“The heady days of East-West detente are gone. The Wall Street Journal and the AFL-CIO representing the American labour movement – are unanimous in their verdict that “detente is dead”. There is thus a growing feeling that detente has never been an effective two-way street: that it has worked solely to the Soviet benefit; that it has helped the Communist ruling groups in Central and Eastern Europe not only to contain, but to annihilate the internal forces working for liberalisation; that it has strengthened the hand of the Politbureau domestically; and to generate the indispensable resources necessary to fuel the Kremlin’s massive armaments programmes.
Detente has furthermore failed to achieve its primary objective of bringing about genuine world-wide relaxation of tensions. It was the second scramble for Africa that eventually untangled the threads of fiction and fact wrapping the detente package. The policy of peaceful coexistence was therefore calulated to lull the West, to cause it to lower its guards, and to project the image of a benign Soviet power”
