Emergence of two Power Blocs: Confrontation through détente

Emergence of Two Power Blocs: Confrontation Through Détente (1962–79)

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The years 1962 to 1979 mark a pivotal phase of the Cold War in the UPSC History Optional World History syllabus, during which superpower confrontation gave way to a period of managed cooperation known as détente, even as proxy conflicts across the Third World continued unabated. This article covers the circumstances that produced détente, the landmark US-USSR and US-China agreements of the era, the parallel breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations, the major Cold War confrontations that persisted throughout the period, and the eventual collapse and revival of détente through the 1980s.

What Was Détente?

• Détente is a French word meaning “a relaxation of tensions.” It is the name given to a period of improved relations during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, generally dated from 1962 to 1979.
  • By the 1970s, both sides had become interested in accommodations that would create a more stable and predictable international system, inaugurating this period of détente.
  • As nuclear arsenals built up, both sides grew increasingly fearful of a catastrophic nuclear war in which there could be no real winner; both were also sickened by the horrors of Vietnam. In addition, individual countries had their own specific motives for wanting détente.

Circumstances Leading to Détente

Fear of Nuclear War

• Both sides began talking primarily because they feared nuclear war — a fear born of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world was brought to the brink of destruction.
  • The Crisis directly motivated the Washington-Moscow Hotline of 1963, providing direct communication between both leaders.
  • A series of treaties to control nuclear weapons followed: the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Outer Space Treaty (1967), and, most importantly, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968).
  • Further negotiations to control the arms race began in 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, culminating in SALT I in 1972, a major achievement in superpower relations.

Ostpolitik

• The nations of Western Europe were especially worried, since they would be on the front line if nuclear war broke out.
  • Neue Ostpolitik — German for “New Eastern Policy” — refers to the push for better relations between West Germany and the USSR/East Germany, driven by the election of Willy Brandt as West German chancellor.
  • Brandt saw the stabilization of European relations as essential to the interests of the continent as a whole.
  • The Treaty of Moscow was signed between the USSR and West Germany, under which West Germany recognised East Germany and the post-war borders of Europe.
  • The Hallstein Doctrine — West Germany’s earlier policy of breaking off diplomatic relations with any state that recognised East Germany — was abandoned.

The Vietnam War and US Needs

• Two related sub-factors were at play here: the economic strain of Vietnam combined with the 1973 Oil Crisis, and a growing American reluctance to engage militarily abroad.

Vietnam, the 1973 Oil Crisis, and US Economic Problems

• The USA faced stagflation — simultaneous high inflation and unemployment — through much of the decade.
  • Oil prices quadrupled due to the 1973 Oil Crisis, when the oil cartel OPEC placed an embargo on the USA in response to its support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War; this crisis played a significant part in the decade’s stagflation.
  • The Oil Crisis also made it more attractive for the US to seek oil from the USSR rather than its traditional, now-hostile, Middle Eastern partners.
  • The Vietnam War itself contributed to unemployment, as veterans returned home, and involved enormous government expenditure.
  • A weakened economic position made the arms race painfully expensive, so seeking a ‘freeze’ via SALT I made practical sense — a poor economy made it harder to sustain both the arms race and continued confrontation.

Vietnam and Reluctance to Engage Internationally

• Several factors tied to Vietnam pushed the USA toward détente:
  • the economic costs of the war;
  • public discontent with the war;
  • the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ — a broad American aversion to overseas military involvement;
  • the high human cost of the war (58,000 US soldiers dead, 300,000 wounded); and
  • a growing sense that the USA could not possibly win a war fought abroad.
• Public discontent, combined with the Vietnam Syndrome, fed a desire to pull back from foreign entanglements, feeding directly into détente.
  • Americans increasingly recognized that there had to be a better way of countering communism than the approach that had achieved so little success in Vietnam; there were clearly limits to what military power alone could accomplish.
  • Some Congressmen and Senators even began speaking of a return to ‘isolationism’.

