<\/p>
<\/p>\n
In 1961, the Berlin Wall<\/a> sealed off the last exit from east to west. It also insulated the most dangerous flashpoint in the European Cold War<\/a>. Gradually both sides of the Iron Curtain settled into the reality of division. No one born in the 1950s and 1960s could imagine anything different.<\/p>\n On the periphery, however, the Cold War was hot and violent. The 1960s saw an escalating conflict in Vietnam, divided after 1945 between the communist north (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam \u2013 DRV) and a corrupt southern regime in Saigon (the Republic of Vietnam). The ROV was dominated by the military and became increasingly dependent on the USA after the French abandoned their empire in Indochina in 1954.<\/p>\n In itself, South Vietnam was of no great importance to the Americans. But by 1965 President Lyndon Johnson saw it as an issue of America\u2019s global credibility. He also feared that if he didn\u2019t act tough abroad against communism, conservatives would block funding for his Great Society programmes at home. \u201cI was determined to be a leader of war and a leader of peace,\u201d he remarked later. \u201cI believed America had the resources to do both.\u201d<\/p>\n It was astonishing hubris. Neither sustained bombing nor escalating US troop commitments broke Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam broke Johnson. Such was the unpopularity of the war by 1968 that Johnson decided not to run for re-election. And it took his Republican successor, Richard Nixon<\/a>, all of his first term to extract the USA from its south-east Asian quagmire.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC) had become banker and arsenal for the DRV and this forced the USSR \u2013 now China\u2019s ideological rival for leadership of the communist world \u2013 to provide similar aid or lose face. So Nixon had to disengage the two communist superpowers in order to facilitate peace in Vietnam. He and his aide Henry Kissinger were finally able to achieve this with the Paris peace accords of January 1973.<\/p>\n In 1972 Nixon became the first US president to visit the capitals of the two communist superpowers. While in Moscow, he and the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, signed a dozen major agreements to slow the arms race, develop economic relations and promote cultural exchange. The following year, Brezhnev visited America and in 1974 Nixon returned to Russia. It seemed that detente \u2013 relaxation of tension \u2013 was becoming a pattern.<\/p>\n In Europe, too, old tensions eased. Under the Social Democrat leadership of Willy Brandt, West Germany reached out across the Iron Curtain in 1972, extending de facto recognition with the regime in East Berlin and concluding, with the four Allied occupying powers, agreements on easier access across the Berlin Wall. Brandt\u2019s goals were pragmatic: to make life easier for the people of that divided city. He had not abandoned hopes of eventual unification and talked of \u201cchange through rapprochement\u201d, but never seriously imagined a united Germany in his lifetime.<\/p>\n Yet detente soon stalled. America had been riven by the Vietnam War<\/a> and then the Watergate scandal<\/a>, which obliged Nixon to resign<\/a> in 1974. Heavy borrowing for the war fuelled inflation, exacerbating America\u2019s trade and payments deficit and finally forcing the country off the gold standard in 1971. The automatic convertibility of dollars into gold had been a cornerstone of the post-1945 monetary system: the end of that era seemed like another intimation of mortality for the Pax Americana.<\/p>\n The west as a whole was also in economic turmoil in the 1970s, as the long postwar boom collapsed in depression. The catalyst was the oil crisis of 1973, when Arab states hiked up the price of oil in retaliation for the United States\u2019 support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Ensuing inflation was accompanied by industrial stagnation and rising unemployment, creating a phenomenon called \u2018stagflation\u2019 that defied orthodox Keynesian remedies and left western governments acutely vulnerable against aggrieved voters and workers. The USSR by contrast \u2013 an economy heavily dependent on oil and gas exports \u2013 did very well from rising energy prices.<\/p>\n As the 1970s progressed, it became clear that \u2018detente\u2019 meant different things on either side of the east-west divide. Washington assumed that the Soviets would now behave themselves and not seek to destabilise a world shaped by American hegemony. Moscow believed that the nuclear parity it had now achieved with the USA provided a chance to expand communism with impunity.<\/p>\nNixon reaches out<\/h3>\n