[4] The United States had sought a provision that would prohibit radio jamming but it failed to find consensus due to Soviet opposition.

The Soviet Union believed that jamming was a legally justified response to broadcasts they argued were a violation of the Helsinki Accords' broad purpose to "meet the interest of mutual understanding among people and the aims set forth by the Conference".

[5] When President Gerald Ford came into office in August 1974, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) negotiations had been underway for nearly two years.

In August 1974, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said to Ford "we never wanted it but we went along with the Europeans [...] It is meaningless — it is just a grandstand play to the left.

[13]: 65  US president Gerald Ford also reaffirmed that US non-recognition policy of the Baltic States' (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) forced incorporation into the Soviet Union had not changed.

While these provisions applied to all signatories, the focus of attention was on their application to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book The Cold War: A New History (2005), "Leonid Brezhnev had looked forward, Anatoly Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these [communist] systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought.

"[19] The then-People's Republic of Albania refused to participate in the Accords, its leader Enver Hoxha arguing, "All the satellites of the Soviets with the possible exception of the Bulgarians want to break the shackles of the Warsaw Treaty, but they cannot.

Then their only hope is that which the Helsinki document allows them, that is, to strengthen their friendship with the United States of America and the West, to seek investments from them in the form of credits and imports of their technology without any restrictions, to allow the church to occupy its former place, to deepen the moral degeneration, to increase the anti-Sovietism, and the Warsaw Treaty will remain an empty egg-shell.

The "undersigned High Representatives of the participating States" as well as seating at the conference were ordered alphabetically by the countries' short names in French (thus starting with the two Allemagnes followed by Amérique, and Tchécoslovaquie separated from Union soviétique by Turquie etc.).