By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Cold War China Xi Jinping And The United
States
Few words are more closely
associated with the late Henry Kissinger than “détente.” The term 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 internationally famous only in the late 1960s and 1970s, when
Kissinger, first as U.S. national security adviser and then also as U.S.
secretary of state, pioneered what would become his signature policy: the
easing of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Détente should not be
confused with amitié. It was not about
striking up a friendship with Moscow but about reducing the risks that a cold
war would become a hot one. “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. Rhetorical crusades cannot change
that, either.” For Kissinger, 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 a variety of issues, including arms
control and trade. He strove to establish “linkage,” another keyword of the
era, between things the Soviets appeared to want (for example, better access to
American technology) and things the United States knew it wanted (for
example, 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, and as Kissinger himself put it, détente meant
embracing “both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to
relax tensions.”
Suppose that
pragmatic sentiment resonates five decades later. In that case, it is because
policymakers in Washington appear to have reached a similar conclusion about
China, the country with which U.S. President Joe Biden and his national
security team seem ready to attempt their 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.” 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,” he wrote. “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.
If détente is making
a comeback in all but name, why did it go out of fashion? In the wake of
Kissinger’s death, in November 2023, his critics on the left have not been slow
to repeat their old list of indictments, ranging from the bombing of civilians
in Cambodia to supporting dictators in Chile, Pakistan, and elsewhere. For the
left, Kissinger personified a cold-blooded realpolitik that subordinated human
rights in the Third World to containment. This was the aspect of détente to
which U.S. President Jimmy Carter objected. But much less has been heard lately
of the conservative critique of Kissinger, which claimed that Kissinger’s
policy was tantamount to appeasement. 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 taunted Kissinger for acquiescing as the Soviets
cynically exploited détente, such as when they and their Cuban allies gained
the upper hand in postcolonial Angola. During his first run for president, in
1976, Reagan repeatedly pledged to scrap the policy if elected. “Under Messrs.
Kissinger and Ford,” he declared in March of that year, “this nation has become
number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to
be second best.”
Reagan was hardly an
outlier. By the time he spoke, hawks across the government were fed up with
Kissinger’s approach. Republicans commonly complained that, in the words of New
Jersey Senator Clifford Case, “the gains made in détente have accrued to the Soviet
side.” Across the aisle, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia
enraged Kissinger by accusing him of having “put great trust in Communist
Russia” and, through détente, “embracing” Moscow. The American military,
meanwhile, suggested that to pursue détente was to admit defeat. In 1976, Elmo
Zumwalt, who had recently retired as head of the U.S. Navy, argued that
Kissinger believed the United States had “passed its historic high point like
so many earlier civilizations.” Just as appeasement, which had started as a
respectable term, fell into disrepute in 1938, détente became a dirty word—and
it did so even before Kissinger left office.
Yet 1970s détente was
unlike 1930s appeasement, both in the way it functioned and in the results it
produced. Unlike the British and French attempt to buy off Adolf Hitler with
territorial concessions, Kissinger and his presidents strove to contain their
adversary’s expansion. And unlike appeasement, détente successfully avoided a
world war. Writing in the mid-1980s, the political scientist Harvey Starr
counted a marked increase in the ratio of cooperative to conflictual acts in
U.S.-Soviet relations during the Nixon administration. The number of
state-based conflicts was lower in the Kissinger years (1969 to 1977) than in
the years after and right before.
Half a century later,
as Washington adjusts to the realities of a new cold war, détente could again
be derailed by hawks. Republican politicians love to portray their opponents as
soft on China, just as their predecessors portrayed their opponents as
soft on the Soviets in the 1970s. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for example, has
claimed that Biden is “coddling and appeasing the Chinese communists.” Former
President Donald Trump’s campaign has accused Biden of “weakness” that
“continues to invite aggression” against Taiwan.
