When American voters went to the polls in November 1968, they could not have realized that they were choosing a president whose administration would initiate the most dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy since the inception of containment more than 20 years earlier.
Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign had curiously little to say regarding foreign policy, compared to his earlier runs for office. He spoke vaguely about ushering in a new era based on cooperation rather than confrontation, an inclination to reconsider American relations with the Soviet Union and China and ending the war in Vietnam.
Despite his limited campaign declarations however, the president had grand plans. They were set into motion just one hour after Nixon's inaugural when the new national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, sat in a basement office of the White House and drafted classified telegrams to American ambassadors abroad, foreign ministers and heads of state.
At the center of these plans was a policy that would set the tone for most of the other foreign policies of the administration: detente with the Soviet Union. It was designed to increase cooperation, facilitate the negotiation of differences, regulate competition and reduce confrontation between the rival superpowers. It was also designed to fail over the long term while paving the way for the ultimate end of the Cold War 20 years later.
In the final volume of his memoirs, "Years of Renewal" (Simon and Schuster, 1,119 pages, $35), Kissinger describes the seismic international and domestic changes that led to the march toward detente in the early 1970s. Abroad, the Soviet Union was achieving numerical parity with the United States in strategic missiles, but growing economic problems were rendering it more dependent upon the West. China, facing a major military border dispute with the Soviet Union, was just stepping out from the self-imposed isolation of the Cultural Revolution.
The United States, under President Lyndon Johnson, had placed a ceiling on American troop levels in Southeast Asia and adopted the idea of Vietnamization to allow a gradual U.S. withdrawal. These immediate changes made it possible -- and indeed necessary -- for Nixon and Kissinger to craft foreign policies that would build a new international order.
At home, the tremendous social and cultural upheaval related to the anti-Vietnam movement produced great pressures on the new administration to conduct foreign affairs in a way that minimized conflict and increased cooperation. The slogan "give peace a chance" resonated well beyond the public desire to end the war in Vietnam. It pointed to a broad public unwillingness to stomach confrontational policies toward even the most traditional adversaries.
The intersecting trends of growing Soviet power and anti-military sentiment at home gave the administration little leeway in terms of policy: It could have either retrenched completely, leaving existing commitments and allies adrift, or it could have tried to preserve American military strength and obligations as well as it could until the domestic storm had passed.
The administration chose the latter path, advancing a policy of limited disengagement to placate the domestic demand for such retrenchment while moving to protect U.S. capabilities and interests in ways that were still feasible politically.
The rhetoric, geared for public and Soviet consumption, emphasized restraint, but many of the administration's actions were geared toward preserving existing strength and building in areas permitted by provisions in arms control agreements.
The SALT agreement, for example, constrained both sides but left enough openings for them to move into areas in which they might gain an advantage. It bought some time for the United States in the strategic arms race, neutralized the damaging effects of Soviet nuclear parity, and was a useful political tool for the administration as it sought concessions from the Soviets in other areas and domestic support for a "peace with honor" in Vietnam.
Detente, then, was as much about politics as it was about policy. It signaled to the American public that its demands for greater cooperation and less wearying expense and sacrifice were being met, even as the primary decisionmakers planned a return to more aggressive policies when the domestic situation changed at a later time.
Newly declassified documents published as "The Kissinger Transcripts," edited by William Burr (The New Press, 515 pages, $30), show Kissinger telling Mao and other Chinese leaders in 1973 that detente was meant to "gain time" and reassuring them that better relations with the Soviets did not mean a repudiation of containment: "Our tactics are more complex and maybe less heroic, but our strategy is the same."
Nixon himself said later that detente was never meant to endure over a significant amount of time. A legendary anti-communist and cold warrior, Nixon believed that cooperative policies toward Moscow could neither serve American interests well over the long term nor overcome the inherently confrontational nature of the Cold War. But the times in which he was trying to govern forced him to adopt more conciliatory policies than he otherwise would have.
Detente, he said, was never meant to replace the grand strategy that had been in place since Truman. Instead, it was a cooperative but realistic way of dealing with the Soviets that was practiced, as Nixon and Kissinger often said, "without illusions."
Further, Nixon and Kissinger believed that the Soviets knew it was meant to be a temporary policy. Nixon told me in 1991 that the Soviets were aware that "those domestic pressures would eventually evaporate" and that it was "ridiculous" to believe that either side thought detente was going to last any significant amount of time.
Unlike the policy toward China, which was meant to be a longer-term, truly revolutionary policy that could sustain itself over time, detente was conceptualized and executed as a tactical holding strategy to preserve American power and position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union at a time when both were vulnerable. By downgrading ideology as a basis for foreign policy and then working constructively with both communist powers, Nixon and Kissinger demonstrated that the American government could conduct a peace policy despite the war in Vietnam.
As Nixon and Kissinger anticipated, detente turned out to be very temporary indeed. The Soviets continued to increase military spending and invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Angola became a new Cold War battleground, and the SALT II agreement failed to be ratified.
In the view of many Americans, the detente of the 1970s did not succeed because of Soviet actions that contravened what the United States understood detente to mean. Either the Soviets undermined detente, or if they did act in ways consistent with it, detente as a policy was flawed. From the American perspective, then, both Moscow and detente itself were to blame for the policy's decline.
From the Soviet perspective, however, the joint detente effort was abandoned deliberately by the United States as it sought to seek advantages from a policy of confrontation and a refusal to accept strategic parity.
This difference in perspective made it difficult for Americans and Soviets even to conduct retrospective assessments of detente in order to determine the causes of its failure.
On each side, the actions of the other were virtually accepted as having been responsible for its breakdown. But it may have been that neither side trusted that detente would succeed. And it did not help its chances for success that Nixon and Kissinger built into detente the expectation -- and in fact the hope -- that it would not last.
Monica Crowley served as foreign policy assistant to former President Richard Nixon from 1990 to his death in 1994 and is the author of "Nixon Off the Record" (1996) and "Nixon in Winter" (1998), both published by Random House. She is completing work for a doctorate in international relations at Columbia University.
Pub Date: 03/14/99