USSR Needs

• The USSR found the expense of matching American military spending increasingly crippling, and had entered a period of economic stagnation.
  • Reducing defence spending was essential if the Soviet Union was to devote more resources to raising living standards — both domestically and across the satellite states, all of which faced their own economic difficulties.
  • Excessive investment in the military and heavy industry left the USSR weak in producing consumer goods, forcing it to import grain from the West; the USA, by comparison, possessed roughly 50 times more computers than the USSR.
  • Because of its lagging technology, the USSR also had to import superior capital goods from the West, selling fuel and raw materials to earn the hard currency needed to pay for imports of grain, consumer goods, and capital equipment.
• With the USA simultaneously negotiating with China, the USSR needed détente for an even more pressing reason: having recently fallen out with China, it feared the possibility of a ‘2 on 1’ situation — the USA and China aligned against the USSR.
  • In May 1972, Nixon became the first US president to visit Moscow.
    • He and Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, signed several agreements covering the prevention of accidental military clashes, arms control (as recommended by the recent Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT I), cooperative research in fields including space exploration, and expanded commerce.
  • The Helsinki Agreement of 1975 introduced human rights provisions and saw the USA accept the communist borders of Eastern Europe.
  • Other agreements banned nuclear tests in space and barred smaller countries from arming themselves with nuclear weapons.
• With the election of Ronald Reagan, who emphasized military preparedness as the key to Soviet-American relations, détente as Nixon had envisioned it came to an end; it collapsed fully at the close of the decade with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, beginning in 1979.

The Broader Shift of the 1960s and 1970s

• Through the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War participants struggled to adjust to a more complicated pattern of international relations, in which the world was no longer divided neatly into two clearly opposed blocs.
  • From the start of the post-war period, Western Europe and Japan had rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s, while Eastern Bloc economies stagnated by comparison.
  • Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new phase began in which the Sino-Soviet split complicated relations within the communist sphere, while US allies — particularly France — demonstrated growing independence of action.
  • The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization movement in Czechoslovakia, and the Vietnam War (1955–1975) ended in the defeat of the US-backed Republic of South Vietnam, prompting further adjustments on both sides.
• As a result of the 1973 oil crisis — in which members of OAPEC proclaimed an oil embargo in response to American support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War — combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as OPEC and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), less-powerful countries gained more room to assert their independence, often proving resistant to pressure from either superpower.
  • Moscow, meanwhile, was forced to turn its attention inward to address the Soviet Union’s deep-seated domestic economic problems; during this period, Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin embraced the logic of détente.

Chinese Needs

• The Chinese, for their part, were anxious about their international isolation, nervous about American intentions in Vietnam given what had earlier happened in Korea, and unhappy about their worsening relations with the USSR.

The US–USSR Relationship in Détente

• Progress had already been made with the ‘hotline’ telephone link and the agreement to conduct only underground nuclear tests, both dating to 1963.
  • A further agreement, signed in 1967, banned the use of nuclear weapons in outer space.
• The first major breakthrough came in 1972, when the two countries signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, known as SALT I. Following his visit to China, Nixon met with Soviet leaders, including Brezhnev, in Moscow, and these Strategic Arms Limitation Talks produced two landmark arms control treaties:
  • SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) — this decided how many ABMs, ICBMs, and SLBMs each side could possess; the agreement did not reduce existing armaments, but it did slow the pace of the arms race.
  • the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty — this limited the anti-ballistic missile systems used to defend territory against missile-delivered nuclear weapons.
• Presidents Brezhnev and Nixon held three summit meetings, negotiations opened for a further treaty to be known as SALT II, and the USA began exporting wheat to Russia.
  • Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of “peaceful coexistence” and established the groundbreaking policy of détente, or cooperation, between the two superpowers.
  • Brezhnev, meanwhile, attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which had been declining partly due to heavy military expenditure; between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties through increased trade.
• These developments coincided with the ‘Ostpolitik’ of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Another important step came with the Helsinki Agreement (July 1975):
  • the USA, Canada, the USSR, and most European states accepted the European frontiers drawn up after the Second World War, thereby recognizing the division of Germany; and
  • the communist countries promised to allow their peoples ‘human rights’, including freedom of speech and freedom to leave the country.

Setbacks to Détente

• Détente did not proceed without setbacks.
  • This was especially evident in 1979, when NATO grew alarmed at the deployment of 150 new Russian SS-20 missiles; in response, NATO decided to deploy over 500 Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe by 1983 as a deterrent against a possible Russian attack on Western Europe.
  • President Jimmy Carter attempted to place a further limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, but his efforts were undermined by other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the KGB-backed Nicaraguan Revolution — both of which ousted pro-US regimes — and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.
  • The US Senate ultimately declined to ratify the SALT II treaty, which would have limited the numbers of MIRVs each side could hold.
• When the Russians invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979, replacing the president with one more favourable to Moscow, all the old Western suspicions of Russian motives were revived.
  • Through the 1970s, the KGB continued to persecute prominent Soviet dissidents who criticized the Soviet leadership in harsh terms.
  • Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued throughout this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East, Chile, Ethiopia, and Angola.