These charges are not
surprising; it is always tempting for Republicans to summon the spirit of
Reagan and rerun his critique of détente. But there is a danger that both
parties are misunderstanding the lessons of the 1970s. In advocating an
uncompromising containment of China, Republicans may overestimate the United
States’ ability to prevail in a confrontation. In shying away from escalation,
the Biden administration may be underestimating the importance of deterrence as
a component of détente. The essence of Kissinger’s strategy was that it
combined engagement and containment in a way that was well-advised given the
state of the American economy and American public opinion in the 1970s, or what
the Soviets liked to call the “correlation of forces.” A similar combination is
needed today, especially when the correlation of forces is a good deal more
favorable for Beijing than it ever was for Moscow.
On The Brink
These days, the more
sophisticated of Kissinger’s academic critics don’t complain that the Soviets
got more out of détente than the United States did. Instead, they argue that
Kissinger repeatedly made the mistake of seeing every issue through the lens of
the Cold War and treating every crisis as if it were decisive to the struggle
against Moscow. As the historian Jussi Hanhimaki has
written in a book-length broadside, Kissinger took it “as a given that
containing Soviet power—if not communist ideology—should be the central goal of
American foreign policy.”
This critique
reflects the efforts historians have made in recent years to focus on the
sufferings of people who lived in the countries caught in the Cold
War crossfire. But it underestimates just how threatening the Soviet Union
was to the United States in the Third World. Whatever the crafty Soviet
ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin might have said to Kissinger, the Kremlin did not
regard détente as anything other than cover for its strategy to gain the
advantage over Washington. As a 1971 report to the Politburo made clear, the
Soviet Union wanted the United States to “conduct its international affairs in
a way that did not create a danger of confrontation,” but only because doing so
could make Washington “recognize the need for the West to realize the interests
of the USSR.” To achieve this objective, the report called on the Politburo “to
continue to use the U.S. government’s objective interest in maintaining
contacts and holding negotiations with the USSR.”
Kissinger was not
privy to this document, but it would not have surprised him. He had no
illusions about the game being played by Dobrynin’s masters. After all, the
Soviets also stated publicly in 1975 that détente did not preclude their
continued “support of the national liberation struggle” against “the
social-political status quo.” As Kissinger told the columnist Joe Alsop in
1970, “If the Soviets think an agreement on nuclear parity will serve their
interests, they are perfectly capable of reaching for such an agreement with
one hand while trying to cut our gizzards out with the other hand.”
Kissinger and Ford
negotiating arms control with General Secretary of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev and others near Vladivostok, Russia, November 1974
Nevertheless,
although Kissinger knew that the Kremlin had ulterior motives, he still
advanced détente for one simple reason: the conservative alternative, a return
to the brinkmanship of the 1950s and 1960s, risked nuclear Armageddon. There
was “no alternative to coexistence,” Kissinger told an audience in Minneapolis
in 1975. Both the Soviet Union and the United States “can destroy civilized
life.” Détente was, therefore, a moral imperative. “We have a historic
obligation,” Kissinger argued the following year, “to engage the Soviet Union
and to push back the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.”
These concerns did
not make Kissinger an advocate of nuclear disarmament. Having risen to
prominence as a public intellectual with a book titled Nuclear Weapons
and Foreign Policy, he remained as interested in the possibility of a
limited nuclear war as he was horrified by the prospect of an all-out one. In
the spring of 1974, Kissinger even requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff
formulate a limited nuclear response to a hypothetical Soviet invasion of Iran.
But when he was
briefed on the draft plan a few weeks later, he was appalled. The Pentagon
proposed firing some 200 nuclear weapons at Soviet military installations near
the Iranian border. “Are you out of your minds?” Kissinger shouted. “This is a
limited option?” When the generals returned with a plan to use only an atomic
mine and two nuclear weapons to blow up the two roads from Soviet territory
into Iran, he was incredulous. “What kind of nuclear attack is this?” he asked.
A U.S. president who used so few weapons would be regarded in the Kremlin as
“chicken.” The problem, as he well knew, was that there could never be
certainty that the Soviets would respond in a limited way to any kind of
American nuclear strike.
