(7 of 11)
Doubts About Détente
Détente with Moscow was less dramatic, but given the nuclear realities, more important. It was in part, of course, a consequence of the China initiative, though Nixon and Kissinger were never crude in playing off the Chinese and Soviets. Another factor that on the surface, at least, made the Russians more tractable was their need for Western trade and technology, and the long deferred demands inside the Soviet Union for a better life.
Some second thoughts about détente set in on both sides. In the U.S. there was much concern about Soviet backing of the Arab states against Israel and the limitations on emigration of Soviet Jews. There was anxiety about the apparent Soviet determination to press ahead with vast armament programs so that a SALT agreement with regard to offensive weapons remained in serious doubt. The 1974 summit produced only limited gains on that front.
On the other hand, détente finally paid off in the Middle East. The Russians had seemed ready to exploit every anti-U.S. opportunity in the area and, in particular, massively armed Syria. But after the Yom Kippur War, they played second fiddle to Kissinger's spectacular effort for peace and saw their own influence decline. The changed U.S. attitude toward the Arabs, from blind backing of Israel to what Nixon had described as a more evenhanded policy, was among the most important of all of Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments.
Throughout all of this there occurred a weakening in the alliance between the U.S. and Western Europe, caused partly by U.S. diplomatic failures, but mostly by new power relationships in the world and by the Europeans' own disarray and weakness. Eventually the Nixon Administration and the new governments in Western Europe seemed to be working out a sounder relationship.
From the U.S. point of view, one reason détente with Peking and Moscow was so important was that it was indispensable to ending the Viet Nam War. Though the Soviet Union and China kept supplying the North Vietnamese, they sat still for the notorious Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong. In the end they backed a negotiated settlement. Nixon and Kissinger managed to pull out U.S. forces and retrieve the American prisoners. Perhaps it was not "peace with honor" (certainly not peace for Viet Nam), but they achieved something that had seemed impossible for years: a U.S. departure that could not be called a sellout of the non-Communist regime in Saigon.
Was it worth the price—and did the price really have to be paid? Debate will continue for years over whether the American role in the war could not have been ended considerably sooner on much the same terms as finally resulted. During the four years that the negotiations were under way, 15,000 American servicemen died in Indochina (of a total of 46,000 since the war began in 1961) and 100,000 were wounded (of 300,000).
As the Viet Nam War wound down, the campuses and ghettos cooled; the riots after the Cambodian invasion and the killings at Kent State were the last major eruption. Quiet set in partly from sheer exhaustion