634Chapter 31
The Cooling Down of the Cold War:
Ostpolitikand Détente, 1965–75
The cold war in Europe began to end in the mid-1960s,
and both the Soviet and American alliance systems be-
gan to weaken. A growing rift between the USSR and
China opened in the 1960s, and the USSR denounced
Chinese policy as “anti-Leninist” and branded Mao a
dictator. The chill worsened when the Chinese deto-
nated their first H-bomb in 1967, and frontier incidents
became common in the late 1960s. Simultaneously,
American alliances were strained by the protracted
Vietnam War, which was widely denounced in Europe.
The diplomatic consequences of these events were
enormous, and new policies emerged during the late
1960s and early 1970s. President de Gaulle of France
and Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany led Eu-
rope into this new era—de Gaulle by distancing France
from the Western alliance in the late 1960s and Brandt
by normalizing relations with Eastern Europe in the
early 1970s. These changes initially discomfitted Amer-
ican governments, but they helped to change American
policy. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary
Leonid Brezhnev cautiously accepted arms control ne-
gotiations in the late 1960s, and this produced a series
of important treaties in the 1970s. The next president
of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, carried this
policy to dramatic lengths in improving relations with
the USSR and Maoist China, despite his career-long
image as a dedicated anticommunist.
Charles de Gaulle opened the decade of diplomatic
change in 1966 with a dramatic announcement that
France was quitting its role in the NATO alliance and
that NATO must leave French soil. De Gaulle also had
a vision behind his actions. He visited the USSR and
Eastern Europe in 1967 to promote his vision of “Eu-
rope to the Urals.” This was not his most startling idea.
The French tested their first atomic bomb in 1966 and
their first H-bomb in 1968, and de Gaulle then pro-
claimed an independent French force de frappe(nuclear
striking force) that was aimed at toutes azimuths(all
points of the compass).
Willy Brandt’s role in the diplomatic revolution had
a more pacific tone. Brandt was shaped by his wartime
experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He be-
came famous as the mayor of West Berlin (1957–66) at
the height of the cold war, leading that isolated city
during confrontations over the Berlin Wall. Brandt then
became the head of the West German socialist party
and led the SPD to electoral victory. As chancellor of
West Germany, he introduced his own dramatic policy
known as Ostpolitik(eastern policy). He improved rela-
tions between the two Germanys by visiting the DDR
in 1970 and shaking hands with the Communist prime
minister. He signed treaties with both the Soviet Union
and Poland, guaranteeing Germany’s postwar frontiers,
especially the Oder-Neisse Line that left much of pre-
war Germany inside Poland. He then negotiated a se-
ries of treaties between the two Germanys, culminating
in a 1972 treaty permitting both states to enter the
United Nations. Ostpolitikwon Brandt the Nobel Peace
Prize, but he resigned in 1974 when a spy scandal re-
vealed that a member of his staff was an East German
agent.
These European changes encouraged the improve-
ment in Soviet-American relations known as détente(the
relaxation of tension). Arms control negotiations with
the USSR were controversial in the United States, and
conservatives had fought against President John F.
Kennedy’s Test Ban Treaty (1963) in which both sides
promised not to test nuclear weapons in the atmo-
sphere, in outer space, or under the oceans. The French
and Chinese nuclear explosions of 1967 persuaded
Washington and Moscow to resume negotiations for
the nuclear nonproliferation treaty of 1968, and this
treaty encouraged the United States and the USSR to
open larger Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in- Anti-Communist conservatives in America fought
this policy, but it succeeded when a conservative anti-
Communist adopted it. Richard Nixon, who placated
anti-Communists by waging vigorous war in Asia, fol-
lowed the left-wing policy of détente to new relations
with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Brezhnev exchanged
state visits in the early 1970s and signed a series of arms
treaties, beginning with the SALT treaty of 1972. A
vivid symbol of the age of détente came in the summer
of 1975 when American and Russian spacecrafts docked
together in outer space, but Nixon provided an even
more dramatic symbol in his Chinese policy. He ac-
cepted Communist Chinese membership in the UN,
flew to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao, agreed
that Taiwan was part of China, and posed for pho-
tographs atop the Great Wall of China. The cold war
was ending.
An Era of Unrest and Violence,
1968–75
Although the cold war was less heated in 1970 than it
had been in the 1950s, Europe faced other violence.
The war in southeast Asia, which had been a battle-