Kissinger’s views on
nuclear arms rankled his conservative critics, particularly those in the
Pentagon. They were especially infuriated by how Kissinger approached the
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which began in November 1969 and paved the way
for the first major U.S.-Soviet arms control agreement. In September 1975, the
Defense Intelligence Agency circulated a ten-page intelligence estimate
asserting that the Soviet Union was cynically cheating on its SALT commitments
to gain nuclear dominance. The debate flared again in the last days of the Ford
administration when reports by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency
suggested that Moscow was seeking superiority, not parity when it came to
nuclear weapons. Government officials claimed that Kissinger knew this but had
chosen to ignore it.
These criticisms were
not entirely wrong. The Soviets had already achieved parity in the raw numbers
of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the late 1960s and had a huge lead in
megatonnage by 1970. Some of these ICBMs carried large, multiple independently
targetable reentry vehicles, which could fire a cluster of warheads at more
than one target. However, the United States retained a five-to-one advantage in
submarine-launched ballistic missiles in 1977. The U.S. advantage in
bomber-carried nuclear weapons was even greater: 11 to one. And Moscow never
came anywhere close to acquiring enough ballistic missiles to carry out a
strike against U.S. nuclear assets that would have made it impossible for
Washington to respond with its nuclear attack. Interviews with senior Soviet
officers after the Cold War revealed that by the early 1970s, the military
leadership had dismissed the notion that the Soviet Union could win a nuclear
war. The subsequent growth of the country’s nuclear arsenal was mainly the
result of inertia on the part of the military-industrial complex.
To a degree,
Kissinger shared his Soviet counterparts’ perspective. His view since the 1950s
had been that an all-out nuclear world war was too catastrophic for anyone to
win. The details of the size and quality of the two superpowers’ nuclear
arsenals therefore interested him much less than how the diplomacy of détente
could reduce the risk of Armageddon. He also believed that Soviet nuclear
parity would ultimately prove unsustainable, given that the Soviet Union’s
economy was much smaller than that of the United States. “The economic and
technological base which underlies Western military strength remains
overwhelmingly superior in size and capacity for innovation,” Kissinger said in
a 1976 speech. He added, “We have nothing to fear from competition: If there is
a military competition, we have the strength to defend our interests. If there
is an economic competition, we won it long ago.”
Lose The Battle, Win The War
Conservatives
objected to Kissinger for reasons beyond his seeming tolerance of Soviet
nuclear parity. Hawks also argued that Kissinger was too ready to accept the
unjust character of the Soviet system—the obverse of liberals’ complaint that
he was too ready to tolerate the unjust character of right-wing dictatorships.
This issue came to the fore over Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration and
the treatment of Soviet political dissidents, such as the author Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. When Solzhenitsyn visited the United States in the 1970s (having
been kicked out of the Soviet Union), Kissinger infuriated conservatives by
advising President Gerald Ford not to meet with him.
Solzhenitsyn became
one of Kissinger’s most implacable opponents. “A peace that tolerates any
ferocious forms of violence and any massive doses of it against millions of
people,” the novelist thundered in 1975, “has no moral loftiness even in the
nuclear age.” He and other conservative critics argued that through détente,
Kissinger had merely enabled the expansion of Soviet communism. The fall of
Saigon in 1975, the descent of Cambodia into the hell of Pol Pot’s communist
dictatorship, and the Cuban-Soviet intervention in Angola’s postcolonial
conflict—these and other geopolitical setbacks seemed to vindicate their claim.
“I believe in the peace of which Mr. Ford speaks, as much as any man,” Reagan
declared in 1976, as he campaigned against Ford in the Republican presidential
primary. “But in places such as Angola, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the peace they
have come to know is the peace of the grave. All I can see is what other
nations the world over see: the collapse of the American will and the retreat
of American power.”
Unlike the allegation
of Soviet nuclear superiority, Kissinger never denied that Soviet expansionism
in the Third World posed a threat to détente and U.S. power. “Time is running
out continuation of an interventionist policy must inevitably threaten other
relationships,” he said in a speech in November 1975. “We will be flexible and
cooperative in settling conflicts. . . . But we will never permit détente to
turn into a subterfuge of unilateral advantage.” Yet the reality was that in
the absence of congressional support—whether for the defense of South Vietnam
or the defense of Angola—the Ford administration had little choice but to
accept Soviet military expansion, or at least the victories of Soviet proxies.
