s costly and disruptive war, although under his leadership the United States would remain in
Vietnam for four even more costly and divisive years.
The US military intervention in Vietnam had a major effect on global politics. Antiwar movements
developed rapidly in America, with young people burning their draft cards, fleeing the country, or serving jail
sentences rather than go to Vietnam. By October 1965 protest demonstrations in forty American cities had
spread to Europe and Asia. Critics of the war condemned America’s atrocities against the civilian population
—North and South—and its use of chemical weapons, and they called for an immediate US withdrawal.
Antiwar activists derided Washington’s claim of battling Chinese communism to save Asians from tyranny,
and deplored America’s opposition to the Third World’s struggle for independence. To the generation raised
after World War II and the Holocaust, America’s claim to defend freedom through its unbridled use of arms,
air power, napalm, and Agent Orange against a tiny, tenacious people, and its support of a corrupt and
repressive puppet government, rang increasingly hollow.
The escalation of the Vietnam War created a major challenge for the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Alexei
Kosygin, who witnessed the US bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in February 1965, drastically increased
deliveries of monetary aid, supplies, technical manpower, and missiles. Although by 1968 Soviet and Warsaw
Pact members’ aid to North Vietnam exceeded China’s, the USSR had little control over its ally and was
locked into a competition with Beijing. Moreover, Moscow’s involvement in the Vietnam War had stifled its
overtures for détente and disarmament with the United States.
The Soviet Union’s increasing support of Hanoi (including the pledge that its nuclear arsenal would deter a
US invasion or a nuclear attack on North Vietnam) also had several advantages. The first was as an investment
in a future Soviet presence in Southeast Asia. Second was the bolstering of the USSR’s global image as a
champion of national liberation movements. And third were the strategic and diplomatic benefits: a struggle
that tied the United States down in Southeast Asia gave the Kremlin more freedom to act in other parts of the

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world and also to extract diplomatic concessions from Washington. Nonetheless, the Kremlin, concerned that
the war might escalate into a larger East-West conflict, began working behind the scenes in 1968 to bring the
parties to the negotiating table. But the Soviet Union’s two-pronged policy—continuing to lavishly supply
Hanoi while working for a peace settlement—exasperated the Chinese and the United States.
China’s role in the Vietnam War was also a difficult one. Despite the economic ravages of the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, China provided substantial manpower and matériel
aid, assisted in major infrastructure and defense projects, and also pledged to repulse a US/South Vietnamese
invasion, only to share the Kremlin’s inability to control North Vietnam’s decision-making. Moreover,
beneath their comradeship in arms was the longstanding Chinese-Vietnamese rivalry over the future control
of Indochina as well as memories of centuries of Chinese occupation, made manifest in the strict limits placed
on Chinese personnel by the North Vietnamese government. By 1966 Beijing was bristling over the
rapprochement between Hanoi and Moscow, which was now providing advanced weaponry and, with its
Security Council seat and diplomatic relations with Washington, representing North Vietnam to large parts of
the world.
Predictably, Mao expressed displeasure with Hanoi’s agreement to commence negotiations with
Washington in 1968 and withdrew the bulk of Chinese forces from North Vietnam. Nonetheless, Johnson’s
startling announcement—coupled with China’s deteriorating situation at home and its worsening relations
with Hanoi and Moscow—would pave the way for Mao’s decision a year later to normalize relations with the
United States.

JUNE 1967: THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

The Arab-Israeli War in June 1967 was another local struggle that drew in the Superpowers but eluded their
control. Israel’s unexpectedly swift and overwhelming victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, followed by the
UN’s failure to repeat its 1956 peacemaking role, changed the Middle East and the Cold War. To be sure, the
principal actors who lit the fuse were also unprepared for the momentous consequences.
The antecedents of the 1967 war were several. The Palestinian problem fed the regional hostility toward
Israel, which had developed into a strong, prosperous, and Western-oriented state that physically divided the
Arab world. Eighteen years after Israel’s military triumph in 1948–1949, more than 1.3 million Palestinian
refugees remained dispersed throughout the Middle East, 39 percent housed in UN-administered refugee
camps. Under Egyptian sponsorship the Palestinian cause was taken up in 1964 during the first summit
conference of the Arab League, which called for the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization
(PLO). Although the Palestinian people were politically divided, they supported the PLO charter that called
for the destruction of Israel.
In 1966 the Ba’ath regime in Syria—the Soviet Union’s newest Middle East client—replaced Egypt as the
Palestinians’ principal sponsor and Israel’s foremost antagonist. The Damascus regime armed Palestinian
militants for border attacks on Israel, which generally originated across the more porous Jordanian border.*
Middle East tensions escalated dramatically in April 1967, when Israeli pilots downed seven Syrian MiGs in
an air battle over Damascus. Five weeks later, Syrian defense minister Hafez al-Assad warned Egypt that
Israel’s troops were massing on Syria’s border in preparation for an invasion.

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 Nasser (who was beset with internal difficulties as well as a long, ruinous war in Yemen and quarrels with
Saudi Arabia and Iran) was roused by the alarm, which was reinforced by a similar message from Moscow.
The Egyptian leader decided to seize the moment to refute domestic and foreign charges of his apathy toward
Israeli aggression and to assert his leadership over the Arab cause. To reassure Syria and deter Israel, Nasser
ordered Egyptian troops into the Sinai. When UN secretary general U Thant refused a partial removal of the
UN Emergency Force (UNEF) that for ten years had separated Egypt from Israel, Nasser ordered UNEF’s
complete withdrawal and on May 22, 1967, announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping.
With these bold actions, accompanied by belligerent speeches to rally the Egyptian population, Nasser crossed
the boundary between peace and war.
Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol, an elderly moderate, was now engulfed by his country’s fear and war
fever as well as by a serious economic recession. Although Israel was legally entitled to use force to keep the
strait open, he recognized the danger of acting alone. He too ordered mobilization on May 16, but he also
appealed for Washington’s support against Nasser, who was threatening “to drive Israel into the sea” and
return the Palestinians to their homeland.
The Arabs looked to the Soviet Union for support. Kosygin and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, in
search of political influence and naval bases in the eastern Mediterranean, had been generously supplying Syria
and Egypt with arms and aid and echoing their criticisms of Israel. But although at least one US intelligence
source suspected that the Kremlin’s warning to Egypt had been aimed at creating still another trouble spot for
Washington, it is doubtful that Moscow’s cautious rulers intended to unleash a Middle East war and risk
another confrontation with the United States.
President Johnson, overwhelmed by Vietnam and constrained by congressional opposition to undertaking
any further military action, acted promptly to restrain Israel from attacking Egypt or Syria and thereby
drawing the United States into the conflict. To sweeten the pill, Johnson sent the Sixth Fleet to the eastern
Mediterranean, approved a substantial military assistance package for Israel on May 23, and also tried to
assemble an international flotilla to open the Strait of Tiran. But by the end of May, after King Hussein of
Jordan had placed his army under Egyptian control and Nasser refused to back down, Johnson changed the
red light to yellow. Although discounting Israeli reports of an imminent Egyptian attack, Johnson recognized
that the delay he had imposed on the frightened, fully mobilized country could no longer be prolonged. In a
fatalistic mood reminiscent of statesmen on the eve of World War I, the US president took no steps to halt
the Israeli attack, which he learned of twenty-four hours in advance.

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Map 11. Israeli conquests in the Sinai, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

The war was unexpectedly short. Early in the morning on June 5, Israel’s air force attacked Egyptian,
Syrian, and Jordanian airfields, destroying the bulk of their craft, which were still mostly on the ground. The
Israeli army then went on to conquer Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt before capturing East Jerusalem and the
West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. In just six days Israel had tripled its size, and the
Arabs faced the greatest military disaster in their modern history. The Superpowers also faced a setback,
having exposed their inability to control their clients. During the brief but bloody conflict Johnson and
Kosygin had made energetic use of the hotline between Washington and Moscow in an attempt to achieve a
ceasefire, which was delayed until Israel had taken the Golan on June 10.

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 Once more the scene shifted to the United Nations, but the result was far different than in 1956. This time
the United States prevented the Arabs from branding Israel as the aggressor and placed no pressure on Israel
to withdraw. The Soviet Union acquiesced. On November 24, 1967, after two weeks of difficult deliberations,
the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242, a British-drafted compromise that reflected Israel’s
lopsided victory, linking any withdrawal from the occupied territories with its neighbors’ willingness to make
peace and recognize its 1949 borders (which became known as “land for peace”), affirming the necessity of
“freedom of navigation through international waterways,” and, ignoring the Palestinians, simply calling for a
“just settlement of the refugee problem.”
Stifled by the Superpowers, the Arabs took matters into their own hands. Egypt and Syria broke off
diplomatic relations with Washington, which they accused of colluding in the Israeli attack. In the summer of
1967 Middle Eastern oil producers imposed a second boycott, this time against the United States, Great
Britain, and West Germany, which had allegedly provided arms to Israel. And the Arab League summit
meeting in Khartoum adopted a resolution on September 1 refusing direct negotiations with a triumphant
Israel and insisting on “the rights of the Palestinians in their own country.” Behind the scenes, however, a
chastened Nasser, defying the Arab militants, had held out the prospect of indirect peace talks through a UN
mediator and an informal acceptance of Israel’s existence. Nonetheless, Israeli leaders, flush with victory, took
Khartoum’s “three no’s” (no peace treaty, no direct negotiations, no de jure recognition) at face value.
While the Israeli public exulted in its deliverance from Nasser’s threats and the liberation of the holy places
in Jerusalem and the West Bank that Jordan had seized during the 1948 war, the Eshkol government was
hesitant over the next steps. Israel faced not only the problem of controlling a territory three times its former
size and the responsibility for one million more Palestinian Arabs but also the prospect of an unremitting
confrontation with its neighbors. A tiny minority advocating withdrawal (among them former prime minister
David Ben-Gurion) was quickly overpowered by the politicians and generals, who argued the value of
strategic depth and of holding on to the territories in exchange for full peace and recognition. In the heady
days of 1967 there was also an explosion of national sentiment—secular as well as religious—in favor of a
Greater Israel that included East Jerusalem and all the land to the Jordan River. Scarcely noticed at the time
was the emergence of the Palestinians as an independent political movement prepared to use violence to assert
their disregarded national claims.
Outside the Middle East, Israel’s supporters generally celebrated its survival and its lightning victory. To be
sure, some leftist critics in Western Europe deplored Israel’s resort to war in June 1967, its territorial
conquests, and the creation of a new wave of Palestinian refugees who had fled the West Bank. Moreover, the
June war had rent NATO’s unity. Facing a dangerous eruption on its vulnerable southern flank, the alliance
had been badly split, with France condemning Israel, the Netherlands defending it, and West Germany,
frightened of a new threat to Berlin, announcing its neutrality.*
The year 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, was a grim one for Moscow. In Asia
the Indonesian communists and their sympathizers had been decimated, and the United States was still
asserting its military strength in Vietnam; in Europe Romania had essentially severed its ties with the Warsaw
Pact; and in the Middle East the Soviet Union had sustained an unexpected blow to its arms and diplomacy,
hyperbolically termed by one of its envoys “one of the greatest defeats in our history.”† Mao lost no time in

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taunting Khrushchev’s successors for betraying their Arab allies and caving in to US pressure at the United
Nations.
The Kremlin wavered between restraint and assertiveness. At great cost, the Soviet Union dispatched
replacement military supplies to Egypt and Syria, but it also decided to impose some fetters on its risk-taking
clients, limiting the flow of offensive weapons, placing Soviet advisers in control of Arab troops and advanced
armaments, and discouraging Arab leaders from provoking another war to regain their lost territories. But
Soviet cautiousness had its political limits: the politburo’s ideologues insisted on compensating for the USSR’s
military inaction during the June 1967 war by severing diplomatic relations with Israel, thereby freezing Soviet
diplomacy in the Middle East and making it hostage to Arab radicalism.‡
At home, the USSR launched an anti-Zionist campaign aimed at intimidating Soviet and East European
Jews who had rejoiced in Israel’s victory. The KGB operation also led to a wave of Jewish emigration from
Poland. But the campaign badly backfired. It not only failed to quench the newfound pride of millions of Jews
living under communism but also raised strong disapproval and charges of antisemitism in the West and
sparked a global movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Despite Moscow’s vituperation against the Jews, Soviet
and East European dissidents were also buoyed by plucky Israel’s challenge to Soviet might.
Ostensibly the United States was a victor in the June 1967 war.* The huge caches of captured Soviet arms
provided NATO with a treasure trove of information. Thanks to America’s actions, the conflict had been
brief and localized. The propaganda benefits were also considerable: a small, courageous nation had stood up
to a communist-inspired threat, and the Soviet Union, although still in the Middle East and now with access
to naval bases in Syria and Egypt, had suffered a major blow to its resources and prestige.
Cooler observers in Washington also recognized that Israel’s overwhelming victory had failed to solve the
region’s problems and had only bought time. In the meantime, an important ally was about to retire from the
scene. In 1966, the cash-strapped Labour government—without consulting Washington—announced the
withdrawal of British forces east of Suez, from Aden and from Persian Gulf bases in 1971, placing the sole
burden for protecting the Middle East against Soviet- or Chinese-supported movements on the United
States. But the Cold Warriors who dominated the Johnson administration, mistaking a military verdict for a
long-term solution, were unable to grasp the brief opportunity in the summer and fall of 1967 to exert
pressure on the Arabs and the Israelis to come to the peace table. And while Johnson quickly turned his
attention back to Vietnam, the rivals’ positions hardened.

PRAGUE: AUGUST 1968

Even after the building of the Berlin Wall, the West did not cease its efforts to overcome the Iron Curtain.
Among the most avid advocates was French president Charles de Gaulle. Although he had stood staunchly
behind the United States over Berlin, de Gaulle was fundamentally opposed to Europe’s division into two
hostile blocs dominated by the Superpowers. Thus, in March 1966 he suddenly announced France’s
withdrawal of its land and air forces from the NATO military command and ordered the removal of the
alliance’s headquarters and US and Canadian military bases from French territory. Three months later de
Gaulle paid a celebrated state visit to Moscow seeking to resurrect Franco-Russian ties and reduce Cold War
tensions in Europe. Soviet leaders, who warmly welcomed their renegade visitor, nonetheless recognized that

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the French president’s long-term goals—German unification, greater autonomy for their satellites in Eastern
Europe, and a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals”—were incompatible with Moscow’s fundamental
interest in maintaining the status quo.
West Germany, with seventeen million countrymen behind the Iron Curtain and an isolated outpost in
West Berlin, had an even greater stake than France in reducing tensions in Europe. But until Adenauer left
the chancellorship in October 1963, Bonn had adhered to an inflexible Cold War line that had alienated
Moscow and its allies: refusing to recognize the GDR and ostracizing every country (except the USSR) that
had relations with the East German government, which it scathingly termed either the “Soviet-Occupation
Zone” or the “so-called GDR”; refusing to recognize the post–World War II boundaries with Poland and
Czechoslovakia; and insisting on German unification as the precondition for any form of European détente.
However, once Adenauer departed, his Conservative successors changed the tone, hastening to conclude
economic agreements with four of the FRG’s eastern neighbors. Even more pointedly, Willy Brandt, the
Social Democrat opposition leader and West Berlin mayor, now openly advocated an Ostpolitik: a new policy
that radically changed Bonn’s relationship with the East, replacing confrontation with accommodation and
acceptance, and placing European reconciliation before German unification.
Soviet leaders were unreceptive to West Germany’s overtures. Moscow recognized that any steps toward
accommodation with Bonn would dismay its East German, Polish, and Czech comrades, who had dutifully
imitated the Kremlin’s diatribes against the FRG’s obsession with its lost territories and inclusion of former
Nazis in key positions, along with its nuclear ambitions, aid to Israel, and subservience to Washington. After
Brandt failed to win the chancellorship in 1966, the USSR kept West Germany’s Grand Coalition
government (headed by the ex-Nazi Kurt Georg Kiesinger and with Brandt as foreign minister) at arm’s
length.
On entering office US president Lyndon B. Johnson had also endorsed a policy of “building bridges” with
Eastern Europe, and in 1966 he called for peaceful engagement to bring about greater freedom for the
countries behind the Iron Curtain. Although Brezhnev had lashed out at Washington and Bonn’s ambitions
to undermine socialism, the Warsaw Pact took note of these overtures and in July 1966 declared its desire for
détente. And that year, NATO, in celebration of its twentieth anniversary, commissioned a study that would
integrate the defense of Western Europe with the prospect of expanding cooperation with the East. A seminal
document in NATO’s history, the 1967 “Report of the Council on the Future Tasks of the Alliance” (better
known as the Harmel Report), acknowledging changes in the international environment since 1949,
committed the alliance to a dual-track policy of maintaining military preparedness and seeking political
détente.
Behind the Berlin Wall there were societies in ferment, chafing at the economic slowdown and the
Communist Party’s heavy hand over the courts, the press, culture, and society. The population of Eastern
Europe, which for more than a decade had been mobilized to declare its solidarity with the downtrodden
people in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, was still heavily controlled in its freedom of thought, expression,
association, and travel, and lived under governments that obediently followed Moscow’s orders. By the mid-
1960s the thaw, which had begun but was then halted by Khrushchev, flowed again in Eastern Europe in a
remarkable outpouring of film, literature, art, and music.* In addition, a slight loosening of travel restrictions
allowed selected citizens to go abroad for study and tourism, which, along with the introduction of television,

