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China's Premier Chou En-lai was crucial to the beginnings of the detente that is leading more than one-fifth of the earth's population out of its dangerous isolation. So was Russia's Leonid Brezhnev; with the Soviets, the Americans signed 15 far-reaching bilateral agreements for trade and cooperation in space, technology and other fields. The Man of the Year in 1970, West Germany's Willy Brandt, continued pursuing his Ostpolitik with the signing of a treaty normalizing relations between the two Germanys, and won a surprisingly generous mandate at the polls from his people for it. But the primary will and intellect behind the emerging alignments resided in the White House.
From Ideology to Realpolitik
It was a full year for Nixon, who had to combine the roles of statesman abroad and politician seeking re-election at home. In a pre-election address on foreign policy, Nixon declared with some satisfaction that "1972 has been a year of more achievement for peace than any year since the end of World War II." Such optimism reckoned without the breakdown of the Viet Nam negotiations, yet in many ways the assessment was accurate. Nixon and Kissinger adroitly played Russian and Chinese desires and fears off against one another to establish a nonideological basis for relations among the three great powers.
Peking's perception of an American determination to get out of Viet Nam, its worry about Russian influence spreading deeper into Asia, and to a lesser degree its concern about the burgeoning power of Japan—all these factors led to the Chinese summit last February, with its astonishing tableaux of Nixon walking the Great Wall, of Nixon toasting Chou. The genius of the Nixon-Kissinger policy was its sensitivity to thinking in Moscow and Peking. That startling thaw between the U.S. and China deeply disconcerted the Soviets.
Anxious to quiet its Western Europe borders, Russia had been diligently courting Willy Brandt and other leaders in the hope of solidifying the status quo in Europe. But the Washington-Peking tie also made a U.S.-Soviet thaw imperative from Moscow's standpoint, which is precisely what Nixon and Kissinger had planned. In a sense, Nixon vaulted over the Western Europeans to establish his goal: improved ties with Russia. From this triangular power play emerged continued improvements in relations and slowly expanding trade with China, and the series of agreements, including a massive trade pact, with Russia. It opened the path toward other negotiations, notably on "Mutual Balanced Force Reductions" in Europe, scheduled to begin Jan. 31.
The theoretical basis of the Nixon Doctrine is stated in Kissinger's 1969 American Foreign Policy: "Regional groupings supported by the United States will have to take over major responsibility for their immediate areas, with the United States being more concerned with the overall framework of order than with the management of every regional enterprise." Kissinger recognized that the legacy of Viet