Détente
In an effort to avoid an escalation of conflict with the Eastern Bloc, the Nixon administration promoted greater dialogue with the Soviet government in order to facilitate negotiations over arms control and other bilateral agreements.
While the recognized era of détente formally began under the Richard Nixon presidency, there were prior instances of relationship relaxation between the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, both the United States and Soviet Union agreed to install a direct hotline between Washington and Moscow, colloquially known as the red telephone.
[10][11] In response to the heightening tensions, U.S. secretary of state George P. Shultz shifted the Ronald Reagan administration's foreign policy towards another period of de-escalation with the Soviet Union especially following Mikhail Gorbachev coming to power.
[12][13] According to Eric Grynaviski, "Soviet and U.S. decision-makers had two very different understandings about what détente meant" while simultaneously holding "an inaccurate belief that both sides shared principles and expectations for future behaviour.
The Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Pact sent an offer to the U.S. and the rest of the West that urged a summit on "security and cooperation in Europe"[This quote needs a citation] to be held.
[citation needed] In 1975, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) met and produced the Helsinki Accords, a wide-ranging series of agreements on economic, political, and human rights issues.
[17] The Jimmy Carter administration had been supporting human rights groups inside the Soviet Union, and Leonid Brezhnev accused the US of interference in other countries' internal affairs.
[17] In July 1975, the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) became the first international space mission; three American astronauts and two Soviet cosmonauts docked their spacecraft and conducted joint experiments.
The mission had been preceded by five years of political negotiation and technical co-operation, including exchanges of American and Soviet engineers between both countries' space centres.
[citation needed] At the same time, the Jackson–Vanik amendment, signed into law by U.S. president Gerald Ford on 3 January 1975 after a unanimous vote by both houses of the U.S. Congress, was designed to leverage trade relations between the Americans and the Soviets.
[19] Nixon and Brezhnev signed an ABM treaty in Moscow on 26 May 1972 as well as SALT I, the Interim Agreement, which temporarily capped the number of strategic arms (MIRVs, SLBMs, and ICBMs).
David Tal argued:[21] The linkage between strategic arms limitations and outstanding issues such as the Middle East, Berlin and, foremost, Vietnam thus became central to Nixon's and Kissinger's policy of détente.
It failed mainly because it was based on flawed assumptions and false premises, the foremost of which was that the Soviet Union wanted strategic arms limitation agreement much more than the United States did.A significant example of an event contributing to détente was the handshake that took place in space.
Conflicts in South Asia and the Middle East in 1973 saw the Soviet Union and the U.S. backing their respective surrogates, such as in Afghanistan, with war material and diplomatic posturing.
[25] Both sides continued aiming thousands of nuclear warheads atop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at each other's cities, maintaining submarines with long-range nuclear weapon capability (submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs) in the world's oceans, keeping hundreds of nuclear-armed aircraft on constant alert, and guarding contentious borders in Korea and Europe with large ground forces.
Espionage efforts remained a high priority, and defectors, reconnaissance satellites, and signal intercepts measured each other's intentions to try to gain a strategic advantage.
[citation needed] The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, carried out in an attempt to shore up a struggling pro-Soviet regime, led to harsh international criticisms, and a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, held in Moscow.
[30][31] However, the Reagan administration talked about a "winnable" nuclear war and led to the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the Third World policy of funding irregular and paramilitary death squads in Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, Cambodia, and Afghanistan.