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gradually opened a window to the West. But while Eastern Europe’s writers railed against their governments’
censorship, ordinary people simply longed for Western blue jeans, rock music, soft drinks, and a beach holiday
in a place other than the Black Sea.
Czechoslovakia, with its strong communist tradition, had been the most loyal of satellites. Two years after
Stalin’s death it had erected the world’s largest monument to the Soviet dictator, and it was the last bloc
member to remove it seven years later. Testifying to Czechoslovakia’s reliability, no Soviet troops were
stationed on its soil, despite the fact that it bordered two noncommunist countries, produced the bloc’s most
advanced armaments, possessed considerable quantities of uranium, and was a prospective site for Soviet
nuclear weapons. Earlier, Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party chief, Antonín Novotný, an old-style Stalinist,
had opposed Khrushchev’s reforms and refused to rehabilitate Stalin’s victims. Until the end of 1967 Novotný
had also ignored Czechoslovakia’s economic woes and his Slovak comrades’ resentment of Prague’s
domination.
Brezhnev, gambling that a party shake-up would strengthen Czechoslovakia, in early 1968 approved the
appointment of Alexander Dubček, a forty-six-year-old Slovak who believed deeply in socialism and in
friendship with the Soviet Union. But as in Hungary twelve years earlier, events spun out of control. Dubček’s
selection of political and economic reformers to head the government, followed immediately by the lifting of
censorship, caused an eruption of anticommunist sentiments throughout the country and calls for a free
market and democracy.*
Even more menacing to Soviet interests was the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s April Action Program,
which envisaged “socialism with a human face”: without relinquishing its leading role, it endorsed freedom of
speech, the press, and association and, working in partnership with other parties, promoted reforms in the
justice system and handed greater control over the economy to the parliament. In June, during the selection of
delegates for the Extraordinary Party Congress, which was expected to ratify this radical program in
September, the dissident writer Ludvík Vaculík, in his fiery “Two Thousand Words” manifesto, urged the
entire nation to rally around Dubček.
An anxious Brezhnev was deeply reluctant to crush the Prague Spring,† fearing bloodshed as well as a
possible NATO intervention and counting on Dubček to restrain his countrymen. But like Khrushchev before
him, Brezhnev faced a hard-line Soviet politburo and KGB as well as satellite governments that were appalled
by their Czechoslovak comrades’ behavior and frightened of the spillover effect in their countries. When
neither the Warsaw Pact’s menacing maneuvers nor Brezhnev’s direct threats halted the swift liberalization of
Czechoslovakia, Moscow decided to rescue communism with force. On the night of August 20–21, 480,000
Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. On November 13,
1968, Brezhnev, stating the doctrine that afterward bore his name, stressed the indivisibility of the communist
bloc and the Soviet Union’s right to prevent any deviation by its members. More a defensive than an
aggressive posture, the general secretary had implicitly acknowledged Moscow’s vulnerability to any weak link
in its Cold War barrier against “Western imperialism.”
The suppression of Czechoslovakia was in many ways a hollow triumph for the Kremlin. Ninety percent of
the “liberated” population condemned the invasion, and a half year elapsed before the Soviet Union could
replace Dubček with leaders willing to ratify the “temporary presence” of its troops on Czechoslovak soil.‡

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Facing a hostile population, the occupying army soon had to be withdrawn from populated centers, and the
formerly impressive Czechoslovak army, which had been confined to its barracks during the invasion, lost its
soldierly spirit.
The occupation of Czechoslovakia was almost universally castigated.* Opposition was even expressed in the
factories of East Berlin and Budapest, on the streets of Warsaw and Kiev, and in Red Square itself. The
invasion worsened Moscow’s already difficult relations with Beijing. Although Mao found Dubček’s reforms
repugnant, he also condemned the Kremlin’s “fascist” behavior in August 1968. Beijing’s fears that the
Brezhnev doctrine provided a license for Moscow to interfere in China’s affairs were heighted by alleged
Soviet intrusions into Chinese air space one month later.
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia provided a temporary propaganda boost to the United States, which
was beleaguered by Vietnam and the race riots in America’s cities. It created a swarm of protests in Western
Europe and around the world. All at once NATO sprang into life: de Gaulle’s overtures toward the Soviet
bloc were discredited, and a frightened West Germany increased its military budget.
But the West was unable to capitalize on the Soviets’ predicament. The Johnson administration offered
only mild protests, with some administration officials reminding the president of Czech arms deliveries to
Hanoi. Despite the talk of bridge building, Washington had never intended to come to the assistance of
Czechoslovakia and once more bore the opprobrium of deserting a people seeking freedom. National interests
undoubtedly trumped moral sentiments. Waging a war nine thousand miles away in Asia, the United States
could ill afford to condemn the USSR’s defense of its borders, especially when Brezhnev had not threatened
West Berlin. The personal and political costs fell heavily on Johnson, who had to cancel his trip to Moscow
for a summit meeting, thereby abandoning the hope of ending his presidency on a high note and securing
peace in Vietnam.
Soviet hard-liners exulted over the West’s restraint in August 1968. Having expanded their supply of
bombs and missiles, they were now brimming with confidence that any form of European détente would be
on Soviet terms. On October 8, in his first meeting with Brandt during the UN General Assembly in New
York, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko made it clear that Moscow’s stiff conditions for improved
bilateral relations had not changed: recognition of Europe’s existing borders, recognition of the GDR,
renunciation of the 1938 Munich Agreement, which had carved up Czechoslovakia, and adherence to the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Nonetheless, the destruction of the Prague Spring created a lasting moral and intellectual dilemma for
Khrushchev’s heirs, dispelling the illusion that the communist system could be reformed and become more
popular and efficient by introducing elements of democracy.* For the next two decades Moscow tried to
suppress the extraordinary seven-month occurrence in Czechoslovakia, and the West, fearing to provoke
another round of repression, also refrained from stirring the hopes of the vanquished in August 1968.

1968: INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS YEAR

The political claims of the East European dissidents echoed a global movement in the 1960s on behalf of
human rights. From the American South to South Africa and from Northern Ireland to Australia, minority
and indigenous populations were demanding citizenship rights, equality under the law, and freedom of

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speech, the press, and association. People still living under colonial rule were demanding independence, and
those suffering under repressive governments were seeking outside defenders. Among their champions were a
growing number of nongovernmental organizations that protested racial and religious discrimination and
advocated rights for women, workers, aliens, refugees, and the incarcerated. In 1967, six years after its
founding, Amnesty International was operating in eighteen countries, adopting prisoners of conscience and
lobbying the United Nations to abolish the death penalty and later to abolish torture.†
Neither of the Superpowers gave significant support to the internationalist goals of the United Nations nor
welcomed any form of outside intrusion in their internal affairs. US leaders, although professing support for
international humanitarian standards, had insisted on their nonbinding, aspirational character. America’s
political culture contained a paradoxical mixture of concern for individual liberties, respect for law, and
generous impulses toward the underprivileged abroad with a strong commitment to laissez-faire capitalism, its
federal system of states’ rights, and its assertion of an exceptionalism that made the United States immune
from outside intrusion. The Soviet Union championed self-determination and antiracism abroad, if not at
home. Guided by Marx’s dicta, it dismissed the “bourgeois” principle of personal rights as a license for
exploitation, defined freedom in economic and social terms (among them, the right to work and to free
education and social services), and insisted on the duties of its citizens and the primacy of the state in building
socialism.
Unsurprisingly, neither side had wished to enlarge the UN competence in the area of human rights, but
both had used its machinery to trade barbs in the Commission on Human Rights and in the General
Assembly: the West condemning the Soviets’ ban on emigration and its forced labor system, and the East
denouncing America’s discriminatory laws and practices against its black population. Under the Eisenhower
administration, Congress, the American Bar Association, and US business groups had reinforced the
president’s refusal to draft or ratify UN human rights conventions, and things changed only slightly under
Kennedy and Johnson. The Soviet leadership, while taunting America’s reticence and endorsing Third World
demands for decolonization, was equally leery of any instrument that exposed their regime to outside scrutiny.
By 1960, the human rights cause had assumed a new direction because an overwhelming majority of UN
members now represented Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Inevitably, these governments were far less
concerned with the barbarous acts committed in World War II than in redeeming the unfulfilled promises in
the Atlantic Charter: removing the last remnants of Western imperialism, ending racial injustice in Southern
Africa, and taking up the cause of the Palestinians. They therefore identified human rights neither with
individual freedom nor with the realization of socialism but with the imperatives of national self-
determination, economic development, and control over natural resources.
The General Assembly sprang to life. The anti-imperialist bloc, joined by all the communist members,
passed declarations calling for Independence for Colonial Peoples (1960) and the Elimination of All Forms of
Racial Discrimination (1965). In 1966 they also broke the long deadlock over implementing the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Recognizing the impossibility of bridging the East-West ideological division
over human rights, the assembly finally passed two International Covenants, one on civil and political rights,
the other on economic, social, and cultural rights.* The Third World attempted to transform the Cold War
into a North-South debate between the developed and nondeveloped worlds and among the planet’s diverse
peoples. In 1967 an expanded UN Commission on Human Rights ended its two-decadelong period of

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inactivity and for the first time conducted investigations of conditions in South Africa and in the Arab lands
occupied by Israel. The next year it sought to implant its political goals on the international discourse of
human rights.
To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration, the United Nations named 1968
“International Human Rights Year” and convened a global conference to review its progress and set an agenda
for the future. The setting, ironically, was Tehran, site of the first Big Three summit in 1943 and also the
capital of an absolutist regime installed by a 1953 Western-sponsored coup and maintained by a powerful
army and secret police, and whose victims were mobilizing worldwide protests against the shah.
The first International Conference on Human Rights met between April 22 and May 13, 1968, at a
moment of considerable Superpower anxiety: it was the height of the Prague Spring and the Tet offensive and
less than three weeks after assassination of the American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The
Third World had amassed considerable power and experience since the Bandung Conference. Echoing their
host’s provocative opening speech, the majority of delegates paid lip service to the Universal Declaration of
1948 but also emphasized its “empty promises.” Several speakers denounced the UDHR’s “cosmopolitan”
values, insisting on “the special circumstances of developing countries,” the priority of “economic” over
“political democracy,” and the precedence of collective entities—nation, people, and state—over the
individual.
The Superpowers shrank from confronting the majority over an issue they had long regarded as secondary.
In a curious twist, Western and Soviet diplomats at the scene quietly linked forces and refrained from
attacking the other’s weak points. Only the aged French jurist René Cassin, a veteran of the 1948
deliberations over the Universal Declaration, dissented, insisting that human rights “could not be different for
Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Asians” and warning against confusing the achievement of national
independence with the necessity of protecting humans from arbitrary power. The only delegate who supported
Cassin was the emissary of Dubček’s reformist government. His appeal for “the rights of the individual” did
draw warm applause from all except the Soviets.
The year 1968 ended on a high note when, on Christmas Eve, the US spacecraft Apollo 8 orbited the moon
and transmitted breathtaking photographs of the Earth’s satellite and of the Earth itself. The United States
had won another Cold War contest—the space race—and seven months later three American astronauts
walked on the surface of the moon. But below, on a planet filled that year with turmoil and violence, some
questioned the huge expense of the US space program. A striking cartoon depicted an urban slum dweller’s
impassive reaction to an astronaut’s observation of the Earth’s beauty as seen from space.
By the late 1960s a youth revolt had erupted on every continent against social, economic, and political
injustice and against war, imperialism, and nuclear arms. Drawing no inspiration from the official ideologies
of either the United States or the USSR or even from Dubček’s socialism with a human face or from
traditional trade union principles, the demonstrators—dressed in Mao jackets and carrying banners of Che
Guevara and Ho Chi Minh—demanded a world that transcended the Cold War. Paul McCartney’s 1967
lyrics suggested that it was time for Sergeant Pepper’s (twenty-year-old) Lonely Hearts Club Band to leave
the scene.
But the Cold War did not end. In response to the popular clamor, the Third World’s assertiveness, and
their near-clashes in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—and especially to the economic slowdown that was

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sapping their power—the United States and the Soviet Union sought new ways to manage their rivalry and
reinforce their global hegemony.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Primary Sources

Cronkite, Walter. “Report from Vietnam (1968).” YouTube video 0:53, from a CBS News Television
broadcast, February 27, 1968. Posted by “tpleines,” May 22, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Nn4w-ud-TyE .
“Final Act of the International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran 22 April to 13 May 1968.” United
Nations. http://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ha/fatchr/Final_Act_of_TehranConf.pdf
Johnson, Lyndon Baines. “Remarks Made Following the First Meeting with Soviet Premier Kosygin.”
Glassboro, NJ, June 1967. UCSB American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?
pid=28317 .
Johnson, Lyndon Baines. Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes. Edited by Michael R. Beschloss.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Navrátil, Jaromír. The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader. New York: Central
European University Press, 1998.
“Palestine National Charter of 1964.” United Nations. Yale Law School Avalon Project: Documents in Law,
History and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp .
“Peace March: Thousands Oppose Vietnam War, 1967/04/18.” Universal News-reels. New York: Films
Media Group, 1967. https://archive.org/details/1967-04-18_Peace_March .
The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision-making on Vietnam. 5 vols.
Boston: Beacon, 1971–1972.
Schoenhals, Michael, ed. China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969: Not a Dinner Party. Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe, 1996.
United Nations Security Council. “Resolution 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967.” United Nations.
https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/7D35E1F729DF 491C85256EE700686136.

Contemporary Writing

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.
Lacouture, Jean. Vietnam: Between Two Truces. Translated by Konrad Kellen and Joel Carmichael. New
York: Random House, 1966.

Memoirs

Dubček, Alexander. Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubček. Translated and edited by Jiri
Hochman. New York: Hodansha International, 1993.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002.

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Johnson, Lyndon B. The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1971.
Kovaly, Heda. Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941–1968. New York: Holmes & Meir, 1997.
Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night. New York: New American Library, 1968.
McNamara, Robert S., and Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York:
Times Books, 1995.
Mlynář, Zdenĕk. Night Frost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism. Translated by Paul Wilson. London:
C. Hurst, 1980.
Trương, Như Tảng, David Chanoff, and Van Toai Doan. A Vietcong Memoir. San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1985.

Photographs

Hobsbawm, E. J., and Marc Weitzmann. 1968 Magnum Throughout the World. Paris: Magnum Photos,
1998.

Films

Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. San Francisco: Zoetrope Studios, 1979.
The Bedford Incident. Directed by James B. Harris. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1965.
Commissar. Directed by Aleksandr Askoldov. Moscow: Gorky Film Studio, 1967.
The Deer Hunter. Directed by Michael Cimino. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1978.
The Ditch. Directed by Bing Wang. Hong Kong: Wil Productions, 2010.
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Los
Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964.
Fail-Safe. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964.
From Russia with Love. Directed by Terence Young. London: Eon Productions, 1963.
I Am Cuba. Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. Moscow: Mosfilm, 1964.
Ice Station Zebra. Directed by John Sturges. Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, 1968.
The Ipcress File. Directed by Sidney J. Furie. London: Lowndes Productions, 1965.
Kolya. Directed by Jan Sverák. Prague: Portobello Pictures, 1996.
M*A*S*H. Directed by Robert Altman. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1970.
The Mouse on the Moon. Directed by Richard Lester. London: Walter Shenson Films, 1963.
The Odessa File. Directed by Ronald Neame. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1974.
Panic in Year Zero. Directed by Ray Milland. Los Angeles: American International Pictures, 1962.
The Quiet American. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Los Angeles: Miramax Films, 2002.
The Red Detachment of Women. Directed by Jie Fu and Wenzhan Pan. Beijing: Beijing Film Studio, 1970.
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Directed by Norman Jewison. Los Angeles: Mirisch
Corporation, 1966.
Seven Days in May. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Los Angeles: Seven Arts Productions, 1964.

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The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Directed by Martin Ritt. London: Salem Films, 1965.
Torn Curtain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1966.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Directed by Philip Kaufman. Los Angeles: Saul Zaentz Company, 1988.
When the Tenth Month Comes [Bao gio cho den thang muoi]. Directed by Nhat Minh Dang. Hanoi: Vietnam
Feature Film Studio, 1985.

Fiction

Achebe, Chinua. A Man of the People: A Novel. New York: John Day, 1966.
Gordimer, Nadine. The Late Bourgeois World. New York: Viking, 1966.
Greene, Graham. The Comedians. New York: Viking, 1966.
Head, Bessie. When Rain Clouds Gather. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
Heller, Joseph. Catch 22, a Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.
Llosa, Mario Vargas, and Edith Grossman. The Feast of the Goat. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2001.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five: Or, the Children’s Crusade, a Duty Dance with Death. New York:
Delacorte, 1969.

Secondary Sources

Barnouin, Barbara, and Changgen Yu. Chinese Foreign Policy During the Cultural Revolution. London: Kegan
Paul International, 1998.
Brands, H. W. The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Brigham, Robert K. Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998.
Brocheux, Pierre. Ho Chi Minh: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Burke, Roland. Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia, PA: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Chang, Gordon H. Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Chen, Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Dockrill, Saki. Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice Between Europe and the World? Houndmills,
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Gaiduk, I. V. The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996.
Ginor, Isabella, and Gideon Remez. Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Havens, Thomas. Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1987.

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Hershberg, James G. Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Jensen, Steven L. B. The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the
Reconstruction of Global Values. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Kaiser, David E. American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.
Klimke, Martin. The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Kovrig, Bennett. Of Walls and Bridges: The United States and Eastern Europe. New York: New York University
Press, 1991.
LaFeber, Walter. The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005.
Levin, Matthew. Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties. Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2013.
Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1999.
Luthi, Lorenz M. The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008.
Martin, Garret Joseph. General de Gaulle’s Cold War: Challenging American Hegemony, 1963–1968. New York
and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015.
McDougall, Walter A. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic
Books, 1985.
Nguyen, Lien-Hang T. Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Oren, Michael B. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Radchenko, Sergey. Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967.
Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2009.
Schwartz, Thomas Alan. Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003.
Segev, Tom. 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2007.
Shemesh, Moshe. Arab Politics, Palestinian Nationalism, and the Six Day War: The Crystallization of Arab
Strategy and Nasir’s Descent to War, 1957–1967. Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2008.
Spector, Ronald H. After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1993.
Strain, Christopher. The Long Sixties: America 1954–1974. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003.

