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Young & Kent: International Relations since 1945

Part IV: The Détente Era, 1972-1980

The essential text for these years is:
Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American–Soviet relations from Nixon to Reagan (Brookings, Washington, 2nd edn., 1994).

Memoirs from some key US players are particularly rich in this period. On the Nixon–Ford administrations see:
Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Little, Brown, Boston, 1979).
Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Little, Brown, Boston, 1982).
Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989).
Richard Nixon, RN: the Memoirs of Richard Nixon (Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1978).

And on the Carter years:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–81 (Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, New York, 1983).
Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (Collins, London, 1982).
Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in American Foreign Policy (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983).

On the Soviet side the essential memoirs are:
Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents, 1962–86 (Times Books, New York, 1995).
Andrei Gromyko, Memories (Hutchinson, London, 1989).

While archives on the period are only just opening, there are also a number of good, detailed studies on the Nixon-Kissinger years:
Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: a life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995).
William Bundy, A Tangled Web: the Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (I. B. Tauris, New York, 1998).
Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: a Biography (Faber & Faber, London, 1992).
Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace: foreign policy in the Nixon Years (Viking Press, New York, 1978).
Richard Thornton, The Nixon-Kissinger Years (Paragon, New York, 1989).

But on the Carter administration see especially:
David Brinkley, ‘The Rising Stock of Jimmy Carter’, Diplomatic History, 4 (1966).
Richard Thornton, The Carter Years: Towards a New Global Order (Pentagon, New York, 1991).

Valuable studies of Soviet foreign policy include:
Robin Edmonds, Soviet Foreign Policy: the Brezhnev Years (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983).
Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Détente (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1984).
Adam B. Ulam, Dangerous Relations: the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970–82 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983).

More specifically on the theme of détente are:
Mike Bowker and Phil Williams, Superpower Détente: a Reappraisal (Sage, London, 1988).
Robert Litwak, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984).
Richard Pipes, US–Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente (Westview Press, Boulder, 1981).
Richard Stevenson, The Rise and Fall of Détente (Macmillan, London, 1985).
John van Oudenaren, Détente in Europe (Duke University Press, Durham, 1991).
Odd Arne Westad, The Fall of Détente (Oslo University Press, Oslo, 1997).

But for a focus on European détente:
Kenneth Dyson (ed.), European Détente: Case Studies in the Politics of East–West Relations (Pinter, London, 1986).
Vojtech Mastny, Helsinki, Human Rights and European Security (Duke University Press, Durham, 1986).

And the Sino–American rapprochement is analysed in:
Robert Ross, Negotiating Co-operation: the US and China, 1969–89 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995).

On the continuing problems of Indochina:
Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Kansas University Press, Lawrence, 1998).
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996).

On the 1973 war and its aftermath in the Middle East:
Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity (Collins, London 1978).
Kenneth Stein, Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab–Israeli peace (Routledge, New York, 1999).
William Quandt, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics (Brookings, Washington, 1986).

On the Civil War in the Lebanon see:
Farid el-Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000).
Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation (Deutsch, London, 1990).

While on the Iranian revolution and its impact see:
James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1988).
Richard Cottam, Iran and the United States: a Cold War Case Study (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1988).
Shireen Hunter, Iran and the World (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990).
Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: the American Experience and Iran (Oxford University Press, New York, 1990).

And on the Cold War’s impact on Africa in the 1970s:
Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2002).
Norrie McQueen, The Decolonisation of Portuguese Africa (Longman, London, 1997).
Robert Patman, The Soviet Union in the Horn of Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990).

On the advances in strategic arms control in these years see:
John Newhouse, Cold Dawn: the Story of SALT (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1973).
Strobe Talbott, Endgame: the Inside Story of SALT II (Harper & Row, New York, 1979).