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Restoring détente will help rebuild the Western alliances.
Now more than ever, the U.S. needs the help of its allies in the complicated task of reinforcing Western security. It needs the British and the West Germans to shoulder more of the defense of Europe, so that the U.S. can concentrate on the Persian Gulf and other far-flung trouble spots. It needs French help in combatting the Libyans and other international muggers in sub-Saharan Africa. It needs the Japanese to assist in shoring up the security of the Pacific. These alliances are already strained, and there is plenty of blame to go around. American leadership has been erratic; the West Europeans in general have been excessively parochial; the French in particular have enjoyed the protection of NATO without active participation. There have been divergent approaches plus failures of communication and coordination on a lengthy agenda of what should be common concerns, from Middle East diplomacy to the north-south dialogue, and most importantly on the collective response to the Soviet threat. The West Europeans and Japanese do not want the new cold war in Soviet-American relations to increase because they are caught, politically and geographically, in the middle.
More specifically, they want the U.S. to keep SALT going, both as part of détente and as the bellwether for a variety of other, multilateral negotiations in which they are directly involved. For example, the British are party to the comprehensive test-ban talks in Geneva, and the West Germans have a key interest in the prospective negotiations on theater nuclear forces. As a result, the West Europeans have imposed a bit of linkage of their own. They have said they will cooperate with the U.S. in upgrading NATO's nuclear defenses only if the U.S. simultaneously pursues arms control agreements. Hard-liners in the Reagan Administration may smell a scent of blackmail there, yet the hard fact remains that the U.S. could restore a much needed degree of transatlantic calm if its fair-weather allies were not quite so nervously eyeing the thunderheads over Soviet-American relations. With calm restored, the U.S. might then be able to reassert the strong leadership and the discipline within the alliance that will be necessary the next time trouble brews between East and West.
I he U.S. should look for ways to play on Soviet vulnerabilities, particularly in Eastern Europe and China, in order to discourage Moscow's expansionism elsewhere.
To pursue adventurist policies on a global scale, the Kremlin leadership needs stability and security within the Soviet bloc; it also requires that all be quiet along the eastern front with China. It was by no means coincidental that the Soviets were receptive to the Nixon-Kissinger initiatives for détente in 1969; that year the Soviets were fighting on the border with China. Similarly, Brezhnev would like, if possible, to defuse Soviet-American antagonisms now, because a military invasion of Poland, at a time when heightened East-West tensions are still crackling in