The ‘Second Cold War’ and Renewed Détente

• The years that followed are sometimes referred to as the ‘second Cold War’.
  • Both sides spent the first half of the 1980s building up their nuclear arsenals, and US President Reagan (1981–89) gave the go-ahead for a new weapons system, the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), popularly known as ‘Star Wars’, intended to use weapons based in space to destroy ballistic missiles in flight.
• Détente gathered momentum again thanks to the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91).
  • In November 1985, Gorbachev met Reagan in Geneva; the meeting went well, and the two leaders issued a joint statement declaring that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
  • Signs pointed to détente being back on course, until, in April 1986, a disastrous accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine, producing a great wave of anti-nuclear feeling within the USSR and convincing Gorbachev that measures to reduce nuclear danger were absolutely vital.
  • In October 1986, Gorbachev invited Reagan to a summit at Reykjavik and proposed a 15-year timetable for a “step-by-step process for ridding the earth of nuclear weapons”; the Americans responded to some extent, though Reagan remained unwilling to abandon his Star Wars project.
• At the next summit, held in Washington (December 1987), a historic breakthrough was achieved: Reagan and Gorbachev formally signed the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty.
  • All land-based intermediate-range (300 to 3,000 miles) nuclear weapons were to be scrapped over the following three years — a total of 436 American and 1,575 Soviet warheads — including all Russian missiles based in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and all American Cruise and Pershing missiles based in Western Europe.
  • Even so, this amounted to only around 4 per cent of existing nuclear stocks, and Reagan’s Star Wars programme remained a stumbling block he was still unwilling to abandon; the agreement also excluded British and French weapons.
  • Nevertheless, the INF Treaty marked an important turning point in the nuclear arms race, since it was the first time either side had actually destroyed weapons rather than merely capping their numbers.
• By 1985, the USSR was seriously embarrassed by its involvement in Afghanistan: despite deploying over 100,000 Soviet troops, it proved impossible to subdue the Islamic guerrilla resistance, and the war became a serious drain on Soviet resources and a blow to Soviet prestige.
  • The hostility of China, the suspicion of Islamic states worldwide, and repeated UN condemnations convinced Gorbachev it was time to withdraw.
  • It was eventually agreed that Russian troops would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan on 1 May 1988, provided the Americans stopped sending military aid to the Afghan resistance.
  • In June 1988, Reagan travelled to Moscow to discuss the timetable for implementing the INF Treaty.

China–US Relations

• China and the USA had been extremely hostile toward each other since the Korean War, and seemed likely to remain so while the Americans continued backing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in Taiwan, and the Chinese continued backing Ho Chi Minh.
  • As a result of the Sino-Soviet split, tensions along the Chinese-Soviet border reached their peak in 1969, and US President Richard Nixon saw an opportunity to use this conflict to shift the balance of power toward the West.
  • At the time, the USSR had achieved rough nuclear parity with the United States, while the Vietnam War was weakening America’s influence in the Third World and cooling relations with Western Europe.
  • The Chinese, for their part, sought improved relations with the Americans partly to gain advantage over the Soviets as well.
• In 1971, the Chinese unexpectedly invited an American table-tennis team to visit China — the celebrated ‘Ping-pong diplomacy’ — and following the visit’s success, the USA responded by dropping its veto of Chinese entry into the UN.
  • In February 1972, Nixon announced a stunning rapprochement with Mao’s China, travelling to Beijing and meeting with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai — the first time a US president had visited the PRC.
  • The repercussions of the visit were vast, marking a significant shift in the Cold War balance and effectively pitting the PRC and the US together against the Soviet Union.
• The problem of Taiwan continued to sour the relationship: though Chiang himself died in 1975, his supporters still occupied the island, and the Chinese communists would not be satisfied until it was brought under their control.
  • Relations improved further in 1978, when Democrat President Carter decided to withdraw recognition of Nationalist China.
  • The climax of Sino-American détente came early in 1979, when Carter formally recognised the People’s Republic of China, and the two countries exchanged ambassadors.
• Good relations were maintained through the 1980s; the Chinese were particularly anxious that détente with the USA should continue given their ongoing conflict with Vietnam (Russia’s ally), which had begun in 1979.
  • In 1985, an agreement on nuclear cooperation was signed between the two countries.
  • Relations took a sharp turn for the worse in June 1989, when the Chinese government used troops to disperse a student demonstration in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, fearing the protest might grow into a revolution capable of overthrowing Chinese communism.
    • At least a thousand students were killed and many others later executed, bringing worldwide condemnation.

