The hope was in détente. Stalin had conceded Italy and Greece in return for this and that, at Teheran or Yalta. Could another such bargain be struck? But this time round there was China as well. There was increasing trouble between these two Communist giants; it could be exploited. In 1967 Kosygin had visited Johnson, who noticed the obsession with China, and even Nixon wrote an article hinting that US relations with China might be improved. In March 1969 Soviet and Chinese forces clashed on the river Ussuri, over a border question, and Moscow asked Nixon to condemn the Chinese nuclear tests; there were hints at a nuclear strike to destroy the Chinese ‘facilities’; and the Chinese were refusing the Russians the right to fly supplies to Vietnam or to use their airfields. The Chinese needed America against Russia. There was room, here, for clever-cleverness, and in April 1971 the world was surprised when an American table tennis team went to Peking. It was even more taken aback a year later, when Nixon followed, on 21 February 1972. Through de Gaulle, Ceauşescu and others, approaches were made, along with indications that Taiwan would be formally derecognized. The Sino-Soviet split was real enough, and the Chinese (themselves barely recovering from economic and cultural convulsions) were anxious to fend off a Soviet attack. Moscow had made plain enough what it would do to Communists who took their own ‘path to socialism’, which Peking ineffably had done. Kissinger travelled incognito to Peking in July 1971, and in mid-July Nixon told television that he had accepted an invitation there. In February 1972 he went, and met a Mao who had insisted on leaving his hospital bed. There was a bargain: China would be protected from Russia; Taiwan would be left alone but downgraded; the Chinese would cease to support the North Vietnamese.
Then came Moscow’s turn, and the offer - suitably preceded by a bill to set up an anti-ballistic missile system - was of negotiations over ‘strategic-arms’ limitation, again handled by Kissinger by stealth. After news of the planned visit to Mao, in July 1971, the Soviet ambassador asked for Nixon to visit Moscow first, but he went in fact later, in May 1972. In September 1971 there was even an agreement about access to Berlin. Despite the various crises of the sixties, there were always US-Soviet discussions as to nuclear weaponry - disarmament. Cuba had frightened both sides (and everyone else) and there was a possibility that war might break out by accident over this or that difficult-to-manage international quarrel. In the Middle East there was one such crisis, the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, when the clients of both sides came to an armed clash and the Israelis won a smashing victory. After Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev met in June 1967, a ‘non-proliferation treaty’ was concluded (July 1968) and this was supposed to stop the chief signatories from passing on nuclear secrets to countries without the bomb, while these countries also agreed not to take them. The chief idea was of course to prevent Germany (or China) from acquiring them. At the same time, negotiations began on the limitation of numbers of strategic arms - SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) - and were permanent after 1969, even the chief matter of US-Soviet relations, though they were held up now and again by political crises. When Nixon and Brezhnev met in Moscow in May 1972, a vast conference on security and disarmament was indeed agreed, but contrary to earlier Soviet ideas it was also to include the North Americans. Preparatory negotiations started in 1973, and led to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which assembled in Helsinki in 1975.
These went in tandem with the SALT. The Americans had proposed these in 1964, but the USSR showed serious interest only after Nixon became President in 1969, obviously with a programme of antiCommunism; by now they were greatly worried about China, and in November 1969 the negotiations began for two agreements - an ABM treaty limiting anti-ballistic missiles and a SALT treaty limiting offensive nuclear weaponry. The Soviets were overtaking the Americans in offensive weapons and their interest lay in limiting the Americans’ superior defensive capacity (ABMs), which reduced the effectiveness of their ICBMs. With the US, the interest was the converse, since by 1972 the USSR had over 1,500 missiles to the United States’ 1,054, and, with a first strike, could incapacitate the silos and completely destroy any nuclear balance between the two sides. In May 1972, with Nixon’s visit to Moscow, the ABM and SALT I treaties were signed. There were to be two ABM bases only, with 100 launchers each, one to defend the capital (the ‘Galosh’ system around Moscow, maybe maintained against China) and one to contain the ICBMs. In fact the ABMs of the era were not effective, because their first explosion would block the Americans’ own radar, and the treaty further stipulated that defensive weapons in space, with the use of lasers (where the Americans had a great advantage), would be banned. This greatly assisted the Soviets, the more so as, not subject to democratic controls, they could proceed anyway with secret tests.
