REGARDLESS of temporary strains at the governmental level, detente in the broader, multi-level sense is now the norm in relations between the Soviet Union and the West. It is even more pervasive in relations between Eastern Europe and the West, as trade and travel between the two regions expand. SALT talks may be disputatious, icy disagreements over human rights may arise, but at the social and economic levels the climate of relaxation inexorably spreads, fostered by the same governments that take such assertive and even truculent stands at the political level. In short, for the first time since 1939, the world seems to be entering another one of those periods in history of surface equilibrium, masking ideological conflict and shifting power relationships.

Detente presents special problems for the West. Beset with the usual political and economic divisions that afflict coalititions in peacetime, its posture is essentially defensive. NATO military doctrine is predicated on the strategic assumption that nuclear war will destroy civilization—which, of course, it would, in the sense that we define it. Soviet military doctrine on the other hand assumes that even after a nuclear holocaust some residual forces will remain intact, and victory will go to the side still capable of enforcing its will. Not having any unifying concept of history, and with a set of values that gives priority to the individual rather than to the state, the West takes its stand on individual liberty, cultural diversity, and material progress based on a combination of free enterprise with social welfare, Soviet political doctrine continues to be aggressively Marxist and predicated on the ultimate collapse of bourgeois society as a result of its internal contradictions.