USSR–China Relations

• Relations between the USSR and China deteriorated steadily after 1956.
  • The Chinese disapproved of Khrushchev’s policies, particularly his belief in ‘peaceful coexistence’ and his claim that communism could be achieved through means other than violent revolution — a position that ran counter to the ideas of Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian revolution.
  • The Chinese accordingly accused the Russians of ‘revisionism’ — revising the teachings of Marx and Lenin to suit their own needs — and were angered by Khrushchev’s ‘soft’ line toward the USA.
  • In retaliation, the Russians reduced their economic aid to China.
• The ideological dispute was not the only source of trouble: a frontier dispute also festered, since Russia had annexed large areas of Chinese territory during the nineteenth century, which the Chinese now demanded back.
  • By the end of the 1970s, both Russia and China were competing for American support against each other, each seeking to claim leadership of world communism.
  • Matters were complicated further when Vietnam aligned itself with Russia; when the Chinese attacked Vietnam in February 1979, relations between Moscow and Beijing reached rock bottom.
    • The Chinese attack was partly in retaliation for Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, which had overthrown the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot, a Chinese protégé, and partly due to the ongoing frontier dispute. The Chinese withdrew after three weeks.
• In 1984, the Chinese formally set out their grievances against the USSR:
  • the presence of Russian troops in Afghanistan;
  • Soviet backing of Vietnamese troops in Kampuchea; and
  • the Soviet troop build-up along the Chinese frontiers of Mongolia and Manchuria.
• Mikhail Gorbachev was determined to begin a new era in Sino-Russian relations.
  • Five-year agreements on trade and economic co-operation were signed in July 1985, and regular contact resumed between the two governments.
  • A formal reconciliation followed in May 1989, when Gorbachev visited Beijing; that same year, Vietnam withdrew its troops from Kampuchea, further improving relations between Hanoi and Beijing.

Confrontations During Détente

(1) French Withdrawal from NATO

• The unity of NATO was breached early in its history during a crisis that unfolded under Charles de Gaulle’s presidency of France, beginning in 1958.
  • De Gaulle protested at the United States’ dominant role within the organization, and at what he perceived as a special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.
  • In a memorandum sent to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Macmillan in September 1958, he argued for the creation of a tripartite directorate that would place France on equal footing with the US and UK, and for expanding NATO’s coverage to include areas of specific interest to France, notably French Algeria, where France was waging a counter-insurgency and sought NATO’s assistance.
  • Considering the response unsatisfactory, de Gaulle began developing an independent French nuclear deterrent, and in 1966 withdrew France from NATO’s military structures, expelling NATO troops from French soil.

(2) The Invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968)

• In 1968, during a four-month period in which Czechoslovakia broke free from strict Soviet control, a political liberalization movement known as the Prague Spring unfolded.
  • Its “Action Program” of liberalizations envisioned increasing freedom of the press, speech, and movement, an economic emphasis on consumer goods, the possibility of a multi-party government, limits on the power of the secret police, and even the potential withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.
  • The Prague Spring began when reformist Alexander Dubcek was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and continued until the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded the country to halt the reforms.
• At a meeting in Bratislava on 3 August 1968, Brezhnev read out a letter from Czechoslovak Communists supposedly asking for Soviet help — a letter that later underpinned the Brezhnev Doctrine, the principle that the USSR would not allow any Eastern European country to reject communism.
  • On 20 August 1968, the Soviet army, together with most of its Warsaw Pact allies, invaded Czechoslovakia.
  • The Czechoslovakians did not fight the Russians; instead, they stood in front of the tanks and put flowers in the soldiers’ hair.
  • The invasion was followed by a wave of emigration, and sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania, and China, as well as from Western European communist parties.

Causes of the Prague Spring

• The policy of détente itself encouraged the uprising; Romania had also broken free of tight Russian control and was improving relations with the West.
  • The Czechs deeply resented Russian control, especially of the economy, which had left Czechoslovakia poor, and the pervasive censorship and lack of freedom.
  • Some Czechs believed the USA would come to their aid.

