Nixon and Kissinger’s greatest triumph came in easing tensions with the country’s Cold War adversaries, a policy known as détente. Through secret maneuvering, Kissinger prepared the way for Nixon to visit mainland China in 1972. After blocking the People’s Republic of China’s admission to the United Nations for twenty-two years, the United States announced that it would no longer oppose China’s entry to the world organization. This cautious renewal of relations with China opened up possibilities of mutually beneficial trade between the two countries.

The closer relations between China and the United States worried the USSR. Although both were Communist nations, the Soviet Union and China had pursued their own ideological and national interests. To check growing Chinese influence with the United States, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev invited President Nixon to Moscow in May 1972, the first time an American president had visited the Soviet Union since 1945. The main topic of discussion concerned arms control, and with the Soviet Union eager to make a deal in the aftermath of Nixon’s trip to China, the two sides worked out the historic Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), the first to curtail nuclear arms production during the Cold War. The pact restricted the number of antiballistic missiles that each nation could deploy and froze the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-based missiles for five years.

Throughout the world, the United States preferred to support dictatorship over democracy when its strategic or economic interests were at stake. In Chile, the United States overthrew the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende after he nationalized U.S. properties. In 1973 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) backed an operation that led to the murder of Allende, and the coup brought nearly two decades of dictatorial rule to that country. Under Nixon’s leadership, the United States also supported repressive regimes in Nicaragua, South Africa, the Philippines, and Iran.