There was a further problem, more important later on, in that the disposal of weaponry might include stuff that was obsolete and was anyway due for the junkyard (a ruse used by the Americans when they solemnly withdrew Jupiter missiles from Turkey in the outcome of the Cuban crisis). Besides, what was to happen with inspection, to make sure that the agreements were being kept? This invited trouble, especially on the Soviet side, where there was a mania for secrecy that even divided the Soviet negotiating team: their military refused to divulge information to the civilians, and would only do so to the US military. They now refused any inspection rights, such that satellites would have to be used, and these could not spot concealed weapons on land. In Washington these treaties, whatever their defects, were desired because they led to ‘stability’, then a much prized commodity. The SALT I treaty was a provisional agreement for five years, to keep things at the then level, and affected intercontinental ballistic missiles with a range of over 5,500 kilometres and submarine-based missiles. Bombers, in which the Americans had a considerable advantage, were not affected. The treaty allowed the USSR 1,620 ICBMs and 950 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and the USA 1,054 and 710 respectively. But it was quite limited - MIRVs (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles) were unmentioned, and so were Cruise missiles, which the Americans put into service the following year, weapons with a precision that altered nuclear warfare. The Soviets continued to have the more powerful warheads (one megaton or more, whereas the Americans had a few hundred kilotons) but there was a mathematical formula for the effect of an explosion, which varied according to the negative cube of distance but only according to the square of the power. Qualitative, not quantitative, matters then began to count.
But the value of the treaties was essentially political. It was translated into a high-sounding document about peaceful coexistence and mutual respect, which amounted to a declaration that the USA recognized the USSR as a legitimate and equal partner, and not as a bandit state. The same Moscow ‘summit’ not only agreed the establishment of the CSCE, but also a conference on MBFR (Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions on the conventional-weaponry side). There was even a commercial counterpart, a commission assembling for the first time in Moscow, with an agreement as to the sale of American grain, and in 1975, following an agreement on space, two manned spacecraft solemnly met up. The grain trade opened the way for bank credit and sales of factories or technology, and in the 1970s the Eastern bloc developed quite quickly because of Western credits (though, much to the fury of the Soviets, the USSR was denied most-favoured-nation status by the Jackson Amendment, which made this dependent upon free emigration of Jews: the effect was to multiply the administrative side, customs and insurance, of US-Soviet commercial exchanges). The apogee of this period was reached with Brezhnev’s journey to the USA, on 22 June 1973, when another high-sounding declaration was made, at Soviet insistence, that there would be co-operation to ensure that the two sides would collaborate if there were any danger of a nuclear war. Some Europeans saw this as a step towards US-Soviet condominium.
When Kissinger went to Moscow in September 1972 he laid out the programme - Helsinki on European security (i.e. borders, etc.) in November, Vienna on reciprocal conventional disarmament (MBFR) the following January. The Helsinki negotiations led to a conference of foreign ministers in July 1973, and to the CSCE in July 1975, also at Helsinki. There were of course various hidden concerns on both sides, and since Congress at the time was very close to desiring absolute withdrawal from Vietnam (Senator Mansfeld’s amendment to that effect was rejected only by two votes in 1973), the Americans were operating under considerable pressure from public opinion - perhaps the worst side-effect of Vietnam being its effects on that. At any rate, the attempt to appeal to Moscow did lead to just the attempt at a huge conference that the Soviet side had been wanting since 1954. This also set up a machinery for détente, with bureaucracies on both sides that came, increasingly, to adopt a mutual understanding which meant, in 1990, that there was no real revolution against Communism: the intelligent Communists sacrificed the stupid ones, and remade their own careers very profitably, contacts intact.
The meeting of foreign ministers that initiated the CSCE in Europe assembled in Helsinki on 3 July 1973 (the experts met in Geneva). There were three great topics to be discussed - ‘baskets’, as they were called - the third being in effect human rights,
i.e.
free circulation of ideas and people, the other two concerning politics and economics. In April 1974 the West made an essential concession, official recognition of the borders of 1945, and the Americans were apparently happy enough to dispose of subjects that were uncomfortable for the Soviets, because they were proceeding with the beginnings of SALT II. The Europeans preferred to let the negotiations last, over the ‘third basket’ (at French insistence), and in any case the Americans had to bear in mind their own eastern European constituency, at times incandescent. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, suddenly took up the ‘third basket’, no doubt as compensation for what had happened over the ‘first’, political one. In the event, differences between the USA, France and Germany, each of which had its own emphasis, were resolved, the French having pushed the ‘third basket’ because they wanted to give satellite governments a lever to prise open the ‘Iron Curtain’ as and when they wanted to, and the Germans, less concerned with this, concerned to avoid having borders defined as ‘intangible’ as distinct from ‘inviolable’. At the turn of July/August 1975 thirty-three heads of state (Europeans, with the USA, Canada, the USSR) signed the ‘Final Act’ of the CSCE - recognition of borders, certain precautionary measures in military affairs, promotion of trade, free circulation of people and ideas. It was a considerable success for the USSR, which had wanted reognition of borders since Potsdam, and Brezhnev told the Politburo that it had needed ‘thirty years of colossal efforts’ to reach that point. Besides, there had been a Soviet condition as regards free circulation of people and ideas, that this would have to reflect ‘national legislation’. The Soviets had wanted to establish a permanent ‘organ’ for the CSCE, which of course might have established them as part of a security structure, as distinct from NATO, but the West managed to substitute, simply, permanent arrangements for conferences (to which Brezhnev proposed, in 1977, various additions as regards ecology, energy, transport). The CSCE had been part of a strategy to draw western Europe towards Moscow.
