ABSTRACT
The Leonid Brezhnev leadership's accession to power coincided with the escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Soviet backing for North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front in their drive to unite all Vietnam under Communist rule was not initially assured. The United States retained an edge in several categories of strategic weapons, and Soviet conventional power-projection capabilities remained inferior to those of the United States in every area except sealift capability. The changed military balance established the basis for the two most important developments of the 1970s: superpower detente and the extension of Soviet influence in the developing world. Soviet dominance in the region rested largely but by no means exclusively on military power. It also depended on economics and on the use of implicit price subsidies in Soviet energy exports to East European states to secure their compliance in other areas.