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Williams, Kieran. The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Wyatt, David. When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2014.
Zhai, Qiang. China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2000.

* Based on classified CIA reports, a Kennedy aide wrote that “by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new
production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop,
feedback control employing self-teaching computers.”
† Following its confrontation with the Soviet Union in 1962, the United States led a regional quarantine of
Cuba. Moreover, the Johnson administration quickly abandoned the reformist impulses of Kennedy’s
Alliance for Progress and in 1965 intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic to overthrow an
allegedly leftist government and prevent “another Cuba.”
* The Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Pakistan, as well as South Vietnam.
* The most prominent was French president Charles de Gaulle, who had negotiated Algeria’s independence
in 1962.
† Drawing on the American public’s fears during the Cuban missile crisis, Johnson suggested that his
Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, would recklessly use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. In the notorious
daisy ad featuring a young child counting flower petals immediately followed by a countdown before a
nuclear explosion, Johnson appealed for voters’ support “because the stakes are too high.”
* In selecting bombing targets, Johnson avoided destroying North Vietnamese dams and ports and thereby
provoking a Chinese intervention; although the Ho Chi Minh Trail was bombed, Johnson made no moves
to invade Laos or attack the Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia; and US forces confined themselves to
search-and-destroy operations against enemy units and largely refrained from involvement in local politics.

* US public support of the war was badly damaged by Eddie Adams’s close-up photograph of the South
Vietnamese police chief, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, executing a suspected Viet Cong officer during the Tet
offensive, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. In the spring of 1968 the Wall Street Journal opined, “No
battle and no war are worth any price.”

* One of these operations in November 1966 provoked an Israeli military retaliation against three Jordanian
villages that drew UN censure from Israel’s friends and foes.

* However, leading German politicians, sensitive to the Nazi past, announced that in the face of the Arabs’
threat to Israel’s existence they could not be neutral in spirit.

† Moreover, the October 1967 death of Che Guevara at the hands of CIA-trained Bolivian Rangers gave
President Johnson a rare moment of optimism over the prospects of halting communist insurgencies in the
Third World.

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‡ In 1970 the KGB recruited Wadi Haddad, the leader of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) who had organized the 1968 hijacking of an Israeli El Al flight, and for the next eight
years the USSR supported PFLP terrorist operations against Israel, its Western allies, and moderate Arab
governments.
* The Israelis, evoking Genesis, named the war Milhemet Sheshet HaYamim (The Six-Day War); the Arabs,
more prosaically, called it an-Naksah (The Setback), and outsiders have labeled it the June 1967 Arab-
Israeli War.
* Among the leading East European cultural figures, the novelists Stefan Heym (GDR), Milan Kundera and
Ludvík Vaculík (Czechoslovakia), and György Konrád (Hungary); the playwright Václav Havel
(Czechoslovakia); and the filmmakers Miloš Forman (Czechoslovakia) and Andrzej Wajda (Poland) all ran
afoul of communist authorities in the 1960s.
* The Czechs and Slovaks were also exultant over their hockey team’s upset victory over the Soviets during the
February 1968 Winter Olympics.
† In Czech pražské jaro, in Slovak pražská jar, “Prague Spring” was originally the name of an annual
international music festival, but in 1968 it became linked to Czechoslovakia’s seven months of political
liberalization.
‡ Once more hockey created a provocation: After the Czechs twice defeated the Soviet team in the March
1969 World Ice Hockey Championships in Stockholm, some five hundred thousand joyous fans poured
into the streets of Prague. In response to alleged acts of violence—which many suspected were stirred by
Soviet provocateurs—the police suppressed the protests, and Moscow used the disorder as a pretext to
place Gustáv Husák at the head of the Communist Party.

* While the governments of Yugoslavia and Romania stood on the sidelines, only North Korea, North
Vietnam, and Cuba applauded the destruction of Czechoslovakia’s “counterrevolutionary forces.”
* This lesson was imprinted not only on the anticommunist opposition but also on the thirty-seven-year-old
communist official in Stavropol (and future party general secretary) Mikhail Gorbachev.

† In 1977 Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “having contributed to securing the
ground for freedom, for justice, and thereby also for peace in the world.”

* These were both ratified by the Soviet Union in 1973, but not by the United States.

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 Chapter 6
DÉTENTE, 1969–1975

It often takes more courage to change one’s opinion than to keep it.

—Willy Brandt

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like “détente” when there’s a good English phrase for it—Cold War.

—Golda Meir

In 1969 the Cold War entered a new stage. The United States and the Soviet Union, responding to the
proliferation of nuclear arms, economic and political rivals, and volatile conditions in the Third World,
attempted to revamp their global rivalry by establishing new ground rules, new practices, and a new
relationship between themselves. Mindful of their limits after the shocks of Tet and Prague, Washington and
Moscow embraced détente as a means of fortifying a status quo in which they would continue to lead the
world.
Détente—the relaxation of Cold War tensions between the United States and the USSR—began in 1969.
Its architects were the new US president, Richard Nixon, and the Soviet Union’s general secretary, Leonid
Brezhnev, two cautious, conservative political actors seeking to fortify their positions in power. Nixon took the
lead, bolstered by his long anticommunist record and the deft support of his national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger. Seeking to reassert US power against the backdrop of the Soviets’ spectacular achievement of
nuclear parity and America’s descent into the Vietnam morass, Nixon proposed a new format of US-Soviet
relations. There would be concrete and reciprocal agreements and an overt linkage among the Superpowers’
three major interests: arms control, expanding economic ties, and containing conflicts in Europe and the
Third World. Brezhnev responded positively, seeking a means of increasing the Soviets’ prestige, obtaining
Western technology, and aiding a faltering economy, as well as alleviating the growing threat from China.
Détente was affected by several factors. In announcing an “era of negotiations” in 1969, both leaders raised
inflated hopes and fears at home and abroad. A Cold War–weary public welcomed a step back from nuclear
saber rattling, but hard-liners on both sides were mistrustful and vocal in their criticism. The US and Soviet
leaders also confronted a multipolar world in which other actors, particularly West German chancellor Willy
Brandt and China’s supreme leader, Mao Zedong, played significant roles in reshaping US-Soviet relations, as
did the leaders of India and Pakistan, Israel and its Arab neighbors, and North and South Vietnam.
Moreover, underlying US-Soviet efforts to create a more orderly and predictable international order was the
old Cold War logic of falling dominoes and their core ideological quarrel: would capitalism or socialism
prevail? Consequently, the launching of détente, which was predicated on establishing mutual agreements, a

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joint code of conduct, and military and political restraint—and in which the means and goals of the two rivals
were intermingled or ambiguous—would inevitably stir suspicions of the other’s bad faith.

REDUCING THE NUCLEAR THREAT

Ever since the dawn of the nuclear age both the United States and the Soviet Union had preached the virtues
of arms control without achieving any agreement. The Soviets had initially rebuffed US calls for a ban on
atomic weapons until they were able to produce their own arsenal, and in the 1950s Khrushchev’s proposals
for general disarmament had foundered on Eisenhower’s insistence on verification.
The Soviet Union’s spectacular military gains in the 1960s formed an important backdrop to détente. Now
that Moscow had bridged the missile gap and achieved strategic parity with the United States, it was prepared
to discuss mutual reductions in nuclear forces, but the initial discussions had been thwarted by the Vietnam
War, the June 1967 war in the Middle East, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. On the eve of the
Prague invasion, on July 1, 1968, East-West cooperation reached a pinnacle with the signing of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement that restricted the transfer of nuclear weapons or technology to
nonnuclear states, called on the latter to renounce the acquisition or production of nuclear weapons, and
established the UN International Atomic Energy Administration in Vienna to enforce compliance.*
By 1969 the Superpowers claimed the capacity for “mutual assured destruction” (MAD): regardless of who
fired the first missile, both were equally vulnerable to annihilation, and no defensive weapon could shield
them. Although neither side was confident in the other’s restraint, the leaders of both countries recognized
the political and economic advantages of curbing their extravagant military budgets and reducing a struggle
that neither could win.
Nixon’s accession to the presidency in January 1969—coupled with Brezhnev’s determination to play a
dominant role in the Kremlin—made the revival of talks on major arms limitations possible. In a daring
political gambit, Brezhnev immediately probed a war-weakened America’s willingness to negotiate as an
equal. And in accepting the Soviet proposal for reciprocal nuclear limitations, Nixon became the first
president to abandon the insistence on US superiority and sought to wrap the USSR in a web of agreements
and understandings to detoxify the Cold War.
The start of serious US-Soviet arms-limitation talks was delayed by old layers of suspicion. The Nixon
administration, obsessed with ending the Vietnam War, continued to demand Moscow’s assistance with
North Vietnam and in the meantime balked at a summit meeting. The president also discomfited Brezhnev
by making friendly gestures toward communist China. The Soviet Union, on its side, maintained its insistence
on a European security conference that would recognize the postwar borders, and the Soviet press continued
to lambaste NATO and Nixon’s “Cold War tactics”: America’s stepped-up war in Southeast Asia, the
decision to expand its antiballistic missile (ABM) system, and its obsession with subverting the socialist world.
After months of mutual stalling (caused in part by the reluctance of their military leaders), the United
States and the Soviet Union finally launched the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) talks in Helsinki
on November 17, 1969. Under a bright spotlight of public attention, the negotiators during their first five
weeks made a serious effort to understand the other side’s views. Nevertheless, the subsequent SALT
meetings, which alternated between Helsinki and Vienna, dragged on for two and a half years. Although both

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sides agreed on the necessity of curbing ABMs, the Soviets, until May 1971, resisted Washington’s demand to
include offensive weapons in their discussions, and when they did, the SALT talks became bogged down over
the different categories of missiles and innovations in nuclear warheads.
The drawn-out SALT talks were also colored by developments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East,
where the two rivals remained at odds. The talks were closely managed behind the scenes by Kissinger
through his Washington back channel with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Another important
element in the arms negotiations was their linkage to the prospect of increased US-Soviet trade. Brezhnev,
who had stood up to the politburo hard-liners in advocating closer economic ties with the West, counted on
Washington to deliver palpable benefits. But Nixon and Kissinger viewed any trade concession as a quid pro
quo for Soviet good conduct over Vietnam and the SALT talks. Indeed, a major SALT breakthrough in May
1971 was directly tied to US grain sales to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the complicated negotiations
between the Nixon administration and anticommunist US labor unions over fulfilling this deal underscored
the domestic perils of linkage.
The SALT talks were ultimately successful, although contested by hawks on both sides. The result gave a
decided edge to the United States. By controlling the pace of the negotiations, the United States had been
able to maintain its strategic advantage despite obtaining only an interim agreement on offensive weapons and
establishing missile numbers that gave an apparent benefit to the USSR. Nixon, by wielding the carrot and
stick of the West’s superior economic power as well as the shock of his breakthrough visit to China in
February 1972, was able to elicit significant concessions from Brezhnev, particularly on excluding US nuclear
weapons in Europe. Moreover, despite the resumption of America’s bombing campaign against North
Vietnam (during which Soviet merchant ships were accidentally hit and several sailors killed), Brezhnev did
not cancel the Moscow summit. In May 1972 Nixon became the first US president to visit the Soviet capital,
where he signed the Cold War’s first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.
A second agreement signed in Moscow, the ABM Treaty, was an attempt to curb the arms race by limiting
the number of defense sites against a nuclear attack. In this treaty the United States and the USSR abandoned
the establishment of a nationwide system of defenses, agreeing to establish only two fixed, ground-based
systems, each with one hundred missile interceptors.* The goal was to reduce the arms race: if both
Superpowers remained vulnerable, they would be deterred not only from a first strike but also from developing
even more powerful offensive weapons.
Nixon and Brezhnev also concluded a Basic Agreement in Moscow laying out the new principles of US-
Soviet relations. These included a pledge to avoid military confrontations and to prevent the outbreak of
nuclear war, a promise of “restraint” in their mutual relations, and a foreswearing of “efforts to obtain
unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly.” Although vaguely worded and largely
unenforceable, these guidelines constituted the unofficial charter for détente and reverberated around the
world as a formal renunciation by the Superpowers of exploiting regional conflicts for their own interests.

Ostpolitik

Unlike Nixon (who had preferred and prematurely congratulated Brandt’s conservative opponent, the CDU
leader Kurt Georg Kiesinger), Brezhnev warmly welcomed Willy Brandt’s victory in the momentous West
German elections in September 1969. As a potential partner, Brandt, the first Social Democrat chancellor of

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the Federal Republic, had impeccable credentials, with his anti-Nazi record, adherence to the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty, outspoken support for rapprochement with the East, and, above all, promises of
generous economic and technological assistance to the ailing Soviet economy. Other Kremlin leaders endorsed
a Soviet Westpolitik as a means of weaning the Bonn government away from NATO and reducing US power
in Europe. However, a few were less enthusiastic. In his response to Brandt’s overtures, Brezhnev had to
overcome strong Soviet memories of World War II, Moscow’s two-decadelong propaganda tirades against the
FRG, and the even longer hostility (dating back to 1917) between communists and Social Democrats—not to
mention the awkward problem of the GDR.
Brandt and his close adviser and confidant Egon Bahr were prepared to move quickly and decisively to free
the German question from its Cold War straitjacket. The FRG, now led by an awkward coalition of Social
Democrats (SDP) and center-right Free Democrats (FDP), had become the world’s third-largest exporter but
was shaken by its first serious economic downturn since 1949 and by social and political unrest from
increasingly militant left- and right-wing movements. Brandt, a charismatic politician and a realist, capitalized
on Nixon’s proposal for an era of negotiations. He intended to overcome the East’s suspicions and bad
memories by conducting an active campaign to conciliate the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies,
including the GDR. He would reassure his US protector and his West European neighbors of Bonn’s fidelity,
quelling their fears of another Rapallo—the 1922 rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union
that had ruptured the West’s unity and laid the basis for close military and economic cooperation until Hitler
came to power. Brandt’s most difficult accomplishment was to convince most, if not all, of his fellow citizens
that by abandoning Adenauer’s hard-line stance toward Germany’s lost territories and the priority of German
unification, the FRG could stabilize relations in Central Europe and secure the future of West Berlin.
Ostpolitik consisted of a series of interlinked agreements brilliantly masterminded by Brandt and Bahr, who
trod a careful line between accommodation and German national interests. The major breakthrough occurred
in the Moscow Treaty (August 12, 1970), in which both sides renounced the use of force and any territorial
claims against each other and also recognized the inviolability of Europe’s borders. By accepting the Soviet
demand to acknowledge the status quo and offering considerable economic inducements, Brandt was able to
convince Brezhnev to accept his refusal to formally recognize the German Democratic Republic and to
sanction West Germany’s inroads into the Soviet bloc.
Four months later Brandt journeyed to Warsaw to sign a treaty with the even more wary Polish
government. Again, the chancellor combined conciliatory gestures—a recognition of the Oder-Neisse border
and an offer of increased trade—with a forceful refusal to pay reparations to Poland and a demand to expedite
the emigration of the remaining ethnic Germans wishing to leave. On December 7, 1970, in a stunning
political gesture, the chancellor fell to his knees before the memorial to the slain Jews of the 1943 Warsaw
ghetto uprising, thereby acknowledging West Germany’s responsibility for its past and its determination to
reconcile with its former victims.
Still to be won was security for West Berlin, whose morale and economy had languished since the Berlin
Wall was built in 1961. During that decade the GDR had done its utmost to isolate the city by impeding
traffic across its territory and blocking ties between West and East Berliners. In response Bonn had persisted
in maintaining its links with the beleaguered outpost by establishing a few government offices and heavily
subsidizing the West Berlin economy.

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 Although the fate of the former German capital rested with the four occupying powers, Bonn, through
back channels, played an important role in the negotiations. The prospects began to improve in May 1971,
when Brezhnev replaced the obdurate East German Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht with the more
obliging Erich Honecker. With the August 23, 1971, Quadripartite Agreement, Brandt won another major
victory, achieving security for his West Berliners. The agreement not only assured unimpeded access to the
city, allowing them to visit East Berlin and other parts of the GDR, but also opened the way for Bonn to
represent West Berlin abroad and to expand its political and economic ties with the isolated city.
Brandt’s successes, culminating in his informal meeting in the Crimea with Brezhnev in September 1971
and the award of a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the year, received grudging approval in Washington. But
they also infuriated Brandt’s domestic rivals, who accused him of betraying the nation’s interests. In April
1972 the Christian Democrats sought to unseat him with a vote of no confidence and a month later to block
passage of the core Soviet and Polish treaties. Brezhnev, on the eve of his summit with Nixon, anxiously
observed these votes, on which the fate of his side of Ostpolitik depended.
Soon Brandt achieved another triumph. On May 17 the Bundestag, by a razor-thin majority, passed the
two treaties. Buoyed by his victory, the chancellor called for national elections as a referendum on Ostpolitik,
and his government won handily in November 1972. Brandt was then able to conclude the most difficult
agreement of all, the Basic Treaty with the GDR, containing recognition of the current borders and a
renunciation of force but also setting more generous rules for human contact between the two Germanys. By
accepting the existence of two states—while still withholding formal recognition—Brandt had abandoned
West Germany’s two-decadelong Cold War crusade against its communist neighbor and normalized its role
in the international community, paving the way for the FRG and the GDR to enter the United Nations in
1973. That year Ostpolitik was completed with the establishment of diplomatic ties with Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and Bulgaria.
Ostpolitik was made possible not only by Brandt’s determination and persuasiveness but also by a new stage
of the Cold War that gave Bonn room to maneuver. With both Superpowers struggling to control their
respective clients, finance their outsized military expenditures, and quell domestic dissatisfaction, Brandt
between 1969 and 1974 was able to transform West Germany into a politically respectable, diplomatically
vigorous middle-sized actor. He laid the foundations for Bonn’s extensive economic inroads into the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, which profited both sides. He promoted the first expansion of the European
Community in 1973, which not only brought in a supportive Great Britain but also raised the prospect of a
stronger European voice in world affairs. And, finally, although Brandt anchored Bonn’s diplomacy in its ties
to Washington, the methods and goals of Ostpolitik were both more geographically limited and politically
daring than Nixon’s view of détente.

