ABSTRACT
Both American and Soviet leaders in the 1970s continued to pursue many of the same objectives that had guided the US-Soviet relationship since the 1950s. Detente as a policy can indeed reflect the positive connotations, and thus aim almost exclusively at reducing political tensions to zero, or close to it. Soviet leaders, in slightly less cosmological terms, also ascribed to detente all the attributes of a major turning point in East-West relations. For their part, many West Germans professed to see in detente the opportunity for major initiatives aimed at overcoming the division of the continent. For West Germany, however, detente was viewed as the onset of a long-term transformation of East-West relations, particularly in Europe. As articulated and practiced all by Willy Brandt, detente implied an eventual end to the Cold War and a gradual but decisive rupture in the long spiral of conflict between the capitalist world and the communist regimes.
