Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Summary
Jeremi Suri’s Power and Protest looks at how the U.S. USSR, and China had to “accommodate themselves to a stalemated Cold War world that restricted policy flexibility.” (1) Suri writes (p. 213): The protests – controlled in China, independent in the U.S. and Western Europe – attempted to “escape the limits” of the Cold War stalemate. As a result, Suri argues that “the widespread unrest of the 1960s had a direct effect on each state’s foreign policy” and, simultaneously, relations among “the most powerful nations inflamed domestic contention.” The Détente, then, had a social origin in the “convergent response to disorder among the great powers.” (2) The decade of the 1960s began with he charismatic politics of Kennedy, de Gaulle, Khrushchev, and Mao who offered grandeur politics: “Kennedy would conquer new frontiers, Krushchev would build real-existing communism, de Gaulle would restore French grandeur, and Mao would guide China in a great industrial leap.” (260) These promises, however, confronted nuclear dangers, Cold War divisions, and large bureaucratic divisions and optimistic and college-educated citizens quickly soured. Over time, as leaders accepted compromises, young men and women grew more violent and adopted a “language of dissent” and accused “their elders of hypocrisy and corruption.”  The global disruption of 1968 – university students in all countries destructing symbols of government power – is a direct result of these un-kept promises. (Thus, domestic unrest combined with nuclear power to create a balance of power) The result: a détente, as leaders “refrained from challenging one another as they had throughout the Cold War” and, in a sense, created a secret group of men that coordinated the political order and excluded most advocates of change. Suri argues: “International collaboration among leaders furthered international disillusion among citizens,” and only benefitted the leaders of each nation. Thus, Suri contends, “large segments of each nation’s population remain politically alienated as a consequence of détente.” (5