PING-PONG DIPLOMACY

Mao Zedong, who reached his seventy-eighth year in 1969 and appointed Marshal Lin Biao as his successor,
was still determined to combat China’s dire economic and security situation. The country, ravaged by the
Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, had become increasingly
poor and isolated, with enemies on almost all its borders. In addition to the American-led war in Vietnam,

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China’s hostile neighbors included Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, India, and especially the Soviet Union, whose
invasion of Czechoslovakia and Brezhnev doctrine directly threatened China. Countering the Kremlin’s
efforts to gain the support of the world communist movement, China drew closer to Romania and Albania
and on March 2, 1969, instigated the first Sino-Soviet armed clash along the Ussuri River.
The advent of détente and Ostpolitik—which threatened to strengthen China’s foremost antagonist—may
well have persuaded Mao to rethink his two-decadelong hostility toward the United States. Drawing on
Leninist vocabulary to accuse Moscow of “tsarism” and “social imperialism” and on traditional Chinese
political culture calling for “borrowing the strength of the barbarians to check the barbarians,” Mao could
justify a momentous shift in world diplomacy.
Nixon was well prepared to woo a second communist power in order to free America from Vietnam, exert
pressure on Moscow, and revive US global power. However, to do so, he had to abandon America’s pro-
Taiwan China lobby (which he had once championed) and deal with a regime the United States had not yet
recognized, had long vilified, and had annually barred from taking a seat in the United Nations, and a
government still supporting North Vietnam. Soon after assuming the presidency in 1969, Nixon set out
boldly, initiating secret diplomatic soundings through the leaders of France, Pakistan, and Romania, which
led to the resumption of the suspended Sino-American ambassadorial talks in Warsaw in early 1970.*
Washington, however, had many unfriendly habits to overcome. Not only had Nixon irritated Mao by
publicly justifying his costly ABM program as a defense against “the Chinese threat,” he had also refused to
end America’s military presence in Taiwan and in May 1970 expanded the Vietnam War by invading
Cambodia. Only when Kissinger recognized the serious split in the Chinese politburo between Prime
Minister Zhou Enlai, who advocated rapprochement with Washington, and Lin Biao, who forcefully opposed
it, did Washington begin to hone its signals and issue more conciliatory statements.
By 1971 Mao was ready to respond. In April he caused a sensation by inviting an American table tennis
team to visit China. While the US press recorded the excitement of “ping-pong diplomacy,” Nixon quietly
lifted the twenty-one-year trade embargo and in May offered to dispatch Kissinger to China for a secret
meeting with its leaders. Kissinger’s two-day visit in July was a resounding political and propaganda success.
The announcement of Nixon’s forthcoming trip to China—which would precede the long-delayed Moscow
summit—alerted the world to a new US-Chinese relationship. In August the United States announced its
support for the seating of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations, which occurred two months
later. Of even greater significance was Lin Biao’s mysterious death in a September 12 plane crash, which
removed a major obstacle to the course set by Mao and Nixon.

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Photo 6.1 President Richard Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon visiting the Great Wall of China, February 24,
1972. Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, WHPO C8548-26A.

Despite Nixon’s hyperbolic toast at the end of his weeklong visit to China in February 1972, the president’s
trip did not “change the world.” Replacing two decades of hostility, the carefully crafted Shanghai
Communiqué on February 27 pledged both countries to work for normalization of relations and expand
people-to-people contacts and trade opportunities.* But US-Chinese relations remained prickly over the
future of Taiwan and ending the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, Washington’s triangular diplomacy had
measurably improved the US position in the Cold War. Although Nixon repeatedly denied that he was
“playing the China card,” the United States in fact had decided to tilt toward the weaker communist power
against the Soviet Union. As proof, Kissinger repeatedly provided sensitive intelligence information to Beijing
but none to the Soviet leaders.
There were additional benefits for the United States. Immediately after the Nixon visit, Beijing counseled
North Vietnam against a military offensive, and when the United States ferociously bombed Hanoi, Beijing
remained relatively silent. Moreover, China gradually began to diminish its aid to insurrectionary movements
in Africa, and over the next three years, while Washington and Beijing began working in tandem to reduce
tensions in Southeast Asia, the United States was able to reduce its armed forces.
For the aged and ill Mao, rapprochement with the long-reviled United States risked domestic opposition
and Hanoi’s contempt. But Nixon’s visit also brought benefits. Although weak and vulnerable, the People’s
Republic of China could now become a major diplomatic player in the region and the world. By reaching out
to the United States Mao had checked the danger of Soviet “imperialism,” and with the winding down of the
Cultural Revolution in 1971, China would be able to profit from expanded ties with the West to revive its
shattered economy.

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 The Soviets were, of course, the major losers. Stunned by Kissinger’s initial visit, Moscow continued to
hammer away at “the Chinese menace,” but it failed to halt Nixon’s triangular diplomacy. Some have
suggested that the USSR’s willingness to conclude the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin was hastened by
Kissinger’s July 1971 trip to Beijing. Even more persuasive are the suggestions that Brezhnev’s concessions
during the SALT negotiations and his refusal to cancel the Moscow summit grew directly out of the Soviet
Union’s ever-worsening relations with China.
Ping-pong diplomacy had also set the United States and China on a course that transcended the Cold War.
The end of China’s isolation not only changed the balance of power in Asia but also added China’s voice on
the UN Security Council as a champion of the old Bandung principles of noninterference and nondomination
by the two Great Powers.

TESTING DÉTENTE, 1970–1974

Despite US-Soviet attempts to manage their affairs peacefully, the Cold War continued in the Third World.
The three-year delay of the Moscow summit played a role, but even more important were the Superpowers’
opposing views of the methods and goals of détente as it applied outside Europe. Khrushchev had earlier
explained to a suspicious Mao that coexistence with the United States did not necessarily preclude seeking
political advantage through aid to potential clients in Asia, Africa, and Latin America or protecting Moscow’s
interests against Western incursions. Consequently, Brezhnev, after the hiatus following the Soviets’ setbacks
in Cuba, the Congo, Ghana, Algeria, and Indonesia, cautiously reentered the fray in the late 1960s,
encouraged by Nixon’s announcement that the United States would no longer commit its troops to halt the
spread of communism.* On the other hand Nixon still insisted on keeping a scorecard on the Kremlin’s gains
and losses and refused to allow Moscow to exploit America’s plight in Vietnam to gain advantage. Also, his
administration built up the conventional military power of America’s allies, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia,
to combat the spread of communism in the Middle East. Thus détente did not stop the Superpowers from
deploying their intelligence, military, and economic resources to compete for influence and prestige in the
Third World.

The Middle East

The Israeli-Egyptian conflict provided the first test of détente. Having heavily rearmed their respective clients
after the June 1967 war, the Superpowers were nonetheless unprepared for the outbreak of hostilities. In
March 1969, just as the Kremlin was exchanging friendly signals with Washington, Nasser, irritated by the
UN’s failure to obtain an Israeli evacuation of Egyptian territory, unilaterally abrogated the 1967 cease-fire
and launched the War of Attrition, with commando raids and the shelling and bombing of Israeli positions.
Israel responded with aerial attacks. By January 1970, Israel’s depth bombings of Egyptian military
installations and urban centers precipitated Nasser’s urgent plea to Moscow for support.
Brezhnev, bowing to his military and intelligence advisers against the more cautious counsel in the
politburo, responded almost immediately with Operation Kavkaz (Caucasus), expanding Egypt’s air defense
system and dispatching 12,000 Soviet soldiers and 150 pilots to control the surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), fly
surveillance missions, and conduct air-to-air combat with Israelis. Although his armed forces were stretched

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from Czechoslovakia to the Chinese frontier, Brezhnev shocked the United States by ordering the Soviet
Union’s most significant deployment outside the borders of the Warsaw Pact.†
Washington, although absorbed by the domestic outcry over the invasion of Cambodia,* was determined to
stand firm against the Soviets’ provocation and moved in as mediator. On August 7, Secretary of State
William Rogers convinced Israel and Egypt to sign another cease-fire, restoring the status quo. Nasser, saved
by US intervention, signed without consulting Moscow. The less enthusiastic Israeli prime minister, Golda
Meir, was assuaged by the offer of new deliveries of US F-4 Phantom aircraft and by Nixon’s assurances that
the United States would not insist on a withdrawal until a “binding peace agreement satisfactory to you has
been achieved.” Under Kissinger’s leadership, the United States had checked Soviet “adventurism” in the
Middle East.
This resolve was immediately tested. In the beginning of September a radical Palestinian group—furious
over Nasser’s desertion—attempted to topple Jordan’s western-leaning King Hussein, and the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four Western planes and forced them to land on an airstrip in
the Jordanian desert.† Nixon, applauding King Hussein’s formation of a military government, denounced the
Palestinian militants, sent naval forces to the eastern Mediterranean, and warned against outside intervention.
But on September 18 the crisis escalated when Syrian forces invaded Jordan in support of the Palestinians.
Washington immediately suspected a Soviet hand behind Syria’s move. Nixon and Kissinger perceived a
pattern of testing America’s mettle, which included the Egyptians’ violations of the cease-fire and Moscow’s
stalling over the SALT and the Berlin negotiations. Moreover, on the very day of the Syrian invasion of
Jordan, U-2 photos had recorded evidence of the construction of a potential nuclear submarine base in
Cienfuegos, Cuba, in violation of the 1962 Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement that prohibited offensive
weapons on the island.‡
A Superpower confrontation—which was underscored by the arrival of armed Soviet ships in the eastern
Mediterranean to shadow the US fleet—appeared imminent. The United States and Israel began
consultations over a possible intervention in Jordan to stave off Hussein’s collapse and the establishment of a
Palestinian Marxist state. However, in reality Washington was moving cautiously out of fear of unleashing an
uncontrollable war.
In the end it was the local actors who ended the crisis. King Hussein, the thirty-five-year-old monarch who
had been a major loser in June 1967, averted an Israeli intervention by unleashing his air force against the
Syrians, who (under the threat of Israel’s mobilization on their borders) beat a hurried retreat. The Jordanian
crisis then ended bloodily with the massacre of thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of their leaders to
Lebanon. In still another startling development, on September 28, Nasser, after calling an emergency Arab
League meeting to solve the Jordanian crisis, died of a heart attack at age fifty-two.
Although Washington trumpeted its victory (and many scholars have repeated this claim), the Jordanian
incident actually served as a crisis-management lesson for both sides. Whether or not Washington’s pressure
had been decisive, Brezhnev, with only limited influence over Syria, had his own good reasons to prevent a
wider war that would sink the prospect of détente. Nixon, too, shrank from a Superpower confrontation.
Despite the nuclear threat lurking behind the Cienfuegos dispute, he decided against escalating that crisis and

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instead negotiated a private agreement with Brezhnev in October. Under the new parameters of détente, the
need for alert, realistic policy making on distant and peripheral disputes had become evident.

South Asia

The struggle between India and Pakistan was another postcolonial rivalry that tested détente. The core source
of antagonism was the region of Kashmir, whose division in 1948 was (and still is) contested by Pakistan.
Initially, India had sought a neutral Cold War stance, but after the Sino-Indian War in 1962 it had gravitated
toward the Soviet Union. Pakistan, a formerly staunch member of the Western bloc, after its 1965 war with
India moved closer to China. In both instances, the United States, immersed in Vietnam, had stayed aloof,
but the Soviet Union in 1966 had gained the gratitude of both parties for its positive role as a mediator.
In the beginning of 1971—just as the United States began its overtures to China—the Indo-Pakistani
quarrel resumed. After a stunning electoral setback, the Pakistani government, led by the military dictator
General Yahya Khan, sought to suppress an autonomous movement in East Pakistan by declaring martial law
and arresting leaders of the resistance.* The violence of the repression, claiming thousands of victims, led to
the flight of almost ten million Bengali (and mostly Hindu) refugees into India. Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi, having failed to obtain international support to halt the atrocities, prepared for war.
The United States, while acknowledging its ally’s brutal behavior, had become dependent on Pakistan as its
conduit to China. Thus in July Nixon decided both to tilt toward Pakistan and to warn India (whose leader he
personally disliked) against any form of aggression against its neighbor. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union,
following the bombshell of Kissinger’s trip to Beijing, responded on August 9 with a Treaty of Peace,
Friendship, and Cooperation with India.
After war broke out in December between India and Pakistan, Washington and Moscow employed the
hotline to prevent an escalation. The Soviets, backing India, insisted on independence for East Pakistan,
which the United States did not oppose. But the crisis escalated when Nixon and Kissinger, suspecting
Kremlin support for an Indian attempt to dismember West Pakistan, dispatched a carrier battle group to the
Bay of Bengal. Moscow’s response was to send its own naval forces into the area.
The two-week war, which ended on December 17, was catastrophic for Pakistan, stripping it of over half its
population (which formed the new state of Bangladesh) and establishing India’s dominance of the
subcontinent. Nonetheless, Kissinger took credit for halting the aggression of a Kremlin proxy, although the
reality was less convincing. Gandhi had no intention of India becoming a Soviet satellite and being dragged
into Moscow’s quarrels with China. Moreover, not only had Washington misread Indian and Soviet
intentions and failed to rein in Pakistan, but its show of naval force had not impressed Beijing, and its refusal
to intervene militarily had infuriated the government in Islamabad.
The war’s outcome also contributed to regional instability and to nuclear proliferation. Immediately
afterward Pakistan decided to follow India’s example and began to develop an atomic weapons program.

Vietnam

The Vietnam War remained the most critical issue in US-Soviet relations. Early in the Nixon administration,
the president had signaled that these could not improve without Soviet aid in ending the war and had

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threatened to escalate hostilities if this was not forthcoming. The Soviets, while acknowledging their limited
control over Hanoi, resented US pressure and the use of its opening to China to force them to stand aside.*
Nixon did fulfill his 1968 campaign promise to end the draft and reduce the number of US troops in
Vietnam, but he also escalated the amount of violence and casualties. Far exceeding Johnson’s approach,
Nixon’s moves included expanding the war into Cambodia in 1970 and into Laos in 1971 (destabilizing both
countries) and responding to every North Vietnamese offensive with massive bombing attacks. Nonetheless,
the United States failed to budge Hanoi at the meeting table. In the secret Paris talks that he directed after
1969, Kissinger failed to win North Vietnamese agreement on a mutual withdrawal of their forces from South
Vietnam.
Facing reelection in 1972, Nixon stepped up the pressure on Moscow. In April Kissinger punished the
Soviets’ complicity in Hanoi’s recent offensive by refusing to facilitate the passage of the two Eastern treaties
in the West German Bundestag. Nixon’s badgering had some effect. At the May 1972 Moscow summit
Brezhnev finally agreed to send an emissary to Hanoi, and during the fall and winter of 1972 both of Nixon’s
summit partners urged restraint on their client. Hanoi responded by accusing China and the Soviet Union of
becoming bogged down on “the dark, muddy road of compromise.” North Vietnam denounced its two
patrons—“lured by the chimera of peaceful coexistence and economic benefits”—for betraying “the great, all-
conquering revolutionary idea of the age.”
The United States wielded its military power. Kissinger’s announcement that “peace is at hand”
undoubtedly contributed to Nixon’s reelection in November 1972; but immediately afterward the president
ordered the December bombing raids on Hanoi and Haiphong that forced North Vietnam to return to the
conference table and to agree to the country’s continuing division. With the agreement on January 27, 1973,
America’s long, costly, and divisive war ended on a sour note with a cease-fire in place instead of a total North
Vietnamese withdrawal.* Within two years, the Saigon government—weakened by the complete removal of
US troops and a sharp decrease in US military aid—was overcome by North Vietnamese forces. In the spring
of 1975 the governments of Cambodia and Laos also fell to the communists, leading to civil war, genocide,
and Hanoi’s intervention in both countries.†
The conclusion of the Vietnam War underscored the paradox of US-Soviet détente that had been
complicated by the emerging US-Sino-Soviet triangle. Although the Superpowers had committed substantial
resources to the struggle in Southeast Asia, neither had fully controlled its clients. Both had expected the
other to be more accommodating than either was willing to be, or even capable of being. To be sure, Hanoi’s
victory in 1975 created more diplomatic and economic problems for Moscow as well as for Beijing, while
America’s defeat—although a severe political and psychological blow—had left its triangular diplomacy
unimpaired. Nonetheless, America’s war in Vietnam had reinforced the nation’s growing conviction that the
struggle against global communism must no longer be fought solely by US soldiers.

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Photo 6.2 Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in a friendly exchange on the presidential yacht, Sequoia, June 19,
1973. Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, NLRN-WHPO-E1028-04.

