Notes on Detente – Geo-Political Development

Resource Description

The period leading up to détente saw tensions in different parts of the globe that ran the risk of dragging the major powers into a more direct conflict. The period of the late 1960s coincided with the culmination of an arms race that gave the Soviet Union parity with the United States in stockpiled nuclear weapons. Those stockpiles, and their implications of MAD, helped to ensure that Vietnam, the conflict between the Soviet Union and China, and the Middle East did not spill over into a major conflagration.

Conflagration: explosive conflict

In September 1945, the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam’s independence from France, beginning a war that pitted Ho’s communist-led Viet Minh regime in Hanoi (North Vietnam) against a French-backed regime in Saigon (South Vietnam).

Under President Harry Truman, the U.S. government provided covert military and financial aid to the French; the rationale was that a communist victory in Indochina would precipitate the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. Using this same logic, Truman would also give aid to Greece and Turkey during the late 1940s to help contain communism in Europe and the Middle East