First, there is little doubt that detente met powerful opposition within the United States. The US military was unhappy with it ; so too were the conservation right, the still influential cold war foreign policy elite, the power Zionist lobby and key section of the trade union movement. Indeed, long before the so-called soviet offensive in the third world this coalition had done much to weaken Kissinger's new strategy. What then destroyed it completely were Watergate at home and the failure of détente to guarantee international stability abroad. After Saigon fell in 1975- to be succeeded by a series of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ revolutions in Africa, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 – many US citizens concluded that Kissinger’s clever strategy had simply failed to deter aggression. Détente had been designed to help the US manage the international system at lower cost. It became identified, however, with growing global anarchy and US decline.