The October War in the Middle East*

After the Vietnam obstacle had been cleared away, US-Soviet relations appeared to improve. Despite a
slowdown in the SALT II negotiations, Brezhnev’s visit to the United States in June 1973 (the first by a
Soviet leader in fourteen years and which included a visit to Nixon’s California home) was amicable. However,
in the course of their private discussions, Brezhnev added an ominous note with his repeated warnings of an
imminent explosion in the Middle East, which Nixon, intent on excluding the Kremlin from the region,
chose to ignore.
By September 1973 US-Soviet relations were cooling. With Nixon engrossed in Watergate,† Kissinger,
who had replaced Rogers as secretary of state, took a harder line toward Moscow. On September 11 the spirit
of détente was rattled by news from Chile, where a US-supported military junta led by Commander-in-Chief
Augusto Pinochet had overthrown the socialist government of Salvador Allende (who died during the attack)
and subsequently launched a wave of repression, imprisonment, and murder against tens of thousands of the
president’s supporters. In addition, the US Congress was balking over granting most-favored-nation trade
status to the Soviet Union, and Moscow was displeased over another planned Kissinger trip to China.
Kissinger intended to maintain US predominance in the Middle East but had decided to delay a peace
initiative until after the October Israeli general elections, which the seventy-five-year-old Golda Meir was
expected to win. Washington was also in direct contact with Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, who, after
expelling seventeen thousand Soviet military advisers and technicians in July 1972, had sought America’s
support in regaining the Sinai. Although Kissinger on September 25, 1973, assured Arab UN diplomats that

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the United States would soon assist them in ending the Israeli occupation, he also warned against “expecting
miracles.”
Sadat, who had lost patience with the Superpowers, was determined to use Egypt’s military power to force
concessions on Israel. In April 1973 he had concluded an offensive agreement with Syrian president Hafez al-
Assad and subsequently ignored repeated Soviet cautions against another disastrous military action. On
October 6, in a well-coordinated surprise attack, Egypt sent its troops across the Suez Canal and overran
Israeli defenses in the Sinai while Syria simultaneously attacked in the Golan Heights.
The United States and the Soviet Union moved immediately to control a war they had failed to prevent.
Over the next two weeks, while conducting a tense diplomatic duet, they both ran nonstop airlifts to supply
arms to their clients and jockeyed for a favorable cease-fire. After Israel launched a counteroffensive and
recaptured practically all the occupied territory, the situation changed dramatically. Kissinger, in almost
complete charge of US diplomacy, won Soviet consent for a cease-fire resolution by the UN Security Council
on October 22.
The Superpowers’ cooperation was immediately tested when Israeli forces, ignoring the cease-fire,
threatened to encircle the Egyptian Third Army corps. On October 24 Brezhnev, in response to Sadat’s
urgent appeal, proposed the dispatch of joint US-Soviet military units to enforce the cease-fire. Kissinger,
determined to keep control over the peace process, chose to interpret the general secretary’s proposal as an
ultimatum, one that (as in 1956) ostensibly threatened a unilateral Soviet intervention. That night US
conventional and nuclear forces throughout the world went on high alert for the first time since the Cuban
missile crisis. In response to Washington’s vociferous reaction, Brezhnev withdrew his proposal. Kissinger
then moved briskly to defuse the crisis, forcing Israel to accept the cease-fire and allow supplies to the
beleaguered Third Army and convincing Sadat to accept an international peacekeeping force. Bypassing the
UN peace conference in December, chaired jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union, Kissinger
conducted a breathtaking round of negotiations leading to disengagement agreements between the Israeli and
Egyptian and Syrian governments that excluded Moscow from the process.
The fourth Arab-Israeli war had global repercussions. On October 16, in retaliation for the West’s support
of Israel, the Arab oil producers cut production, quadrupled prices, declared a total embargo against shipments
to the United States and the Netherlands, and drastically reduced supplies to Western Europe. The oil shock
of 1973–1974 dealt a crippling blow to the noncommunist world, sending their economies into stagflation, a
period of low economic growth and rising prices and unemployment.
The Soviet Union, a major oil and natural gas producer, initially profited from higher world prices. But this
boon also had a negative effect, reinforcing the command economy and blocking internal reforms. Brezhnev,
who had staked his leadership on using oil and gas revenues to obtain Western technology, rejected the urgent
proposals of Soviet economists to modernize, decentralize, and diversify the USSR’s economy to face the
challenges of the postindustrial age.
The October War also exposed the fragility of the 1972 Basic Agreement between the United States and
the Soviet Union. Once more, both sides had poured arms into their clients but had difficulty controlling
them, and neither had been willing to sustain a defeat by proxy. Moreover, there were serious domestic
impediments to their managing the world’s problems together. Brezhnev had become vulnerable to mounting
criticism from military, intelligence, and politburo hard-liners for sacrificing Soviet interests on the altar of

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peaceful coexistence, and Nixon and Kissinger faced growing congressional opposition to appeasing Moscow
in light of its persecution of Jews and political dissidents. Indeed, outrage over Brezhnev’s “provocative”
behavior during the October War fueled support for the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which had been added
to the 1974 Trade Act. Stirred by the Kremlin’s restrictions on the emigration of Soviet Jewry, the
amendment withheld most-favored-nation treatment from countries that violated human rights and was
passed overwhelmingly, effectively foreclosing the Kremlin’s economic payback for détente.* Kissinger, who
had strongly opposed Jackson-Vanik, now recognized that negative linkage could cripple US-Soviet ties.
The October War left a scar on US relations with its NATO allies, who were not consulted during the
crisis, were terrified by the nuclear alert, and bore the major brunt of the Arab oil boycott. In 1974 the
European Community, now consisting of nine members (including Great Britain), sought to exert its
diplomatic muscle by initiating direct ties with the Arab world, only to be scolded by Kissinger for obstructing
the peace process and breaking ranks with US leadership.

HELSINKI

Détente still had one more act to play. The Soviet Union had long sought a treaty recognizing its control of
Eastern Europe, but the United States had refused to go beyond an acknowledgment of the status quo.
However, once Bonn had launched its Ostpolitik and recognized Europe’s post-1945 borders, Washington
could no longer resist.
In December 1971, four months after the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin, NATO formally accepted
the Soviet proposal but insisted on US and Canadian participation in the Conference on Security and Co-
operation in Europe (CSCE). Following more than a year of preparation, the conference opened in 1973 in
Helsinki. Over the next two years delegates engaged in tough negotiations and finally drafted a series of
conventions, agreements, and confidence-building measures to improve East-West relations in Europe. On
August 1, 1975, Brezhnev; Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford; and the leaders of thirty-three other governments
signed the Helsinki Accords.
On the surface, the Soviet Union was the victor. The first two parts of the Helsinki Final Act (termed
Baskets One and Two) pronounced the inviolability of Europe’s borders and prohibited changes either by
force or by economic coercion. The West thereby acknowledged the division of Germany and the borders of
Poland and the Soviet Union (including the absorption of the Baltic states). In pledging to “respect each
other’s sovereign equality and individuality” and “refrain from any intervention . . . in the internal or external
affairs . . . of another participating state,” the West foreswore any political designs to alter the status quo. And
in pledging to increase East-West trade relations, the West granted expanded access to its loans and
technology to the communists.
However, in addition to legitimating the Soviet Union’s European empire, the Helsinki Accords offered
the daring prospect of its reform. The third section, known as Basket Three, drawing on a decade of human
rights activism, contained a pledge to uphold such fundamental rights as “freedom of thought, conscience,
religion, or belief” as well as freedom of movement, and “to promote and encourage the effective exercise of
civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedom, all of which derive from the inherent
dignity of the human person.”

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 Basket Three had raised a momentary alarm in Moscow. But Foreign Minister Gromyko, citing Stalin’s
signature on the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe in return for Western political and territorial
concessions, calmed the Kremlin by repeating Kissinger’s assurances that neither side would interfere in the
other’s domestic affairs and insisting, “We remain masters in our own house.” Yet despite the tacit US-Soviet
accord over nonintervention, the Helsinki Accords brought forth a wave of human rights activism that
Moscow could only temporarily repress.
On balance, the Helsinki Accords revealed the ambivalent nature of détente and drew criticism for their
ambiguity. For Europeans—East and West—Helsinki marked a relaxation of tensions while the Iron Curtain
still stood; for the United States it represented a formal concession with the prospect of a future wedge issue;
and for the Soviet Union it was a triumph that would soon place it on the moral and political defensive.
Partisans of Helsinki evoked the spirit of the 1922 Genoa Conference, which had tried to rebind Europe after
World War I and to efface the ideological divide between the Soviet Union and the West. Thus Helsinki was
both an end and a beginning of two distinct stages in the Cold War.
The six-year period of détente remains a highly controversial historical episode in the West. Its proponents
were praised for lowering the decibels of the Cold War, but they were also castigated for replacing principled
resistance to communism with realpolitik, for extending the life of an enfeebled Soviet Union and betraying
the dissidents, and, especially, for failing to prevent conflicts in the Third World. Similarly, Brezhnev and his
supporters were lauded for gaining political and economic concessions from the West but also scolded by
domestic and foreign critics for abandoning the Marxist creed of international class warfare. In a broader
perspective, the authors of détente had sought stability over change without anticipating the domestic
backlash or fully understanding the new challenges of global politics.
To be sure, the Superpowers’ embrace of détente was more superficial than real. Because of internal
pressures and their old Cold War habits, they did not stop building bombs and missiles or attempting to seek
political advantage wherever possible; they also did not cease spying on each other using human informants
and highly sophisticated technological devices. Détente succeeded in establishing some permanent ground
rules of US-Soviet behavior that lasted until the end of—and even beyond—the Cold War. But because its
principal authors were not bold enough to abandon their domino theories, resist their clients’ pressure, play by
mutual rules, and, above all, give up the prospect of winning the Cold War, the principles of equality and
compromise inherent in the Helsinki Accords were only short-lived.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Documents

“Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe Final Act, Helsinki, 1975.” Organization for Security
and Co-operation in Europe. http://www.osce.org/mc/39501?download=true.
“Joint Statement Following Discussions with Leaders of the People’s Republic of China.” Shanghai,
February 27, 1972. US State Department. Office of the Historian.
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v17/d203.
Kissinger, Henry. The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow. Edited by William
Burr. New York: New Press, 1999.

168
“Paris Peace Accords, 1973.” Wikisource. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords.
“Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I).” Signed May 26, 1972. NTI: Nuclear Threat Initiative.
http://www.nti.org/treaties-and-regimes/strategic-arms-limitation-talks-salt-i-salt-ii/.
“The Tilt: The US and the South Asian Crisis of 1971.” National Security Archive. 2002.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/.
“Treaty Between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union, Signed at Moscow, August 12,
1970.” Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe.
http://www.cvce.eu/obj/the_moscow_treaty_12_august_1970-en-d5341cb5-1a49-4603-aec9-
0d2304c25080.html.
“Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABM Treaty).” Signed May 26, 1972. NTI:
Nuclear Threat Initiative. http://www.nti.org/treaties-and-regimes/treaty-limitation-anti-ballistic-missile-
systems-abm-treaty.

Memoirs

Arbatov, G. A. The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics. New York: Times Books, 1992.
Brandt, Willy. People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975. Translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1978.
Bruce, David K. E. Window on the Forbidden City: The Beijing Diaries of David Bruce, 1973–1974. Edited by
Priscilla Mary Roberts. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 2001.
Bush, George. The China Diary of George H. W. Bush: The Making of a Global President. Edited by Jeffrey A.
Engel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Dobrynin, Anatoly. In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986).
New York: Times Books, Random House, 1995.
Gandhi, Indira. My Truth. New Delhi: Vision Books, 1981.
Gromyko, Andrei Andreevich. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
Israeliyan, Viktor Levonovich. Inside the Kremlin During the Yom Kippur War. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
Kissinger, Henry. Years of Upheaval. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982.
Meir, Golda. My Life. New York: Putnam, 1975.
Nixon, Richard M. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978.

Films

Born on the Fourth of July. Directed by Oliver Stone. Los Angeles: Ixtlan, 1989.
Go Tell the Spartans. Directed by Ted Post. Los Angeles: Mar Vista Productions, 1978.
Hamburger Hill. Directed by John Irvin. Los Angeles: RKO Pictures, 1987.
The Killing Fields. Directed by Roland Joffé. London: Enigma Productions, 1984.
Kippur. Directed by Amos Gitai. Jerusalem: Agav Hafakot, 2000.

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Missing. Directed by Costa-Gavras. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1982.
1971. Directed by Amrit Sagar. Mumbai: Sagar Art International, 2007.
Noch nad Chili (Night over Chile). Directed by Sebastián Alarcón and Aleksandr Kosarev. Moscow: Mosfilm,
1977.
Platoon. Directed by Oliver Stone. Los Angeles: Hemdale Film/Cinema 86, 1986.
Salvador Allende. Directed by Patricio Guzmán. Santiago: JBA Production, 2004.
Uncommon Valor. Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1983.
Xiu, Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. Directed by Joan Chen. Beijing: Good Machine/Whispering Steppes, 1998.

Drama

Blessing, Lee. A Walk in the Woods: A Play in Two Acts. New York: New American Library, 1988.
Dorfman, Ariel. Death and the Maiden. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
Frayn, Michael. Democracy. London: Methuen Drama, 2003.

Opera

Adams, John, Alice Goodman, and John McGinn. Nixon in China: An Opera in Three Acts. 1987.

Fiction

Del Vecchio, John M. The 13th Valley: A Novel. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
Gao, Xingjian. One Man’s Bible: A Novel. Translated by Mabel Lee. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.
Just, Ward S. Stringer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
Mallon, Florencia E. Beyond the Ties of Blood: A Novel. New York: Pegasus Books, 2012.
Roa Bastos, Augusto Antonio. I, the Supreme. New York: Knopf, 1986.
Roth, Robert. Sand in the Wind. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Sloan, James Park. War Games. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
Stone, Robert. Dog Soldiers: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
Yu, Hua. To Live: A Novel. Translated by Michael Berry. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.

Secondary Sources

Alvandi, Roham. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014.
Asselin, Pierre. A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Bange, Oliver, and Gottfried Niedhart. Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe. New York: Berghahn
Books, 2008.
Berman, Larry. No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 2001.
Bluth, Christoph. Soviet Strategic Arms Policy Before SALT. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1992.

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Buwalda, Piet. They Did Not Dwell Alone: Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1967–1990. Washington,
DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997.
Daigle, Craig. The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969–
1973. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Dannreuther, Roland. The Soviet Union and the PLO. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
Gao, Wenqian. Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary: A Biography. Translated by Peter Rand and
Lawrence R. Sullivan. New York: Public Affairs, 2007.
Garthoff, Raymond L. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985.
Gelman, Harry. The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1984.
Golan, Galia. Yom Kippur and After: The Soviet Union and the Middle East Crisis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1977.
Guilmartin, John Francis. A Very Short War: The Mayaguez and the Battle of Koh Tang. College Station, TX:
Texas A&M University Press, 1995.
Gustafson, Kristian. Hostile Intent: US Covert Operations in Chile, 1964–1974. Washington, DC: Potomac
Books, 2007.
Hakkarainen, Petri. A State of Peace in Europe: West Germany and the CSCE, 1966–1975. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2011.
Hanhimäki, Jussi M. The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Haslam, Jonathan. The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide.
London: Verso, 2005.
Hoff, Joan. Nixon Reconsidered. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Hoyt, Ronald E. Winners and Losers in East-West Trade: A Behavioral Analysis of US-Soviet Détente (1970–
1980). New York: Praeger, 1983.
Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
MacMillan, Margaret. Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2007.
Mansingh, Surjit. India’s Search for Power: Indira Gandhi’s Foreign Policy, 1966–1982. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage, 1984.
Maresca, John J. To Helsinki—the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1973–1975.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
Möckli, Daniel. European Foreign Policy During the Cold War: Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the Dream of
Political Unity. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.
Nelson, Keith L. The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Newhouse, John. Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT. Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989.

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Pittman, Avril. From Ostpolitik to Reunification: West German–Soviet Political Relations Since 1974.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Sarotte, Mary Elise. Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969–1973. Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Sergent, Daniel. A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1979.
Sisson, Richard, and Leo E. Rose. War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1990.
Smith, Gerard C. Doubletalk: The Story of the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1980.
Stent, Angela E. From Embargo to Ostpolitik: The Political Economy of West German–Soviet Relations, 1955–
1980. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Terriff, Terry. The Nixon Administration and the Making of US Nuclear Strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1995.
Thomas, Daniel C. The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Xia, Yafeng. Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks During the Cold War, 1949–1972. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2006.

* Opened for signature in 1968, the treaty came into force in 1970 but with India, Pakistan, and Israel
declining to sign, along with France and China (both of which acceded in 1992). North Korea, which
signed in 1985, withdrew in 2003.
* The treaty explicitly banned sea-, air-, space-, and land-based mobile ABM systems, and the number of
fixed sites was reduced to one in 1974.
* Between 1955 and 1970 (with a hiatus between 1968 and the beginning of 1970 due to the chaos caused by
the Cultural Revolution), US and Chinese ambassadors met 170 times, first in Geneva and after 1958 in
Warsaw, to discuss outstanding issues relating to Korea and Taiwan.

* In a bow to China’s anti-Soviet stance, the communiqué also asserted that neither nation “should seek
hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region” and that each was “opposed to efforts by any other country or group
of countries to establish such hegemony.”
* In his press conference in Guam on July 25, 1969, the president proclaimed the Nixon doctrine. Returning
to the more prudent formulations of the Truman and Eisenhower doctrines, he announced the end of
Vietnam-type military interventions, stating that although the United States would maintain its treaty
commitments and continue to furnish requested military and economic assistance, he expected America’s
allies to play a major role in their own defense.

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† Smaller numbers of Soviet troops had been sent earlier to Korea, Cuba, South Yemen, and Vietnam.
* In April 1970, after US troops were sent into Cambodia to prevent North Vietnamese troops from using
that country as a sanctuary from which to attack South Vietnam, there was a wave of domestic and foreign
protests, culminating in the May 4 demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio, during which four
students were killed by the National Guard.
† After freeing the 300 passengers the hijackers blew up all four aircraft.
‡ Washington’s hackles had been further raised on September 4, 1970, when, despite its efforts, the socialist
Salvador Allende had won the presidency of Chile, adding a second left-wing government in the Western
Hemisphere.
* The state of Pakistan consisted of two regions separated by a thousand miles with India in between. (See
Map 8 .)
* The United States had slightly more success with China, which urged the North Vietnamese to accept a
compromise and in 1971 rebuffed Hanoi’s pleas to cancel the Nixon visit.

