ABSTRACT
Detente and Ostpolitik had been heavily dependent on four individuals—Nixon; Brandt; de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou; and Brezhnev—and three of them suddenly departed the scene in 1974, leaving the Soviet leader with less-than-wholehearted partners. Detente and human rights stood at opposite poles. During the high era of detente this had forced the West to passively observe the Kremlin’s antisemitic campaign and its crackdown on Soviet and East European dissidents. The United States (US) Congress grasped the issue of human rights in reaction to Nixon’s "imperial" presidency and the growing backlash against the questionable benefits and amoral characteristics of detente. Detente was shattered in Africa, where the US and the Soviet Union both intervened in the political struggle in Angola and in the war between Ethiopia and Somalia. Three striking events—the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—drew the Superpowers back into the Middle East, a region that detente had touched only briefly in late 1973.
