The World in a Word: The Rise and Fall of Détente

The World in a Word: The Rise and Fall of Détente H. W. Brands The history of American foreign relations is littered with single words and short phrases that encapsulate a policy, an outlook, or an approach. The creation of sound bites, so to speak, began with George Washington, who, upon retiring, urged his countrymen to "steer clear of permanent alliances"; so powerful was this admonition and so convincing the concept that it stood unviolated for 150 years. "Manifest destiny" had a shorter life, yet hardly a short one, reflecting and shaping American attitudes toward North America and much of the Western Hemisphere for half of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, "appeasement" first surfaced as a neutral or even benign way of describing efforts by European diplomats to deal with Hitler; after World War II began it became one of the most pejorative labels in the American—and Western—lexicon. "Containment" emerged during the early Cold War as a description of the goal of American policy toward the Communist countries. Although briefly challenged by the more assertive concept of "liberation"—often used interchangeably with "rolling back communism"—containment became the most enduring policy in twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations. Whether it has outlasted the Cold War and remains in force today depends principally on one's view of the continuing role of NATO, including its prospective new members, vis-à -vis Russia. Another challenger to containment that achieved greater success was "détente." Although identified chiefly with the Republican administrations of the 1970s, the concept has a longer history, both as a diplomatic device and as a political buzz word. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that the career of détente fairly summarizes a central theme of American foreign policy in the postwar period, albeit a theme that never entirely displaced the more persistent theme of containment. Of equal interest, especially from the standpoint of the rhetoric of public policy, the rise and fall of détente demonstrates certain of the strengths and weaknesses of the catch phrase approach to international affairs. H. W. Brands is Professor of History at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1,No. 1,1998, pp. 45-60 ISSN 1094-8392 46 Rhetoric & Public Affairs The Origins of Détente Like most of the traditional vocabulary of diplomacy, détente is a French word. The literal meaning derives from the Latin: de- + tendere (to stretch), that is to destretch . Applied initially to such items as bowstrings, it eventually came to mean a release of tension between rival states. In the context of the Cold War, the concept first surfaced after the death of Stalin in 1953, when the Cold War began to thaw a little. The 1955 summit meeting at Geneva between Eisenhower and the post-Stalin Soviet leadership, and the "spirit of Geneva" that ensued, indicated a real reduction in the tensions the Cold War had produced to this point. But the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 demonstrated the limits of relaxation, and for most of the next six years—through the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the renewal of the Berlin crisis in 1958, the U-2 flap and exploded Paris summit of 1960, the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—tensions between the superpowers were about as great as they had ever been. Yet the Cuban crisis, by demonstrating the dangers prolonged tension could engender, ushered in a new period of relaxation. European governments pressed the superpowers to seek a reduction of tension. French president Charles de Gaulle, the most vigorous proponent of this new détente, spoke repeatedly of a single, undivided Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals"; to this end he withdrew France from NATO's unified military command, visited Moscow, and sent his diplomats on the rounds of Eastern European capitals. During the same period West Germany began to modify its hardline policy toward the Communist countries. Under Ludwig Erhard and Kurt Kiesinger, this Ostpolitik was careful and incipient, but after Willy Brandt, the socialist former mayor of West Berlin, became chancellor in 1969, Bonn moved forcefully toward normalization...