This Is Not Détente

Détente - that charming French word every American knew in the 1970s, which referred to a thawing of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.  While the period of détente is generally thought to have started with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the spirit of amicability between the two superpowers started as early as June 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met at a summit in Glassboro, New Jersey and sought to ease tensions over the fate of Vietnam and to cool tensions in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Israeli Six-Day War.  Once Nixon succeeded Johnson, détente flowered nicely, resulting in a couple of arms-limitation treaties, the Helsinki Accords, and the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project space mission.  There was a reason why many of us Generation Xers didn't worry about nuclear war in the 1970s and why even a few of us didn't know anything about nuclear weapons.  Détente was it.

Donald Trump came to power in 2017 in a different era.  The Cold War was over, the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union had split into separate countries, and Russia - the largest Soviet republic and the republic that had more or less created the Soviet Union - had tried democratic government under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, but economic hardships led to the autocratic Vladimir Putin a return of tensions between post-Soviet Russia and the West.  Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton for the Presidency in part because he wanted to stabilize Russo-American relations. As Trump himself said, it made sense to seek better relations with the other major nuclear power on the planet.  That is, détente. 

Fast forward to 2025.  The current Russo-American relationship is not détente.  It's more like an alliance.  Trump and Putin are dealing behind and sometimes in front of the scenes to bring an end to the war in Ukraine in a way that benefits everyone but the Ukrainians, hence their absence in the talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to end the Russo-Ukrainian War - a war Trump erroneously claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky started.  The "peace plan" being framed is not a friendly gesture in the way that Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 was.  It's a collaboration, and the objective isn't peaceful space exploration.

At the least, the Riyadh talks parallel the Munich Conference of 1938, in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was all too happy to let Hitler take over the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia without Czechoslovakian representatives in the talks - not to end a war but to prevent one, though Chamberlain's goal then was the same as Trump's is now - "Peace in our time."  But at least Chamberlain had no love for Nazi Germany and had no desire to collaborate with Hitler to create a new European order.  The deal Trump and Putin are trying to hammer out would not only give Russia the Russian-speaking Donbass area of Ukraine but entitle the United States to 50 - five-zero - percent of Ukrainian mineral rights to compensate for the money the U.S. has spent to aid Ukraine in the past three years.  This isn't Munich in 1938 - this is Moscow in 1939, when German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a nonaggression pact that secretly divided eastern Europe between the Nazis and the Soviets. 

Trump has made it clear - he wants the United States and Russia to be allies, not just partners.  Neither Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, nor Jimmy Carter, whose death two months ago spared him the knowledge of what a Trump Mark Two regime would be like, would recognize this as détente.

They would call it "sleeping with the enemy."  

And Ronald Reagan, whose election not just signaled the end of the seventies but the end of détente, would call it "sleeping with the evil emperor."