Word: nixonization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This was to be one of the rare times that I totally disagreed with Nixon on a major foreign policy question. The Soviets had given us no help in Viet Nam. SALT was still substantially deadlocked. The Soviets had introduced combat personnel into the Middle East-the first such Soviet action in the postwar period...
Fortunately, notes Kissinger, though Nixon was eager for a summit in 1970, the Soviets overreached themselves and Nixon "did not need it as desperately as Moscow reckoned." The U.S. bided its time, and soon the pendulum was swinging its way. In December 1970, trouble erupted on the Soviets' own doorstep with food-price riots in Poland. In July 1971 came the announcement of Nixon's trip to China. Less than four weeks later, the Soviets formally invited the U.S. President to visit Moscow in the spring of 1972. Kissinger served as a kind of diplomatic advance...
...Soviet summit never developed the uniform texture of the one in Peking; it was more random and jagged. The discussions between Nixon and the Soviet leaders lacked a central theme. On the whole what emerged were formal expressions of standard positions not significantly different from the written exchanges that had gone back and forth through the Channel...
...simply disappeared. It was never clear whether the numerous delays and the constant switching of topics were a form of psychological warfare or simply reflected the Soviet working style. When Brezhnev visited the U.S. in 1973, he sat on his veranda at Camp David in full view of Nixon's cabin, talking with his advisers right through a scheduled meeting with the President, whom he kept waiting for two hours without explanation or apology...
There was one dramatic session during the summit-on Viet Nam. Held at Brezhnev's dacha outside Moscow, it pitted Nixon against a troika of Soviet leaders: Party Boss Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny...