“This narrative is often quite gripping, with wonderfully
revealing quotations from the key actors. The author puts the
reader on the shoulders of these men and their Soviet
counterparts as they maneuver through three years of
negotiations, posturing, and policy activities.”
-Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin
Most Americans consider detente to
be among the Nixon administration'smost significant
foreign policy successes. The diplomatic back channel
that national security advisor Henry Kissinger
established with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin
became the most important method of achieving this
thaw in the Cold War. Kissinger praised back channels
for preventing leaks and streamlining communications.
These methods, however, were widely criticized by
State Department officials and by an American press
and public weary of executive branch prevarication and
secrecy.
Richard A. Moss's penetrating study documents
and analyzes US-Soviet back channels from Nixon's inauguration
through what has widely been heralded as the apex of detente,
the May 1972 Moscow Summit. He traces the evolution of
confidential-channel diplomacy and examines major flashpoints,
including the 1970 crisis over Cienfuegos, Cuba, the Strategic
Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), US dealings with China,
deescalating tensions in Berlin, and the Vietnam War.
Employing newly declassified documents, the
complete record of the Kissinger-Dobrynin channel ─ jointly
compiled, translated, annotated, and published by the US State
Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry ─ as well as the Nixon
tapes, Moss reveals the behind-the-scenes deliberations of
Nixon, his advisers, and their Soviet counterparts. Although
much has been written about detente, this is the first scholarly
study that comprehensively assesses the central role of
confidential diplomacy in shaping America's foreign policy
during this critical era.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Khenry and Anatol
Chapter 1: Precedents and Back-channel
Games, 1968-1970
Chapter 2: At a Crossroads: Cienfuegos,
SALT, and Germany-Berlin
Chapter 3: "Playing a Game," Finding a
"lever": Back channels and Sino-American rapprochement
Chapter 4: Divergent Channels: A
"watershed" on the Subcontinent
Chapter 5: Vietnam in U.S.-Soviet Back
channels, November 1971 - April 1972
Chapter 6: Cancellation Crises
Conclusion: At the Summit, Achieving
Detente
Richard A. Moss is an associate research
professor at the United States Naval War College's Center for
Naval Warfare Studies. Moss earned a B.A. from the University of
California Santa Barbara and an M.Phil and Ph.D. in History from
the George Washington University. He specializes in U.S.-Soviet
relations during the Cold War and is an expert on the Nixon
presidential recordings. He previously served with the U.S.
Department of Defense, as an historian with the U.S. Department
of State, and worked with Luke A. Nichter and the National
Security Archive to make the entire digitized collection of
Nixon tapes available at
nixontapes.org.
Views are personal and do not necessarily
represent those of the U.S. Government, U.S. Navy, or the U.S.
Naval War College.
