The end of the tumultuous 1960s was marked by the death of four fans at a Rolling Stones concert in December at Altamont, CA, beaten by the members of Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang the band had hired as security—noteworthy because from the signing of the Atlantic Charter through the 1960s, the United States’ quest to ensure the security of its markets and maintain its global influence had brought with it many dangers.
As the 1970s began, the Cold War tensions relaxed and grew stagnant, caught in perpetual low-grade conflict—a period known as détente. The United States rose in the 1970s to great power; Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger found agreements with China, arms treaties with the Soviets and worked in the Middle East to stabilize the post-Vietnam era and to open cooperation across regions. Nixon’s visit to China marked an opening of relations significant to the easing of Cold War tensions, and the United States final withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 ended American involvement in a criminal war. Nixon, in seeking a greater realism in foreign policy, saw that the danger from Communist China was to be met with confidence and cooperation, not only to thwart the expansion of communism, but to take advantage of Asian resources, specifically, as Kissinger noted in 1971, “one-quarter of the world’s most talented people” (Engel 296).
In Chile, however, American policy continued to advocate for regime change in nations that threatened international stability, including support for General Pinochet’s coup deposing democratically elected Salvador Allende’s socialist government, dangerous because of his ties to Fidel Castro.
War in the Middle East disrupted United States’ relations with the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) in the form of reduced production and an embargo on shipments to international supporters of Israel’s response to attack by Egypt and Syria in October 1973.
Neoconservatives statesmen Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense, respectively, for President Ford sought to re-awaken a sense of America’s power in the world—to reduce American military costs but project power further into the world— and Henry Kissinger, seen here "over the barrel" to an Arab sheik, worked towards trade agreements, international stability, and the protections of human rights as the provisions for détente.
By 1974, the U.S. Congress had acknowledged in a bipartisan report that “an increasingly interdependent world means that disregard for human rights in one country can have repercussions in others,” a state of international affairs that made U.S. leadership in this area “morally imperative and practically necessary” (Engel 301). The Atlantic Charter had promised a “New Deal” for international relations—freedom from fear for “all the men in all the lands”—and inaugurated the modern human rights regime such that individuals, rather than nation-states could stake legitimate claims in international law to violations of their rights, to be supported by an international community united, at least in principle, in their ,defense. The human rights protections that the Helsinki Accord Final Act of 1975 signed into international law were fundamental in limiting ongoing conflict, and by the end of the decade, freedom’s expansion had reached Poland under the stewardship of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity party, which earned workers' rights under the Gdansk Agreement of 1980.
In Czechoslovakia, Vaclev Havel and the members of Charter 77 boldly asserted the unacceptable circumstance that “Hundreds of thousands of other citizens are denied the right to “freedom from fear” because they are forced to live in constant danger that if they express their opinions they will lose their possibility to work and other possibilities," and President Carter, in a speech at Notre Dame University in 1977, argued that world leaders could “no longer separate the traditional issues of war and peace from the new global questions of justice, equity and human rights [in] a politically awakening world” (Engel 307, 303).
The end of the decade found Americans held hostage in Iran, and Ronald Reagan due in the office of president. The neoconservative’s new leader represented their desire for America to reject its previous weakness and reassert her virtuous power through demonstration of her strength. But war did not quickly become peace as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Cold War tensions increased.