Georges-Henri Soutou poses the question as to whether recognition of ‘human rights’ mattered more, in the longer term, than the recognition of borders, and of the legitimacy of Communist rule in eastern Europe. It is a good question. As regards ‘human rights’ - a clumsy Atlantic, bureaucratic rendering of the French ‘Rights of Man’ - the Soviets were indeed, for a time, embarrassed. But then they hit on a useful device: there were blemishes, and more than that, on the Western side. If the fate of a dissident Yuri Orlov or Leonid Plyushch were mentioned, the Soviet representatives could wax indignant as to the rights of women in Micronesia. How were such matters to be covered? What Vladimir Bukovsky calls
une bureaucratie droitsde-l’hommarde
grew up, and could easily be used against the interests of the West, or even to break up countries such as Turkey. And the KGB knew how to manage ‘dissidence’, to use it, even in the ‘satellite countries’. One writer-martyr, Andrey Sinyavsky, turned out to be one of its agents.
This clever-clever management of world affairs because of the Vietnam problem was not rewarded with forbearance on the part of the North. Between Kissinger’s journeys to Peking and Moscow, the North Vietnamese attacked (spring 1972). There were now very few American troops on the ground, and the South Vietnamese were exhibiting all the signs of rout. This began in March and went on until June with attacks from Laos and Cambodia as well as North Vietnam, and there was fierce fighting in the Mekong Delta. By now there were only 10,000 US combat troops present (400,000 had been taken out) and the ARVN had superior numbers, but the forces were mismanaged in defensive positions without reserves and refugees clogged the roads. Without the B52s there might have been collapse (Pleiku-Kontum). Nixon began to think only of great air strikes in the North at last and secretly approached Brezhnev, who wanted a ‘summit’ on arms control. Kissinger did not even tell the ambassador. Nixon was widely condemned, but Moscow went ahead with the Brezhnev meeting and Dmitri Simes, there on the Soviet side, said that Nixon handled the meeting perfectly, not ‘moralizing’ as Carter was later to do.
Bombing seemed to be the only way to save South Vietnam, and Nixon, in the face of much opposition within the Cabinet, went ahead to mine Haiphong and bomb the supply depots and railways. He was now rewarded for his efforts over Vietnam. Perhaps Chinese pressure meant that the North made a serious move for peace; in any event, Hue had not fallen and by mid-September 1972 Quang Tri had been retaken. A presidential election was due in the United States, and Nixon sent a message via Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, that after the election he would go much further in attacking the North. On 8 October Kissinger reported from Paris that there had been a great shift: the North were at last seriously talking peace. Nixon celebrated with Lafite-Rothschild but matters then dragged on because the proposal did not suit the South Vietnamese leader, Thieu, at all: he could see that if troops were left as they were on the ground (the proposal for ceasefire) then Saigon was under great pressure. In the event he had to be threatened by Nixon with complete abandonment before he gave way, and the North also prevaricated. Kissinger was infuriated and called its team ‘tawdry, filthy shits’. Nixon then sent in waves of B52s against the Hanoi-Haiphong area from 18 to 30 December, dropped 40,000 tons of bombs, and received an appalling press, the ineffable little Kennedy saying it should ‘outrage the conscience of all Americans’. Congress moved to cut off funds. In reality the bombing had not been marked by much ‘collateral damage’: the bombs were (as the Soviet experts noted) of a new and ‘smart’ kind and the military installations were indeed hit. This sufficed: on 9 January 1973 Le Duc Tho accepted the conditions proposed in November. Thieu himself was obstinate - the agreement was not at all favourable to him, as it left the North in a position to strike at will - but Nixon, both threatening the end of all aid, but also promising a bombing campaign if the North Vietnamese broke the truce, overruled him, with a deadline of 20 January 1973 (his own inauguration) for the ending of the war. This finally caused the North Vietnamese to appreciate that they would have to wait for final victory, and on 27 January 1973 the agreement was at last signed. It left a messy situation on the ground, half war, half peace, and Thieu used it to clear the Delta, while the Vietcong moved heavy weaponry through jungle roads and developed an ultramodern radio network.