“Our domestic disputes,” Kissinger said in December 1975, “are depriving us of
both the ability to provide incentives for [Soviet] moderation such as in the
restrictions on the trade act, as well as of the ability to resist military
moves by the Soviet Union as in Angola.”
It can, of course, be
debated to what extent Kissinger was right to claim that with continued
congressional support for U.S. aid, South Vietnam and even Angola might have
been saved from communist control. But there is no doubt Kissinger cared about
stopping the spread of Soviet systems. “The necessity for détente as we
conceive it does not reflect approbation of the Soviet domestic structure,” he
said in 1974. “The United States has always looked with sympathy, with great
appreciation, at the expression of freedom of thought in all societies.” If
Kissinger declined to embrace Solzhenitsyn, it was not because Kissinger was
tolerant of (much less secretly sympathetic to) the Soviet model. It was
because he believed that Washington could accomplish more by maintaining
working relations with Moscow.
Ford and Kissinger conferring before a summit in
Vladivostok, Russia, November 1974
And in this, he was
surely right. 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 when Kissinger
was firmly in charge 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 U.S.-Soviet trade deal, emigration
went down. Kissinger’s conservative critics were vehemently opposed to 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 commit to respecting 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.
None of these facts
could save Kissinger’s governmental career. As soon as Ford was out, so was his
secretary of state, never to return to high office. But Kissinger’s core
strategic concept continued to bear fruit for years to come, including under
the principal critics of détente: Carter and Reagan. Carter had criticized
Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger for being insufficiently compassionate in their
realism, but his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, persuaded him
to get tough with Moscow. By the end of 1979, Carter was compelled to warn the
Soviets to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan or face “serious
consequences.” Reagan, for his part, ended up adopting détente as his policy in
all but name—and indeed went beyond what Kissinger did to ease tensions. In his
pursuit of rapprochement, Reagan agreed to reduce Washington’s nuclear arsenal
by a far larger amount than even Kissinger thought prudent. The “Kissinger era”
did not end when he left the government in January 1977.
Although since
forgotten, this truth was recognized by Kissinger’s more observant
contemporaries. The conservative commentator William Safire, for example, noted
how quickly the Reagan administration was penetrated by “Kissingerians”
and “détenteniks,” even if Kissinger himself was kept
at bay. The Reagan administration became so accommodating that it was now
Kissinger’s turn to accuse Reagan of being overly soft, such as in his response
to the imposition of martial law in Poland. Kissinger opposed plans for a
pipeline to transport natural gas from the Soviet Union to Western Europe
because it would make the West “much more subject to political manipulation
than it is even today.” (This warning, it turned out, was prescient.) In 1987,
Nixon and Kissinger took to the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times to
warn that Reagan’s readiness to make a deal with the Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev, in which both states would get rid of all their intermediate-range
nuclear weapons, was going too far. To such criticisms, Secretary of State
George Shultz gave a revealing response: “We’re beyond détente now.”
Détente 2.0
Considering the
troubles the United States was facing by the start of 1969, détente as
Kissinger conceived of it made sense. Unable to defeat North Vietnam, afflicted
by stagflation, and deeply divided over everything from race relations to
women’s rights, Washington could not play hardball with Moscow. Indeed, the
U.S. economy in the 1970s was in no condition to sustain increased defense
spending overall. (Détente had a fiscal rationale, too, although Kissinger
seldom mentioned it.) Détente did not mean—as Kissinger’s critics
alleged—embracing, trusting, or appeasing the Soviets. Nor did it mean allowing
them to attain nuclear superiority, permanent control over Eastern Europe, or
an empire in the Third World. What it meant was recognizing the limits of U.S.
power, reducing the risk of thermonuclear war by employing a combination of
carrots and sticks, and buying time for the United States to recover.
