The term detente was first used in diplomacy in the early 1900s when the French ambassador to Germany tried—and failed—to better his country’s deteriorating relationship with Berlin, and in 1912, when British diplomats attempted the same thing. But détente became famous only in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Henry Kissinger, first as US national security adviser and then as US secretary of state, pioneered what would become his signature policy — easing tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, as stated by writer Niall Ferguson in his story, “Kissinger and the True Meaning of Detente.”
It was not about friendship with Moscow but about reducing the risks that a Cold War would become hot. “The United States and the Soviet Union are ideological rivals,” Kissinger explained in his memoirs. Détente cannot change that. The nuclear age compels us to coexist. The deceased diplomat understood that the Cold War could have catastrophic consequences if it turned hot. For the former secretary of state, détente was a middle way between the aggression that had led to World War I, “when Europe, despite the existence of a military balance, drifted into a war no one wanted,” and the appeasement that he believed had led to World War II, “when the democracies failed to understand the designs of a totalitarian aggressor.”
To pursue détente, Kissinger sought to engage the Soviets on various issues, including arms control and trade. He strove to establish “linkage,” another keyword of the era, between things the Soviets appeared to want — better access to American technology - and things the United States knew it wanted — assistance in extricating itself from Vietnam. At the same time, Kissinger was prepared to be combative whenever he discerned that the Soviets were working to expand their sphere of influence from the Middle East to southern Africa. In other words, détente meant embracing “both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions.”
Policymakers in Washington appear to have reached a similar conclusion about China, the country with which US President Joe Biden and his national security team seem ready to attempt their own version of détente. “We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict,” Biden told the Chinese leader Xi Jinping in California in November.
“We also have a responsibility to our people and the world to work together when we see it in our interest to do so,” said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, made a similar point in his essay in these pages last year: “The contest is truly global, but not zero-sum. The shared challenges the two sides face are unprecedented.” To paraphrase Kissinger, the United States and China are major rivals. But the nuclear age and climate change, not to mention artificial intelligence, compel them to coexist.
Kissinger has had his share of critics over the years, from both the left and the right side of the political spectrum. For the left, Kissinger’s policies subordinated human rights in the Third World to containment. This was the aspect of détente to which US President Jimmy Carter objected. Many mention the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile as an example of Kissinger’s policies at work. However, some on the right side of the political spectrum didn’t like détente as well. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan spent the 1970s blasting détente as a “one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims.” He said the Soviets cynically exploited détente, such as when they and their Cuban allies gained the upper hand in postcolonial Angola. During his second presidential run in 1976, Reagan repeatedly pledged to scrap the policy if elected. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the former secretary of state, and I prefer the ideas of another realist thinker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor.
The Cold War was a dangerous time for the US and the world. Kissinger said: “Both the Soviet Union and the United States have the capacity to destroy civilized life. We have a historic obligation to engage the Soviet Union and to push back the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.” Kissinger’s views on nuclear arms weren’t popular with conservative critics, particularly those in the Pentagon. They were infuriated by how he approached the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which began in November 1969 and paved the way for the first major US-Soviet arms control agreement.
America did promote its values with détente. Ferguson said: “By easing tensions both in Europe and across the rest of the world, détente helped improve the lives of at least some people under communist rule. Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union rose in the period during the years of détente. After Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and other congressional hawks sought to publicly pressure Moscow into releasing more Jews by holding up a US-Soviet trade deal, emigration went down. Kissinger’s conservative critics vehemently opposed the United States’ signing the Helsinki Accords in the summer of 1975, arguing that they represented a ratification of Soviet postwar conquests in Europe. But by getting the Soviet Union’s leaders to respect certain basic civil rights of their citizens as part of the accords—a commitment they had no intention of honoring—the deal ultimately eroded the legitimacy of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.” It must be noted that the number of state-based conflicts was lower in the Kissinger years (1969 to 1977) than in the years after and right before.
The detente policy recognized the limits of US power, reducing the risk of thermonuclear war by employing a combination of carrots and sticks and buying time for the United States to recover from hard economic times and withdraw from Vietnam. Just before his death, he warned that the new Cold War would be more dangerous than the first one because of advances in technology, such as artificial intelligence, that threaten to make weapons faster and more accurate and potentially autonomous. He called on both superpowers to cooperate whenever possible to limit the existential dangers of this new cold war—and to avoid a potentially cataclysmic showdown over the contested status of Taiwan.
What would a new détente look like? Ferguson stated it would mean engaging in myriad negotiations on arms control (urgently needed as China frantically builds up its forces in every domain), trade, technology transfers, climate change, artificial intelligence, and space. Like SALT, these negotiations would be protracted and tedious.
Could a new détente allow China to switch sides and leave Russia isolated in the world? If so, it would save your country a lot of money. After all, China switched sides in the first Cold War and saved the US a lot of money in terms of security. Regardless of your views of Kissinger, let’s hope we can remember what he did with détente as we live through this second Cold War.
Jason Sibert of St. Louis is the Lead Writer of the Peace Economy Project.
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024
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