* The 1973 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the North Vietnamese negotiator Lê Đức
(who declined to accept).
† In a doleful epilogue to US involvement in Indochina, in May 1975 Khmer Rouge forces, one month after
seizing power in Cambodia, seized the US merchant ship Mayaguez. The resulting bombing assault and
rescue mission ordered by Washington resulted in the death or capture of forty-one US servicemen along
with a brief international crisis.
* Because the outbreak of the war on October 6 coincided with holy days in both the Jewish and the Muslim
calendars, the Israelis (and much of the West) have called it the Yom Kippur War, while the Arabs have
called it the Ramadan War.

† The scandal that originated in the June 1972 arrest of five burglars who had broken into the Democratic
National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington, DC. With the discovery of
the burglars’ ties to Nixon’s reelection committee and the subsequent cover-up attempts, Watergate grew
into a major political and constitutional crisis played live after July 1973 in the nationally televised hearings
of a special congressional investigative committee.

* Indeed Brezhnev, recognizing the high political cost of the KGB’s anti-Jewish campaign, complained at a
politburo meeting in March 1973, “Zionism is making us stupid.”

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 Chapter 7
DÉTENTE COLLAPSES, 1975–1980

Peace is more precious than a piece of land.

—Anwar Sadat

In the Islamic government all people have complete freedom to have any kind of opinion.

—Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs.

—Lech Wałęsa

Détente and Ostpolitik had been heavily dependent on four individuals—Nixon; Brandt; de Gaulle’s successor,
Georges Pompidou; and Brezhnev—and three of them suddenly departed the scene in 1974, leaving the
Soviet leader with less-than-wholehearted partners.* Although Kissinger, who stayed on as President Gerald
Ford’s secretary of state, tried to stay the course, Congress’s moves to curtail the president’s powers plus the
shock of South Vietnam’s collapse placed a brake on further US-Soviet rapprochement.* In addition, the new
German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, and French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing were less devoted to
Ostpolitik than their predecessors.
The Helsinki Accords, signed on August 1, 1975, marked the climax of a string of Soviet gains. The steep
oil price hikes in 1973–1974 had not only crippled the West economically but also raised the value of the
Soviets’ expanding oil and gas exports and lowered the cost of its grain imports. By the mid-1970s Soviet
factories appeared to be churning out nuclear weapons, missiles, and conventional arms as well as steel, iron,
and industrial goods, and Soviet trade with Western Europe and the Third World was bringing in increased
foreign currency. Moreover, America’s setback in Vietnam encouraged Moscow to shed its reticence over
challenging the United States in other parts of the Third World as well as in Western Europe. Although the
Soviet Union, in stark contrast with its Chinese rival, had tacitly abandoned the mission of fomenting world
revolution and remained dedicated to the “peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems,” the
new 1977 Soviet constitution still endorsed the “struggle of peoples for national liberation and social
progress.”
Not only did détente expire, but between 1975 and 1980 the Cold War was reignited by ideological
competition and regional conflicts, which Washington and Moscow had lost both the will and the capacity to
handle in tandem.

HUMAN RIGHTS

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Détente and human rights stood at opposite poles. As the price of negotiating agreements on arms reduction
and the relaxation of tensions over Berlin, the Soviet Union had insisted on the principle of nonintervention
in its sovereign internal affairs. Brezhnev’s partners in Washington and Western Europe had recognized
Europe’s post-1945 borders and also agreed to refrain from encouraging dissident movements inside the
Soviet realm. During the high era of détente this had forced the West to passively observe the Kremlin’s
antisemitic campaign and its crackdown on Soviet and East European dissidents.
Kissinger defended US policy by insisting that any effort to induce internal changes in the Soviet Union
would “defeat what must remain our overriding objective, the prevention of nuclear war.” He argued that
although the United States was not “neutral . . . in the age-old antagonism between freedom and tyranny, . . .
consciousness of our limits is recognition of the necessity of peace—not moral callousness,” and he
vehemently opposed the temptation to apply pressure on the Soviet Union.* Moreover, under Nixon’s
leadership the United States also ignored human rights abuses by its Cold War allies Pakistan, Greece, South
Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Iran, and South Africa, as well as in Chile after 1973.†
The emergence of human rights as an element of international affairs came from several sources. The US
civil rights movement after World War II was an important model, and the 1960s saw the birth of a small,
disparate, but also resolute grassroots movement in the Soviet Union. On December 5, 1965, a group of
dissidents, alarmed over the demise of Khrushchev’s reforms and the growing repressiveness of the Soviet legal
system, had rallied in Pushkin Square in Moscow under the banner “Respect the Soviet Constitution.” Even
more challenging to the USSR were the protests by Soviet Jews against official discrimination, the persecution
of their religion and culture, and the restriction on their right to emigrate to Israel. In 1969 a group of Soviet
intellectuals formed the USSR’s first human rights association, encompassing three perspectives. There were
the dissenting Marxists, such as the historian Roy Medvedev and his twin brother, the biochemist Zhores,
who advocated reforms within the Soviet system; the democrats, represented by the nuclear physicist Andrei
Sakharov, who called for more elements of Western liberalism; and the nationalists, represented by the
novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who viewed Marxism as an unredeemable foreign intrusion on Russian soil.
After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1974, Solzhenitsyn denounced the nonintervention
principle and urged the United States to “interfere as much as you can.”
The second factor was the expansion of the international human rights community in the 1970s and its
increased activism. At the forefront was Amnesty International, whose research department documented
human rights abuses on every continent. A global campaign on behalf of Soviet Jewry, strongly supported by
the government of Israel after 1969, became closely connected with the struggle for human rights, and in 1971
the New York–based International League for Human Rights established ties behind the Iron Curtain and
disseminated the texts of Soviet dissidents.
Third, the US Congress grasped the issue of human rights in reaction to Nixon’s “imperial” presidency and
the growing backlash against the questionable benefits and amoral characteristics of détente. A coalition of
anticommunist liberals and conservatives conducted hearings in 1973 and, over Kissinger’s objections, forced
the State Department to submit annual reports on the state of human rights in more than one hundred
countries.
After Nixon’s resignation the US administration’s stance toward human rights changed dramatically.
Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, the unelected thirty-eighth president, who had served for nearly thirty-five

175
years in the US Congress, responded to America’s yearning for a less devious and more upright foreign as well
as domestic policy.* Ending two and a half decades of official US indifference, Ford marked the twenty-sixth
anniversary of the Universal Declaration by inviting his fellow citizens to join the international
commemoration and declaring December 10, 1974, Human Rights Day in the United States. Following a
unanimous congressional vote, Ford reversed Nixon’s opposition to punishing Moscow for its restrictions on
Jewish emigration and enthusiastically signed the trade bill with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment on January 4,
1975. On August 1, at the signing ceremony in Helsinki, Ford placated détente’s critics by looking directly at
Brezhnev and proclaiming America’s “deep devotion to human rights and individual freedoms.”
Brezhnev gave the standard Soviet response: “No one should try to dictate to other peoples how they should
manage their internal affairs.” Yet, inexplicably, the Soviet leader authorized publication of the entire text of
the Helsinki Accords, including the human rights provisions, which, unlike the UN covenants, contained a
review process as well as follow-up meetings that placed sustained pressure on Moscow and its allies. Almost
immediately after Helsinki, Soviet and East European dissidents formed organizations to test their
governments’ compliance, beginning with the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group in May 1976 and Charter 77
in Czechoslovakia.
The celebration of America’s bicentennial in 1976 stirred popular hopes of replacing the convoluted
pragmatism of the Nixon-Kissinger era with a straightforward Wilsonian idealism. Ford’s Republican rival,
Ronald Reagan, and his Democratic opponent, Jimmy Carter, bolstered by Congress and the military, the
churches and the unions, the captive Baltic nations and the Jewish lobbies, transformed the 1976 presidential
campaign into a referendum on détente. With Carter’s victory in November, followed by his ringing inaugural
address† and the assurance that dissidents could “depend on the United States,” human rights moved to the
forefront of global attention in 1977.
The one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter represented the high point of America’s public espousal of
human rights. The deeply religious but politically inexperienced former governor of Georgia sought to alter
the terms of détente, posing a more robust challenge to the Soviet Union by elevating America’s moral stature
and demanding better behavior from Moscow. Guided by his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski
—but against the warnings of the US State Department—the president announced that human rights would
be a “central concern of my administration.” Carter voiced support for the dissidents in Czechoslovakia who
urged their government to conform to the Helsinki Basket Three principles. He responded personally to the
appeal by Sakharov to speak out against Soviet repression.* And, breaking with his predecessors’ practice,
Carter received the prominent exiled dissident Vladimir Bukovsky† in the White House.
Because the Helsinki Accords had specified a series of follow-up conferences, Carter seized the opportunity
to keep human rights at the center of the international agenda. At the Belgrade meeting of the CSCE in
1977–1978, the US delegate objected vigorously to the communists’ human rights violations. Afterward
Carter, increasingly irritated over Moscow’s machinations in Africa, backed up his rhetoric. Following a new
wave of imprisonments of leading Soviet dissidents, the president tightened restrictions on exports to the
Soviet Union. In 1978 the United States drew closer to the Soviet opposition through the founding of the US
Helsinki Watch Committee. Funded by the Ford Foundation and led by major public figures with close ties

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to the administration and Congress, the committee monitored Moscow’s compliance with the Helsinki
Accords.
Brezhnev’s response was indignant and defensive. Citing America’s record of civil rights violations against
its own population and its support of “terroristic” regimes in Chile and South Korea, he insisted that under
the Soviet constitution “the exercise of individual freedoms must not injure the interests of society, and the
State, and the rights of other citizens.” Moscow, calling Carter’s bluff, also expanded the crackdown on
nationalists seeking autonomy in several Soviet republics and on religious groups, including Baptists,
Pentecostals, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. After 1978 there was a sudden increase in
Jewish emigration, but the Soviet Union imposed harsh prison sentences on leaders of the Moscow Helsinki
Watch Group, and Brezhnev dismissed Carter’s appeal on their behalf. In 1980 the Soviet government
banished Sakharov (one of the group’s leaders who had protested the invasion of Afghanistan) to Gorki, an
industrial city 250 miles from Moscow that was closed to foreigners.
Carter’s human rights crusade was aimed not only at the Soviet Union but also at some of America’s more
repressive Cold War allies (a task made easier in the mid-1970s by the restoration of democracy in Greece,
Portugal, and Spain). The United States faced an acute challenge in South Africa, a strategically—and
economically—important partner whose apartheid* policies and repression of its black majority had drawn
condemnation by the United Nations for more than a decade. In 1976 a brutal police attack on student
protesters in Soweto resulted in at least 575 deaths, and a year later the death of the activist Stephen Biko in
police custody brought worldwide protests.
Carter initially set out to reverse the Nixon-Kissinger hands-off policy toward South Africa. However, the
president ended up zigzagging, in his first two years making futile attempts to convince the Pretoria
government to undertake democratic reforms and in the last two easing off, reverting to a Cold War stance of
placing the communist threat to Southern Africa at the top of his priorities.
US relations with Iran, another key US ally, also exposed Carter’s ambivalence toward human rights. In the
1960s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had used his enormous oil revenues to finance an ambitious program of
industrialization and modernization, but he was also a despotic ruler who used his omnipresent intelligence
agency (SAVAK) to suppress liberal and religious, as well as communist, opposition and drew worldwide
criticism for his brutal methods. Nonetheless the Nixon administration, viewing Iran as an important
anticommunist bastion, had sent sophisticated weaponry to the shah. Carter, following suit, in 1977
notoriously deemed Iran an “island of stability” in the Cold War world.
Finally, in Central and South America, where the Cuban threat still haunted Washington, Carter tried to
reverse his predecessors’ policy of supporting right-wing dictatorships in the name of Cold War imperatives.
Bowing to global anti-imperialism and braving domestic opposition, Carter in 1977 renegotiated the Panama
Canal treaty, relinquishing US control over the waterway and the five-mile-wide zone surrounding it. Carter
also supported the return to democratic rule in Honduras and encouraged reforms in the Dominican
Republic. However, the president failed to curtail government abuses in Guatemala, backed a brutal junta in
El Salvador, and tolerated the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, which was toppled by left-wing
Sandinistas in 1979. In South America Carter also used the human rights stick sparingly, urging reforms in
Peru but having little effect on the authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

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Photo 7.1 Jubilant Sandinista soldiers in the main square of Managua as they take control of the government
of Nicaragua, June 20, 1979. © Bettmann/Corbis.

Carter’s espousal of human rights not only contributed to US-Soviet estrangement but also left the United
States at odds with its allies—with dictators who resented Washington’s meddling and with European and
Canadian partners who rued the damage to East-West détente. Moreover, Carter’s crusade continued to be
selective, notably excluding Saudi Arabia and South Korea. And throughout the delicate process of
establishing full diplomatic relations with China in January 1979, the president carefully refrained from raising
human rights issues with Beijing.
Nonetheless, the humanitarian principle enshrined in the Helsinki Accords enabled the United States in
the late 1970s to escape the doldrums of Watergate and Vietnam and to assert its moral superiority over the
USSR. Some scholars believe that the revitalization of the international human rights movement planted a
“time bomb” in the heart of the Soviet Empire, where the various dissident groups had found both a global
audience and avid supporters. But at the same time America’s new focus on human rights highlighted the
North-South divide: the growing gap between the Cold War–dominated developed world and the planet’s
poorer regions, whose populations had become increasingly vulnerable to Great Power rivalries over their
resources and strategic locations.

THE COLD WAR IN AFRICA

Détente was also shattered in Africa, where the United States and the Soviet Union both intervened in the
political struggle in Angola (1975–1976) and in the war between Ethiopia and Somalia (1977–1978). Drawn
in by their clients and insistent on the high stakes of these two bloody contests, Washington and Moscow
resumed their old duel on a distant continent while still professing hopes of nuclear disarmament and peaceful
negotiations elsewhere.

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 A left-wing military coup in Portugal in April 1974 had ended forty years of authoritarian rule at home and
also accelerated the dissolution of Europe’s oldest overseas empire in Africa.* The new Lisbon government
immediately abandoned the almost two-decadelong struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Portugal’s white-
dominated colonies and announced its intention to grant independence to the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea,
Mozambique, and Angola.
Shortly afterward, in 1975, civil war erupted in Angola, which contained vast reserves of oil, natural gas,
and diamonds as well as iron, bauxite, and uranium. Three competing indigenous rebel factions—the Popular
Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA),
and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)—all had outside support, MPLA
from Cuba and the Soviet Union, FNLA from the United States, and UNITA from South Africa (which
feared a spillover into South-West Africa, now Namibia, which was still under its control; see Map 8).
On the eve of Helsinki, Washington and Moscow were drawn into a proxy conflict. Kissinger, terming the
Angola war a test of America’s “will and resolve” to halt the spread of communism, used some $32 million in
CIA funds (which included payments to mercenary troops) to prop up FNLA, and the United States also
backed South Africa’s military intervention in October 1975. Brezhnev, intent on exerting Moscow’s
leadership over Africa’s “anti-imperialist struggle,” sent arms, intelligence officials, and military advisers to
MPLA and in November and December 1975 began airlifting Cuban combat units to the front. After reports
of the covert US funds were leaked to the press in December, an irritated, post-Vietnam Congress, by an
overwhelming vote, banned any further aid for Angola—which might actually have dragged out the war.
In February 1976 the Soviets achieved a stunning victory when the MPLA proclaimed the People’s
Republic of Angola almost simultaneously with the triumph of the pro-Marxist Liberation Front
(FRELIMO) forces in Mozambique. That month Brezhnev announced that Moscow’s goals of world peace
and nuclear disarmament did not preclude its support for “national liberation and social progress.” A shocked
and irate Kissinger aroused the hawks who had opposed détente with his denunciations of Soviet perfidy,
blamed Congress for America’s “first failure to check Moscow’s incursion outside its immediate orbit,” and
spent his final year in office warning against “another Angola” and bolstering the communists’ ostensible next
targets, South Africa and Rhodesia.
Carter toned down his human rights rhetoric and sought to stem the left-wing tide in Southern Africa.
Seeking to regain the moral high ground, the United States terminated its nuclear collaboration with Pretoria,
called for multilateral diplomacy to resolve the Namibia issue, and, working closely with Britain, achieved a
Rhode-sian settlement and the creation of an independent Zimbabwe in April 1980.
Yet Carter too became caught up in the US-Soviet rivalry, this time in the Horn of Africa, which,
according to Washington’s Cold War perspective, was a region of high strategic importance. (See Map 8.)
Ethiopia until 1974 had been a major US ally and the recipient of substantial aid, but after the military coup
that removed the aged emperor Haile Selassie, it had gravitated toward Moscow. In the spring of 1977,
Carter, citing Ethiopia’s human rights abuses and, more important, its major arms deal with the Soviet Union,
suddenly cut off all aid to Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia’s sworn opponent, Somalia, had been the recipient of generous Soviet aid in return for access to
the port of Berbera.* Its leaders had long set their eyes on liberating Ogaden, a desert area comprising one-
third of Ethiopia’s territory and inhabited by ethnic Somalis. Carter, although hesitant to send arms and to

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back an aggressor, was tempted by the prospect of obtaining a new US client and checking the Marxist threat
to the Gulf region. In June 1977, in a carefully worded message, he assured the Somali government that it
could “depend on the United States” for “defensive” weapons.
Based on this vague promise, Somalia, on July 23, 1977, committed the grave blunder of sending its troops
into Ogaden, but after two months of heavy fighting, it failed to capture the entire province. Moving quickly
and decisively to rescue its newest ally, the Soviet Union dispatched military advisers to the front and between
November 1977 and March 1978 also airlifted some seventeen thousand Cuban combat troops, enabling
Ethiopia to reconquer Ogaden. Carter, fending off charges of having sanctioned the debacle, turned down
Somalia’s pleas for arms but also warned Ethiopia to halt at the Somali border. The US government, although
outraged at another successful Soviet-Cuban intervention, could neither remove the communists’ military
presence in Ethiopia nor alleviate this new blow to its prestige. But it had at least replaced the Soviets in
Berbera.
The United States and the Soviet Union did not instigate the two conflicts in Africa, but both once more
had responded in a reflexive Cold War manner. Contrary to the Basic Principles established at the height of
détente in 1972, neither side was now willing to hold direct discussions or to exercise a joint role of restraint
over their clients. To be sure, there were also no clear-cut winners or losers. For the ostensibly victorious
Brezhnev, his African involvement had gained two new impoverished and unstable allies and increased the
cost of keeping Castro’s Cuba afloat. And although Carter lost face in the spring of 1978, he paid the Soviet
Union back by accelerating the normalization talks with China, greatly unnerving Moscow.