Effects of the Invasion of Czechoslovakia

• Czechoslovakia returned to communist control, and Russian troops were stationed there; half the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC), along with directors of many firms — especially publishing companies — were dismissed, and 47 anti-communists were arrested.
• Russia stayed in control behind the Iron Curtain, with the Brezhnev Doctrine now formalising Moscow’s claimed right to violate the sovereignty of any country attempting to replace Marxism-Leninism with capitalism, “even if it meant a third world war.”
• The episode also marked an increase in Cold War tensions: people in the West were horrified, as were many communist countries, particularly Romania and Yugoslavia.

(3) Third World Escalations

The American Occupation of the Dominican Republic (1965–66): Operation Power Pack

• In late April 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson landed some 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic for a year-long occupation, codenamed Operation Power Pack, citing the threat of a Cuban-style revolution emerging in Latin America.
  • Presidential elections held in 1966, during the occupation, handed victory to the conservative Joaquin Balaguer.
  • Activists of the Dominican Revolutionary Party were violently harassed by the Dominican police and armed forces.

The Indonesian Killings of 1965–66

• In Indonesia, the hardline anti-communist General Suharto wrested control of the state from his predecessor Sukarno in an attempt to establish a “New Order,” ending Sukarno’s 22-year presidency and beginning Suharto’s own 31-year rule — one of the most tumultuous periods in the country’s modern history.
  • Between 1965 and 1966, the military led the mass killing of an estimated half a million members and sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party and other leftist organizations.

The Vietnam War

• Escalating the scale of American intervention in the ongoing conflict between Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnamese government and the communist National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) insurgents, President Johnson stationed some 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the NLF and its North Vietnamese allies.
  • This costly policy weakened the US economy and, by 1975, culminated in what much of the world regarded as a humiliating defeat of the world’s most powerful superpower at the hands of one of its poorest nations.
  • North Vietnam had received Soviet approval and assistance for its war effort as early as 1959, while China also provided military help and aid.

The 1973 Chilean Coup d’État

• In Chile, Socialist Party candidate Salvador Allende won the presidential election of 1970, becoming the first democratically elected Marxist to lead a country in the Americas.
  • The CIA worked to undermine his domestic support, contributing to a period of unrest that culminated in General Pinochet’s coup d’état on 11 September 1973.
  • Pinochet consolidated power as a military dictator, rolled back Allende’s economic reforms, and crushed leftist opponents.

The Middle East

• The Six-Day War (Third Arab-Israeli War, 1967): Egypt, which received the bulk of its arms and economic assistance from the USSR, proved a troublesome client, with a reluctant Soviet Union feeling obliged to assist Egypt (through advisers and technicians) in its 1967 Six-Day War against pro-Western Israel.
  • The war was fought between 5 and 10 June 1967 by Israel against the neighbouring states of Egypt (then the United Arab Republic), Jordan, and Syria; relations between Israel and its neighbours had never fully normalised since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and tensions had grown dangerously heightened in the lead-up to June 1967.
  • Responding to apparent Arab mobilization, Israel launched pre-emptive strikes early on 5 June, capturing Sinai from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
  • The UN Security Council called for a ceasefire on 7 June, accepted by all parties, and a formal ceasefire was signed on 11 June; Israeli-controlled territory had tripled, significantly strengthening the country’s defensibility, as would later be demonstrated in the Yom Kippur War.
  • Arab losses in the conflict were disastrous; Egyptian President Nasser announced his resignation on 9 June but quickly reversed the decision amid mass demonstrations calling for him to remain in office. Israel, meanwhile, had proved beyond question that it was the region’s preeminent military power.
  • The war also marked the start of a new phase in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees and bringing more than one million Palestinians in the occupied territories under Israeli rule.
• The Yom Kippur War (Fourth Arab-Israeli War, 1973): Despite Egypt’s shift from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American orientation beginning in 1972 under its new leader Anwar El Sadat, rumors of imminent Soviet intervention on Egypt’s behalf during the 1973 Yom Kippur War triggered a massive American mobilization that threatened to wreck détente altogether.
  • The war was fought by a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria against Israel from 6 to 25 October 1973, with Egypt’s stated goal being the expulsion of Israeli forces occupying Sinai; the resulting US-Soviet tensions were resolved through a cooperatively imposed second ceasefire on 25 October.
  • The war carried far-reaching implications: despite impressive Israeli operational and tactical achievements, it produced the recognition within Israel that military dominance over the Arab states could no longer be guaranteed, paving the way for a subsequent peace process.
  • The 1978 Camp David Accords that followed led to the return of Sinai to Egypt and the normalization of relations — the first peaceful recognition of Israel by an Arab country — as Egypt continued its drift away from, and eventual exit from, the Soviet sphere of influence.
• South Yemen and Palestinian Support: The Soviets also succeeded in establishing close relations with communist South Yemen, as well as the nationalist governments of Algeria and Iraq.
  • Indirect Soviet assistance to the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict included support for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an organization founded in 1964 for the “liberation of Palestine” from Israel.
• The Iraqi Ba’athist Coup of 1968 (The 17 July Revolution): A bloodless coup in Iraq, led by General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, brought the Iraqi Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party to power.
  • Both Saddam Hussein, later President of Iraq, and Salah Omar al-Ali, later a Ba’athist dissident, were major participants in the coup, which upset the US-sponsored security system established in the Middle East during the Cold War — leaving the impression that any enemy of the Baghdad regime was a potential US ally.
  • From 1973 to 1975, the CIA colluded with the Iranian government to finance and arm Kurdish rebels in the Kurdish-Iraqi War, in an effort to weaken al-Bakr’s regime.