It worked. True,
Kissinger did not secure the “decent interval” between the U.S. withdrawal from
South Vietnam and the South’s conquest by the North, an interlude he had hoped
would be long enough to limit the damage to Washington’s credibility and reputation.
But détente allowed the United States to regroup domestically and to stabilize
its Cold War strategy. The U.S. economy soon innovated in ways that the Soviet
Union never could, creating economic and technological assets that enabled
Washington’s Cold War victory. Détente also gave the Soviets the rope with
which to hang themselves. Emboldened by their successes in Southeast Asia and
southern Africa, they mounted a series of mistaken and costly interventions in
the less developed world, culminating in their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Given détente’s
rarely acknowledged success in these terms, it is worth asking if there are
lessons the United States can learn today that are relevant to its competition
with China. Kissinger certainly believed so. While speaking in Beijing in 2019,
he declared that the United States and China were already “in the foothills of
a cold war.” In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he upgraded that to
“the mountain passes.” And a year 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 not
only faster and more accurate but also potentially autonomous. He called on
both superpowers to cooperate whenever possible to limit the existential
dangers of this new cold war—and, in particular, to avoid a potentially
cataclysmic showdown over the contested status of Taiwan.
As during the 1970s,
plenty of experts criticize this approach in the current debate over U.S.
policy toward China. Elbridge Colby, the most thoughtful of the new generation
of conservative strategists, has exhorted the Biden administration to adopt a
“strategy of denial” to deter China from militarily challenging a status quo in
which Taiwan enjoys de facto autonomy and a thriving democracy. At times, the
Biden administration has itself seemed to call into question the half-century
Taiwan policy of strategic ambiguity, in which the United States leaves unclear
whether it will use military force to defend the island. There is almost a
bipartisan consensus that the previous era of engagement with Beijing was a
mistake, predicated on the erroneous assumption that increased trade with China
would magically liberalize its political system.
Yet there is no good
reason why the superpowers of our time, like their predecessors in the 1950s
and 1960s, should endure 20 years of brinkmanship before having the détente
phase of their Cold War. Détente 2.0 would surely be preferable to running a
new version of the Cuban missile crisis over Taiwan, but with the
roles reversed: the communist state blockading the nearby contested island and
the United States having to run the blockade, with all the attendant risks.
That is certainly what Kissinger believed in the last year of his long life. It
was the main motivation for his final visit to Beijing shortly after his 100th
birthday.
Like détente 1.0, a new
détente would not mean appeasing China, much less expecting the country to
change. It would mean, once again, 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—and
perhaps even inconclusive. But they would be the “meeting jaw to jaw” that
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill generally preferred to war. As for
Taiwan, the superpowers could do worse than dust off their old promise,
hammered out by Kissinger, to agree to disagree.
Xi and Biden in Woodside, California, November 2023
Détente, of course,
does not work miracles. In the 1970s, it was both oversold and overbought. The
policy unquestionably provided the United States with time, but it was a chess
strategy that perhaps required too many callous sacrifices of lesser pieces on
the board. As one Soviet analyst, puzzled by U.S. opposition to his country’s
intervention in Angola, remarked, “You Americans tried to sell détente like
detergent and claimed that it would do everything a detergent could do.”
Critics ultimately
succeeded in poisoning the term. In March 1976, Ford banned its use in his
reelection campaign. But there was never a workable replacement. Asked then if
he had an alternative term, Kissinger gave a characteristically wry response.
“I’ve been dancing around myself to find one,” he said. “Easing of tensions,
relaxation of tensions. We may well wind up with the old word again.”
Today, the Biden
administration has settled for its word: “de-risking.” It is not French, but it
is also barely English. Although the starting point of this cold war is
different because of the much greater economic interdependence between today’s
superpowers, the optimal strategy may turn out to be essentially the same as
before. If the new détente is to be criticized, then the critics should not
misrepresent it the way Kissinger’s détente was so often misrepresented by his
many foes—lest they find themselves, like Reagan before, doing essentially the
same when they are in the Situation Room.
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