SS-20 MISSILES AND SALT II

The Superpowers’ efforts for arms control waned after 1975. While the Soviets continued to expand their
nuclear and conventional weaponry, a growing segment of the American public fretted over alleged US
weakness and viewed détente as a mechanism for managing their country’s decline. Moreover, NATO
members began pressing Washington to counter the Soviet preponderance in Europe. The Carter
administration was deeply divided, with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance urging a continuation of the
disarmament negotiations with Moscow and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski calling for a
policy of “strength.” Indeed, the new president got off to a bad start with the fiasco over the neutron bomb.*
Washington’s proposal of this new weapon in 1977 gave Moscow the opportunity to condemn Carter’s
nuclear saber rattling and mobilize the antinuclear movement in Western Europe. One year later, the
president’s withdrawal of his neutron bomb proposal infuriated the West German chancellor, Helmut
Schmidt. A reluctant supporter of this initiative, Schmidt complained of America’s “unreliability.”
Next it was Brezhnev’s turn to raise apprehensions. In 1977 the Soviet Union—in a move to counter the
US, British, and French nuclear forces in Europe omitted from the SALT I agreement—began replacing its
older missile systems on the continent with new mobile, solid-fueled SS-20 intermediate-range missiles
containing multiple warheads, which could potentially destroy NATO’s nuclear arsenal and its command
system. Dismissing Moscow’s claims that this simply represented a modernization of its weaponry (and that
older missiles would be removed), Washington accused the Soviets of attempting to gain regional superiority.

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Schmidt, already apprehensive over the Superpowers’ SALT II negotiations, voiced Bonn’s alarm over
decoupling Western Europe from the United States and leaving it vulnerable to Soviet political blackmail.
The NATO negotiations over a response to the SS-20 dragged on for two years, weighed down as much by
political as by military considerations. In October 1979 Brezhnev issued a last-minute warning against
stationing new intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe and offered to negotiate arms
reductions with NATO. Two months later, on December 12, NATO issued its Double-Track (also called
Dual-Track) Decision: to station almost six hundred highly accurate US Pershing II and Tomahawk cruise
missiles in five countries of Western Europe* but also offering to begin talks with Moscow over limiting
theater (ground-based) tactical nuclear weapons.
The deployment announcements by the Soviet Union and NATO between 1977 and 1979 reflected the
mounting coldness between both sides after Helsinki. Despite lingering references to détente, it had become
clear that in evaluating strategic conditions each side viewed the military balance differently, neither took the
other’s perspective into account, and the habits of negotiation had broken down.
The backdrop to these European tensions was the prolonged, politically charged SALT II negotiations.
With the interim SALT I agreement scheduled to expire in 1977, several issues stood in the way of a new
US-Soviet arrangement. Innovations in missile technology (particularly the introduction of multiple
independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs) had not only undermined the goal of mutual deterrence
and restored the advantage to a first strike but also made the comparison and verification of US and Soviet
forces far more difficult. Moreover, the United States continued to insist on excluding from any agreement its
nuclear forces in Europe along with those of Britain, France, and China, although these were all capable of
destroying targets in the Soviet Union, which had no nuclear allies that could similarly threaten the United
States. America’s strategy of extended deterrence was aimed at blocking an attack on US territory but also at
balancing the Soviets’ conventional superiority in Europe and thwarting what it termed Soviet “adventurism”
in the Third World.
The outlines of a SALT II agreement had been drawn up in November 1974 by Ford and Brezhnev at their
meeting in Vladivostok. Brezhnev had taken a considerable political risk by agreeing to a limit of 2,400 missile
launchers and strategic bombers, of which 1,320 could be equipped with MIRV technology, and again
accepting the exclusion of NATO’s European arsenal. However, several issues were left unresolved. Although
both parties had expected to sign a new treaty, Brezhnev’s ill health, followed by the heated US debate over
détente, delayed the conclusion of a new treaty while Ford was still in office.
Carter, responding to the critics of arms control, decided to abandon the Vladivostok framework. In March
1977 the new administration shocked Moscow by proposing disproportionately deeper cuts on the Soviet
Union, which an outraged Brezhnev refused. Over the next two years the SALT II negotiations were stalled.
While Washington condemned the Kremlin’s human rights abuses, countered Soviet moves in the Horn of
Africa, tacitly condoned the Chinese attack on Vietnam, and reunited its NATO allies against the SS-20s,
Moscow dragged out the talks to fend off the US demands. Brezhnev’s illness may also have slowed down
these negotiations.
In June 1979, almost five years after Vladivostok, Carter and Brezhnev finally met in Vienna and, under the
glare of the world press, resumed the old Cold War sparring. Brezhnev answered Carter’s complaint over the
Cubans’ presence in Africa by endorsing legitimate national struggles for freedom and independence and

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denying US charges of Moscow’s “plots and intrigues.” Privately the two leaders were more amicable, with
Carter praising the recent rise in Soviet-Jewish emigration and assuring Brezhnev that the improvement in
US-Chinese relations would not impair America’s stance toward Moscow.
On June 18 Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty, a historic agreement that limited both sides’
strategic forces and committed them to work for even more significant cuts. SALT II, whose details
represented an advance over the simple Vladivostok framework, created significant advantages for the United
States. NATO quickly endorsed the document, only to watch it immediately unravel. The long delay had
fueled US public opposition to appeasing Moscow, and the vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee
was overwhelmingly negative. By December 1979, after new Superpower quarrels had erupted over the
discovery of a Soviet brigade in Cuba, the deployment of the new NATO missiles, and, especially, the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, Carter withdrew the treaty from the Senate.
The SALT II debacle was not simply the result of a new direction by a new president in the White House
but also a reminder of fundamental Cold War realities. During the Carter administration an increasingly vocal
part of the American public, convinced of the Soviet threat to its territory and the heinousness of the
communist regime, was unwilling to concede any form of nuclear parity to Moscow, however skillfully
camouflaged in the arcane figures of a disarmament treaty. For Soviet leaders it was a lesson that the United
States still took linkage seriously (that military agreements could not be isolated from other forms of
Superpower contestation) and that their propaganda campaign to save the world from nuclear war had failed
by ignoring the West’s political and moral concerns.

THE MIDDLE EAST: 1979

Three striking events—the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan—drew the Superpowers back into the Middle East, a region that détente had touched only
briefly in late 1973. By the late 1970s the United States, increasingly dependent on imported oil, was more
than ever determined to play a leading role from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and the
Soviet Union was equally intent on building a buffer against the expanding Western presence. In an updated
version of the nineteenth-century Great Game between Britain and Russia, the United States and the USSR
plunged into this strategically important environment laden with local political rivalries, and there the last
shreds of détente were unraveled.
After the October 1973 war the United Nations’ efforts to create a Middle East settlement had been
stillborn. The principal reason was the Nixon and Ford administrations’ refusal to partner with the Soviet
Union, but other causes included the serious divisions in the Arab world and Israel’s refusal to negotiate with
the Palestinians and its leaders’ fear of a dictated peace.* By the end of 1976 leading US analysts, worried
about a renewal of hostilities and facing sharply rising oil prices, urged Washington to change course.
Jimmy Carter came to office determined to negotiate a comprehensive peace treaty, even at the cost of an
active Soviet role. However, this initiative suddenly halted in the fall of 1977 because of Carter’s irritation over
the Soviet-Cuban buildup in Ethiopia and the strong protests of Israel’s new right-wing prime minister,
Menachem Begin, but also because the US-Chinese rapprochement (which would lead to the establishment
of full diplomatic relations in January 1979) had strengthened the president’s position vis-à-vis Moscow.

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 Carter’s abrupt reversal not only infuriated the Kremlin but also caused considerable disappointment in
Cairo, where Sadat had counted on US and Soviet pressure to force his rival, the hard-line Syrian leader
Hafez al-Assad, to join him at the negotiating table. Suddenly Sadat, in an extraordinarily bold move to
rescue Egypt’s failing economy and regain the Sinai, on November 20, 1977, paid a dramatic visit to
Jerusalem. Before the Israeli Knesset and the world’s television cameras, Sadat issued an eloquent appeal for a
“comprehensive” peace among all the former enemies and for a “just solution” to the Palestinian problem.
But lofty words aside, by his presence in Jerusalem the Egyptian leader had signaled his willingness to defy
Moscow, break ranks with his Arab partners, and conclude a separate peace with Israel. When Begin proved
obstreperous, it was Carter who provided the decisive intervention by summoning the two parties to Camp
David, the US presidential retreat, in September 1978 and devising an astute solution that separated Middle
Eastern issues into three distinct parts.
After thirteen days of seclusion at Camp David with Carter as their dogged intermediary, Sadat and Begin
finally agreed on a Framework for Peace in the Middle East. The middle section of the three-part agreement
was straightforward: a plan for a bilateral treaty between Egypt and Israel involving a phased Israeli
withdrawal from the Sinai in return for the establishment of full diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations
between the two countries. The two other parts were murkier: the first outlining the prospect of future
negotiations over the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza among Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and “representatives
of the Palestinian people,” and the third proposing parallel treaties between Israel and Jordan, Syria, and
Lebanon. On December 10, 1978, the thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Sadat and Begin jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize for the Camp David Accords.
But Carter’s work was not finished. After Camp David came six difficult months of negotiations between
Egypt and Israel to work out details small and large. At the last minute, Carter, emulating Kissinger,
conducted eight days of shuttle diplomacy. Finally, on March 26, 1979, Begin and Sadat came together in
Washington to end thirty years of warfare between their two countries and to sign the Middle East’s first
peace treaty. Almost lost in the excitement were the exclusion of Palestinian self-rule* and the dim prospects
of additional agreements between Israel and its other neighbors.

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Photo 7.2 President Jimmy Carter (center) shaking hands with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli
prime minister Menachem Begin at the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty on the grounds of the
White House. Courtesy of the National Archives and the Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-WHSP-C-10017.

The Egyptian-Israeli treaty was a pragmatic alternative to a comprehensive Middle East peace, combining
the UN’s 1967 land-for-peace formula,* Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations, and Sadat’s national goals. It
was a triumph for Washington, satisfying US Cold Warriors by once more eliminating the Soviets from the
eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the treaty utterly transformed the three-decadelong Middle East conflict,
removing the strongest member of the Arab bloc and bringing it into the Western orbit—although at the cost
of substantial increases of US aid to both parties. It was also a victory for Israel, which by surrendering the
Sinai and dismantling its settlements had gained peace on its longest and most vulnerable border without
making any concessions to the Palestinians or curbing its occupation and settlements in the West Bank and
Gaza.
To be sure, these victories came with a high price for the parties and the region. Sadat’s defection isolated
Egypt from its Muslim neighbors and also made him a victim of assassination two years later. Begin’s
withdrawal from the Sinai infuriated Israeli hard-liners, who would oppose any further retreats. The Arab and
Muslim world became even more unstable, fragmented by the 1979 treaty and plunged into a leadership
struggle, and the abandoned Palestinians stepped up their guerrilla operations against Israel from their bases
in Lebanon.
Moreover, America’s Middle East success was offset by a severe setback in Iran. During the 1970s, under
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran had become America’s closest Middle Eastern ally and a major
purchaser of US weapons and equipment. Carter, upon assuming the presidency, had urged this loyal anti-
Soviet partner to curb its human rights abuses but received a striking rebuff. By 1978 the United States, which
desperately needed to contain oil prices and enlist the shah’s backing for the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations,

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failed to recognize the growing Iranian opposition and the futility of the regime’s repressive measures, which
included the shooting of some 4,500 unarmed demonstrators on September 8. Carter on December 12, 1978,
declared, “The shah has our support and he also has our confidence.”
Both Moscow and Washington were taken aback by the Iranian uprising in late 1978 and by the shah’s
sudden departure. On January 16, 1979, the shaken Iranian chief of state, ill with cancer and uncertain of his
army’s loyalty, fled the country. The political vacuum was quickly filled by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the
charismatic religious opposition leader who returned triumphantly from exile on February 1, 1979. Although
the Kremlin may have welcomed the fall of a close US partner, it played no role in the Iranian revolution,
which at once took on an anti-Soviet direction. Not only did Khomeini harshly suppress the local
communists, but the establishment of the world’s first Islamic republic in Tehran created a new force in
regional politics, threatening to stir up restive Muslims in the Soviet Union’s Central Asian borderlands.
The United States, which also exerted no control over the events in Iran, was even more vulnerable to the
crowds’ outrage and to Khomeini’s political ambitions. Carter’s efforts to bolster Prime Minister Shapour
Bakhtiar, the shah’s last-minute appointee, incited suspicions in Tehran that Washington was plotting to
return Pahlavi to power and bring back his hated secret police. Khomeini played an extremely clever game. In
February he disavowed the Iranian leftists’ seizure of the US embassy and allowed Bakhtiar to free the
captives, but nine months later, once the Marxists had been disposed of, Khomeini was ready to mobilize
Iranian sentiment against the United States (now called the Great Satan) to remove the last moderates from
power. After Carter provided the pretext by admitting the dying shah into the United States for medical
treatment, on November 4, in a well-planned action, hundreds of Iranian demonstrators scaled the walls of
the American embassy compound, overwhelming the guards and seizing more than seventy hostages.
Khomeini seized the moment to consolidate power. Within a few weeks he became Iran’s supreme leader,
replacing Nasser’s defunct pan-Arab nationalism with pan-Islamism and championing the rights of all
Muslims oppressed by Soviet and US imperialism. The revolutionary government in Tehran denounced the
Egyptian-Israeli treaty, embraced the Palestinians’ cause, threatened the US client Saudi Arabia, and spread
alarm in its secular neighbor Iraq.

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Photo 7.3 Iranian women in a February 1, 1979, demonstration, carrying a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. ©
Bettmann/Corbis.

For the United States, the 444-day Iran hostage crisis represented a profound domestic and international
blow.* Only four years after the collapse of the Saigon government, this new sign of America’s vulnerability
was reinforced by Carter’s failed attempt in April 1980 to rescue the hostages.† Indeed, the sudden collapse of
America’s position in Iran may well have emboldened the Kremlin in December 1979 to take far stronger
measures in Afghanistan.
Until 1973 Afghanistan had not been a contested space between the Superpowers. The Soviet Union,
although maintaining Russia’s historic concern over the power balance in this mountainous, multitribal land
that bordered its southern underbelly,* had accepted Afghanistan’s nonaligned status, and the United States
had declined to bid for the Afghans’ loyalty.
Everything changed in 1973, after Mohammad Daoud Khan overthrew the Afghan monarchy and
established a republic. Daoud not only suppressed the leftist, pro-Moscow political groups in Afghanistan but
also raised Soviet fears that he would gravitate toward the West. After various factions rose against the Daoud
regime’s corruption and repressiveness, on April 27, 1978, he and his entire family were murdered in a bloody
coup—which may or may not have been countenanced by the Kremlin. Daoud was succeeded by a
communist-dominated government bound by a treaty of friendship to the Soviet Union and now with the red
flag of a Soviet satellite and the official title of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The Carter
administration masked its surprise by reacting blandly to the events, signaling that the United States still
considered Afghanistan within the Soviet orbit.

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 Despite Moscow’s cautions, the new regime in Afghanistan, headed by the longtime communist activist
Nur Muhammad Taraki, immediately imposed a radical blueprint of social, economic, and political
transformation that provoked widespread opposition: Islamists decried its atheism, the landlords opposed
collectivization, local and tribal leaders resisted centralization, and parts of the army also turned against the
government. A major turning point occurred on March 24, 1979, when defecting soldiers and mujahideen†
temporarily seized Herat, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, killing thousands of people, including Soviet
advisers and their families. Moscow was alarmed by its satellite’s inability to quell the rebellion and the cost
(estimated at $9 million per day) of propping up its client. Even more shocking was the September 13–16
coup, during which Taraki was replaced (and murdered) by his far more independent rival, Hafizullah Amin.
By the beginning of December 1979 the Kremlin was shaken by reports of Amin’s purges of left-wing forces,
his overtures to the Muslim and tribal opposition, and his approaches to the Western powers. In addition,
there were rumors of Chinese and Pakistani support for Amin. Moscow thus faced the prospect of a hostile
regime in Kabul on top of its two other setbacks that year.‡
The Soviet leadership was divided in its response. Brezhnev was furious at Amin’s perfidy, and several
influential politburo members strongly favored intervention, but the military chiefs were almost unanimously
opposed to sending troops into Afghanistan. After the KGB failed to assassinate Amin, the politburo on
December 12, 1979, by a unanimous vote,* decided to intervene in Afghanistan to establish a more broad-
based government and quell the rebellion. On Christmas Eve some thirty thousand Soviet troops began the
occupation of Kabul and all the other major cities as well as Afghanistan’s strategic points, main lines of
communications, and border entries. Three days later, after Soviet special forces had murdered Amin, his
family, and his colleagues, his Soviet-installed replacement, Babrak Karmal, issued a belated request for
assistance under the terms of the two countries’ friendship treaty.