Ethiopia and Somalia

• In Africa, Somali army officers led by Mohamed Siad Barre carried out a bloodless coup in 1969, creating the socialist Somali Democratic Republic, which the Soviet Union pledged to support.
  • The pro-American Ethiopian Emperor was overthrown in a 1974 coup led by the Derg, a radical group of Ethiopian army officers under the pro-Soviet Mengistu, who built up relations with Cuba and the USSR.
• The Ethiopian-Somali War, or Ogaden War, was fought between July 1977 and March 1978 over the disputed Ogaden region in present-day eastern Ethiopia.
  • In a striking illustration of the fluidity of Cold War alliances, the Soviet Union switched from supporting Somalia to backing Ethiopia — previously a US-backed state — prompting the US in turn to begin supporting Somalia.
  • The war ended when Somali forces retreated across the border and a truce was declared.

Angola

• In Africa, where Angolan rebels had waged a multi-faction independence war against Portuguese rule since 1961, a two-decade civil war replaced the anti-colonial struggle once independence was achieved, as fighting erupted between the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), backed by Cuba and the USSR, and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), backed by the United States, China, and Zaire.
  • The MPLA, bolstered by Cuban personnel and Soviet assistance, eventually gained the upper hand.

The Cambodian Civil War

• During the Vietnam War, North Vietnam invaded and occupied parts of Cambodia to use as military bases, contributing to the violence of the Cambodian Civil War between the pro-American government of Lon Nol and the Maoist Khmer Rouge insurgents.
  • Under Pol Pot’s leadership, the Khmer Rouge would eventually kill between 1 and 3 million Cambodians in the notorious “killing fields,” out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million — described by some as “the purest genocide of the Cold War era.”
  • Vietnam deposed Pol Pot in 1979 and installed the Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin, only to find itself bogged down in a guerrilla war and subjected to a punitive Chinese attack.

Key Achievements in Détente (1960s–1970s)

• 1968: The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed, with nuclear powers agreeing not to give other countries nuclear technology.
• 1971: The US table tennis team played in China, and the USA dropped its veto to allow China’s entry into the United Nations.
• 1972: President Nixon visited China, and Russia and America signed the SALT I Treaty, agreeing to limit their anti-ballistic missiles and bombers.
• 1975: The Helsinki Agreement recognised Soviet control over Eastern Europe, concluded a trade agreement, and saw Russia promise to respect human rights; that same year, Russian and American spacecraft docked together in space.

Limitations of Détente

• The Non-Proliferation Treaty failed to stop other countries from developing nuclear weapons, such as China, and reportedly South Africa and Israel.
• Neither Russia nor America fully kept to the SALT I agreement, and neither side reduced its conventional weapons; further talks proved far less successful, and the SALT II Treaty of 1979 achieved little.
• In the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, America supported Israel while Russia supported Egypt and Syria — hardly the behaviour of powers genuinely committed to reducing confrontation.
• The Helsinki Agreement arguably achieved little of substance: it effectively confirmed the Iron Curtain, and Russia largely ignored its promises regarding human rights.
• Symbolic gestures such as the table tennis exchange and joint space missions were, in the view of some critics, little more than one-off propaganda stunts.
• Brezhnev himself stated that communists would continue trying to destroy capitalism, and some historians have suggested that Nixon’s outreach to China was motivated less by genuine rapprochement than by a desire to drive a wedge between Russia and China.