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Map 12. During its ten-year war in Afghanistan, the Soviet army, facing a determined, outside-armed
resistance, suffered high casualties, while the Afghan population’s losses numbered two million deaths and five
million refugees.

According to the now-available records of the politburo deliberations, Moscow’s momentous decision in
December 1979 emerged less from an expansionist impulse than from fear, miscalculation, and the inertia of
an out-of-touch and inflexible regime. In a disastrous underestimation of the Afghan resistance, Defense
Minister Dmitriy Ustinov and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov had argued, incredibly, that a military
intervention in this historically unconquerable land would be quick, decisive, and unopposed. Moreover, there
was almost no expectation of US disapproval or a threat to the remnants of détente. In an extraordinary
blunder, the Kremlin interpreted Washington’s bland response to the April 1978 coup, the absence of
warning signals throughout 1979, and Carter’s preoccupation with Iran as signs of America’s acquiescence.*
But Carter did react strongly. Seeking reelection in the face of the ongoing hostage crisis and a new spike in
oil prices caused by the unrest in Iran, which had intensified America’s economic woes and stagflation, the
president in January 1980 hyperbolically termed Moscow’s entry into Afghanistan “the greatest threat to peace

188
since the Second World War.” Interpreting the invasion as a menace to America’s vital oil and strategic
interests, he issued a Trumanesque doctrine that bore his name: “An attempt by any outside force to gain
control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States and
. . . will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Carter reinforced his tough words with action, significantly increasing the US military budget, reviving the
registration of draft-aged males, and accelerating the creation of a rapid deployment force to respond to
threats in the Middle East. The president also unleashed a global propaganda campaign against the Soviet
Union† and ordered a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Moreover, Carter withdrew
SALT II from Congress, discontinued technology exports to the USSR, and ordered a punishing grain
embargo, forcing the Soviets to pay an additional $1 billion for their imports on the international market and
making them more dependent on Western Europe. Even more potently, Carter authorized a substantial CIA-
directed campaign of military assistance to the Afghan Islamist rebels. Reversing his negative stance toward
the military dictatorship in Pakistan (hitherto shunned by Washington because of its human rights abuses),
Carter designated the Islamabad government as a front-line state, a conduit of assistance to the Afghan rebels,
and a tacit US ally. To put further pressure on Moscow, Washington strengthened its strategic bonds with
Beijing by increasing its deliveries of advanced military equipment and also by countenancing a secret supply
route for weapons, support systems, and technology between Israel and China.

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Photo 7.4 Anti-Soviet mujahideen soldiers, January 1, 1980. Armed by the CIA, which bought weapons from
sellers all over the world, their numbers swelled to 150,000 by 1981. © Pascal Manoukian/ Sygma/Corbis.

America’s NATO allies, who viewed Afghanistan as fully within the Soviet orbit, were reluctant to follow
Carter’s militant path. By 1980 France, Italy, and West Germany had all established important trade links
with Moscow, were increasingly dependent on Soviet oil and natural gas deliveries, and were therefore
opposed to disrupting détente. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who fully endorsed the US
position, faced criticism in the House of Commons over Washington’s failure to consult its partners.
By the end of 1980, Moscow’s war in Afghanistan had been transformed from a well-executed operation
into a quagmire. The invasion was highly unpopular among the Afghan population, the Afghan army
performed poorly, and Soviet forces, undermanned and unprepared for counterinsurgency warfare in the
rugged mountainous terrain, maintained control over the urban areas but not over the countryside. In the
meantime international pressure mounted because of the flood of millions of refugees into Pakistan, the
drumbeat of criticism led by the United States and China, the almost universal condemnation from the
Muslim world, the weak support of Moscow’s East European satellites (as well as Cuba), and, especially, the
mounting arms deliveries to the various groups of Afghan rebels, who grew daily in strength and confidence.

SOLIDARNOŚĆ

Poland, Moscow’s largest European ally with one-quarter of the Eastern bloc’s population, had always been a
restive satellite. Its population—scarred by more than a century of tsarist rule, the Soviet occupation between
1939 and 1941 (during which some twenty-two thousand prisoners of war had been murdered), and
Moscow’s imposition of a communist regime after World War II—was fiercely resistant to Marxist ideology
and practice. For the Soviet Union, four decades of control over Poland had brought mixed results; while
ensuring its land route to front-line East Germany, Moscow had been burdened by Warsaw’s weak economic
performance and frequently independent communist leadership.
With the onset of détente and West German Ostpolitik in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had loosened
its reins, allowing increased cultural and trade relations between Poland and the West, but also exposing its
satellite to mounting foreign debt, rising prices, and domestic unrest. The Kremlin’s decision to discontinue
subsidizing oil and gas exports to its East European allies undoubtedly contributed to Poland’s economic
misery. In 1976, spurred by the Helsinki Accords’ human rights provisions and incensed over the
government’s brutal suppression of workers’ protests in several Polish cities, the opposition group KOR
(Komitet Obrony Robotników, or the Workers’ Defense Committee) was born, the communist world’s first
grassroots civic organization, which included intellectuals, students, and workers.
On October 16, 1978, another charismatic religious figure entered the world stage. That year, as Poland
was suffering widespread shortages and a looming political crisis, the Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła was
unexpectedly elected Pope John Paul II. On his first visit to his homeland as head of the Catholic Church in
June 1979, the eloquent, physically commanding, and fervently anticommunist patriot urged a crowd of
250,000 ecstatic listeners in Warsaw’s Victory Square, “Be not afraid.”
One year later the Polish tinderbox exploded. In the summer of 1980, just as the Soviet war in Afghanistan
had bogged down, Poland erupted with strikes against announced wage reductions and food price hikes. The

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center of resistance was the Lenin shipyards in Gdańsk (formerly Danzig), where workers, supported by KOR
and the church and led by the sacked electrician Lech Wałęsa, set off a tidal wave of strikes throughout the
country. In late August and early September, in a series of unprecedented agreements, the Polish government
surrendered to almost all the workers’ demands, which included the relaxation of censorship and of
restrictions on the Catholic Church and granting the right to strike and to form an independent trade union.
On September 17, 1980, Solidarność (Solidarity),* the communist world’s first independent, nationwide trade
union was established, and over the next year it enrolled some ten million workers, farmers, students, and
intellectuals, transforming itself into a powerful social and political movement that challenged communist
rule.
The West reacted warily, welcoming the August accords but also fearing political chaos and Soviet
intervention. Carter, pressed by Congress, labor unions, churches, and the Polish American community to
support Solidarność, praised the workers’ “courage” and “resilience,” but in September he also released a
substantial loan to stabilize the Warsaw government and encouraged America’s NATO’s allies to adopt a
strict noninterference policy to deny the Kremlin any pretext to intervene. Britain, France, and West
Germany—still hoping to preserve détente—were happy to follow the president’s cautious lead.
Moscow, recognizing Solidarność’s threat not only to communist rule in Poland but also to its western
borderlands, moved quickly to quarantine the infection through heavy domestic censorship and “anti-
antisocialist” propaganda. But stung by the punishing Western response to its invasion of Afghanistan and its
inability to impose its will there by force, the Kremlin hesitated to suppress the Polish union. Moreover,
Moscow’s socialist partners were divided between East German and Czechoslovak hard-liners who strongly
favored intervention and the Hungarian and Romanian leaders who were vehemently opposed.
Chastened by Afghanistan, this time Brezhnev chose caution. Although authorizing the military exercises
that raised alarm in the West, he had abandoned his doctrine and decided that the Poles must bring order in
their own house. At the crucial Warsaw Pact summit in Moscow on December 5, 1980, Brezhnev used the
threat of “international assistance” (a Soviet-led intervention) to pressure his Polish comrades to stand firm
against Solidarność. Hence Carter, who in his last days in office had carefully monitored the Polish situation,
was spared the challenge of responding to another Soviet military strike.
One month earlier, the landslide election of archconservative Ronald Reagan had marked the rebirth of
US-Soviet confrontation. Reagan not only disliked the principles and practice of détente but was also
ideologically committed to destroying Soviet communism and winning the Cold War. He began his
presidency on a high note with Iran’s release of the US hostages on the day of his inauguration.*
On the Soviet side the West faced an aged, ailing general secretary anxious over the growing power of
China, which after Mao’s death in 1976 had embarked on major economic reforms and strengthened its ties
with the West. Brezhnev was also alarmed over the high price of maintaining his overseas clients and the cost
of the disastrous intervention in Afghanistan. Détente had enabled the Soviet leader to avoid economic and
political modernization while still pursuing the USSR’s interests overseas. But détente had crumbled, and by
the end of 1980 the Kremlin had acquired new and resolute adversaries within its empire and outside its
borders and had been made aware of its vulnerability to the political, economic, and diplomatic challenges of a
more unstable global environment.

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 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Documents

“Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War.” National Security Archive. 2001.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57.
Andrew, Christopher M., and Oleg Gordievsky, eds. Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on
KGB Foreign Operations, 1975–1985. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
“Apartheid South Africa 1948–1980.” Archives Direct: Sources from the National Archives, UK.
http://www.archivesdirect.amdigital.co.uk/Apartheid.
“The Carter-Brezhnev Project.” National Security Archive. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/carterbrezhnev/.
Carter, Jimmy. “Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1977.” Yale Law School Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History
and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/carter.asp.
“Documents on the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.” Woodrow Wilson Center Cold War International History
Project. 2001. http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/e-dossier_4.pdf.
“Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXVIII, Southern Africa: Angola Document
List.” US State Department Office of the Historian. 2011.
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v28/ch3.
“Jimmy Carter Oral Histories.” University of Virginia, Miller Center of Public Affairs.
http://millercenter.org/president/carter/oralhistory.
“President Carter and the Role of Intelligence in the Camp David Accords.” Freedom of Information Act
Electronic Reading Room. Central Intelligence Agency. http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/carter-camp-david-
accords.
“Soviet Deliberations During the Polish Crisis of 1980–1981.” Special Paper No. 1. Edited by Mark Kramer.
Woodrow Wilson Center Cold War International History Project. 1999.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACF56F.PDF.
“Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II).” Signed June 18, 1979.
http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/treaties/salt2–1.html.
“Twenty Years After the Hostages: Declassified Documents on Iran and the United States.” National Security
Archive. 1999. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB21/.

Contemporary Writing

Khalidi, Rashid. Soviet Middle East Policy in the Wake of Camp David. Beirut, Lebanon: Institute for Palestine
Studies, 1979.
Medvedev, Zhores A., and Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev. A Question of Madness. New York: Knopf, 1971.
Roth, Stephen J. The Helsinki “Final Act” and Soviet Jewry. London: Institute of Jewish Affairs in association
with the World Jewish Congress, 1976.
Rubenstein, Joshua. Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1980.

Memoirs

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Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977–1981. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985.
Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1982.
Jordan, Hamilton. Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency. New York: Putnam, 1982.
Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza. Answer to History. Translated by Michael Joseph Ltd. New York: Stein and Day,
1980.
Panov, Valery, and George Feifer. To Dance. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Sadat, Anwar. In Search of Identity: An Autobiography. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
Sakharov, Andrei. Memoirs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
Schmidt, Helmut. Men and Power: A Political Memoir. Translated by Ruth Hein. New York: Random
House, 1989.
Snepp, Frank. Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End. New York: Random House, 1977.
Vance, Cyrus R. Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1983.
Wałęsa, Lech. A Way of Hope. New York: H. Holt, 1987.

Films

Charlie Wilson’s War. Directed by Mike Nichols. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2007.
Do Not Be Afraid: The Life and Teachings of Pope John Paul II. Directed by Krzysztof Zanussi. World Film
Services and Eurovideo. New York: HBO Home Video, 1996.
Man of Marble. Directed by Andrzej Wajda. Warsaw: Vision Film Distribution, 1976.
Persepolis. Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi. Paris: France 3 Cinéma, 2007.
The Soweto Massacre. WPA Film Library. New York: Film Media Group, 1976.
Under Fire. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode. Los Angeles: Lion’s Gate Films, 1983.

Fiction

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1982.
Dawlat’ābādī, Mahmūd. The Colonel. Translated by Tom Patterdale. London: Haus, 2011.
García Márquez, Gabriel. The Autumn of the Patriarch. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Greene, Graham. The Human Factor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Hirsh, M. E. Kabul. New York: Atheneum, 1986.
Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Maḥfūẓ, Najīb. The Day the Leader Was Killed. Translated by Malak Hashem. New York: Anchor Books,
2000.
Ondjaki. Good Morning Comrades: A Novel. Translated by Stephen Henighan. Emeryville, ON: Biblioasis,
2008.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Cancer Ward. Translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

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Braithwaite, Rodric. Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–1989. London: Profile Books, 2011.
Caldwell, Dan. The Dynamics of Domestic Politics and Arms Control: The SALT II Treaty Ratification Debate.
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Liakhovskiĭ, Aleksandr Antonovich. Inside the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the Seizure of Kabul,
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 Project. Working Paper No. 51. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
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Yordanov, Radoslav. The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa During the Cold War: Between Ideology and
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* Pompidou died on April 2, Brandt resigned on May 7 after the discovery of an East German spy in his
immediate entourage, and because of the Watergate scandal, Nixon on August 9 became the first US
president to resign. Moreover, Golda Meir, one of détente’s major opponents, also left office, on June 3,
1974, after a National Inquiry Commission issued a critical preliminary report on the Israeli military’s lack
of preparedness for the October 1973 war.
* Antidétente sentiments in the United States were stirred by the images of Soviet tanks aiding the capture of
Saigon in 1975.
* This was underlined by his advice to Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford (on the eve of the signing of the
Helsinki Accords), to refuse a White House visit to the exiled Soviet writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
† In a July 1975 speech titled “The Moral Foundations of Foreign Policy,” Kissinger acknowledged, “Today
we cooperate with many nations for the purpose of regional stability and global security even though we
disapprove of some of their internal practices.”
* To be sure, the latter initiative was undermined by Ford’s controversial pardon of Nixon.
† Which included the words, “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom
elsewhere.”
* According to Sakharov, “Every person serving a term in the hell of present-day Gulag for his beliefs or open
profession of them—every victim of psychological repression for political reasons, every person refused
permission to emigrate, to travel abroad—represents a direct violation of the Helsinki accord. . . . Is the
West prepared to defend these noble and vitally important principles?”
† One of the original founders of the Soviet Union’s human rights movement, Bukovsky had served a twelve-
year incarceration in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and psychiatric institutions and exposed the misuse of
psychiatry against political prisoners.
* Instituted in 1948, the regime of apartheid mandated the strict separation of races, which led to
discriminatory treatment of the non-European population in almost every aspect of their lives.
* The dissolution of Portugal’s Asian empire began in 1961 with India’s seizure of Goa. In 1975 East Timor
declared independence but was immediately invaded by Indonesia and achieved full independence only in
2002. In 1999 Macau, according to a 1987 agreement with Beijing, reverted to China.

* In Berbera, the Soviets had constructed an airfield, a communications center, a missile maintenance facility,
and a naval base with access to the Indian Ocean.

* The neutron bomb, also known as an enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), had been under development
since the 1950s and was first tested in the 1960s. Its proponents believed it would be an effective deterrent
to a Warsaw Pact attack because of its short-range destructiveness without endangering nearby population
centers. Its opponents derided a thermo-nuclear weapon that killed people and left buildings intact.

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* Britain, West Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands.
* Israeli leaders were determined to avoid another Munich—a Great Power dictate that shaped its post-1967
borders.

* Indeed, Begin referred twice in his speech to Israeli control over Jerusalem, and Sadat omitted the portion of
his prepared text referring to the “grave injustice” that had been inflicted on the Palestinians.
* UN Resolution 242 had linked Israel’s withdrawal from the territories it had occupied in 1967 with the right
to every state in the region “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from force or
threats of force.”
* Other calamities in 1979 included the kidnapping and assassination of the US ambassador in Afghanistan in
February and the burning of the American embassy in Islamabad in November, shortly after Islamic
militants had seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in protest against the Saudi monarchy’s subservience to
the United States.
† After the commander aborted the mission because of the mechanical failure of one of the rescue craft, a
helicopter collided with a C-130 tanker aircraft, killing eight servicemen and injuring several more.

* After the Bolshevik Revolution there had been three brief episodes of Soviet intervention when its troops
crossed the frontiers of Afghanistan in 1925, 1929, and 1930.
† The Islamic rebels who called themselves “holy warriors.”
‡ The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and the Islamic revolution in Iran.
* The principal opponent of intervention, Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, was absent from this crucial
meeting.
* To be sure, some politburo members may have been rattled by NATO’s December 12 decision to station
new US medium-range cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, which may have reinforced
Soviet fears that Amin might “pull a Sadat,” move his country into the American camp, and conceivably
agree to US bases and the deployment of US missiles in Afghanistan.

† After the Soviets blocked a debate in the UN Security Council, the General Assembly on January 14, 1980,
by a vote of 104–18 adopted a US-sponsored resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

* Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy (NSZZ), or Solidarność (Independent and Self-Governing

Trade Union, or Solidarity), a name suggested by the Polish historian and political dissident Karol
Modzelewski.
* US and Iranian negotiators had worked out the principal details before the presidential election, but
Khomeini, in an effort to block Carter’s reelection, had vetoed the release of the hostages until after the
vote.

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