The three factors ideology, new military technologies, and new strategic places influenced the classical geopolitics allure. However, the Caribbean crisis has shown that traditional understanding of all these two factors of geopolitics would or could lead to nuclear war between the two superpowers, which could potentially destroy the whole world, the whole humanity. And that's why a new approach to geopolitics, a new approach to geopolitical competition was needed. This new approach came with the new stage in international relations, which was called detente. Detente in international relations came in late 1960s early 1970s, and the very term was invented by the American diplomat Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The idea of this term was grounded on the understanding that the whole world is a closed system or in other words the link principle that the whole world is a closed network. All parts of this world are connected with each other and the whole world should be considered as a global balance of power system where there should be a balance between the Soviet Union and the United States. Balance in order to prevent any possibility of a huge war between the two superpowers. Detente in international relations meant a lot to geopolitics. Henry Kissinger together with several other government officials contributed a lot to the new understanding of global geopolitics and developed new approaches to these geopolitics. For example, Henry Kissinger himself considered geopolitics as a synonym to the global equilibrium, and he focused on how to bring this equilibrium to the world balance of power. The example of his activity was a dialogue that was established between the United States and China and Henry Kissinger actually used difficulties in relations between the Soviet Union and China in order to bring the Communist Republic of China on the side of the United States. It was an example of a new approach to geopolitics that replaced the previous geopolitics by the United States used by the United States the containment geopolitics. It was oriented maybe less on ideology and more on attracting new allies, even if these allies practice different ideology and by this once again to bringing balance to the whole world system. Another new concept developed within geopolitics. What was the concept of shatterbelt, this concept was developed by another American Saul Cohen and this concept shatterbelt described the territory that was actually, that didn't belong to any of the existing camps. Meaning the US led camp and the Soviet led camp. However, these territory was under their influence and was within their both interest. In the map, we can show two places of this shuttlerbelts somewhere in the Middle East and in North Africa and somewhere in Southeast Asia. These shatterbelts on the one hand were vulnerable, were unstable. On the other hand, they were very important in terms of global balance of power. The country that spreads its influence in this shatterbelt becomes more powerful and that's why for the other country it was important to prevent the spread of influence in the territory of shatterbelt of its opponent, another concept for the Cold War geopolitics. The period of detente in international relations didn't last long. In the end of 1970s, when the Soviet Union decided to invade Afghanistan in order to protect the Communist Regime in this country, the United States changed their strategy again and turned back to the policy of containment. The US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski is associated with this new stage in American geopolitics, which was on the one hand step back to containment on the other hand, it was still in the framework of balance of power system the global balance of power. This time however, it wasn't spread somewhere worldwide this time American geopolitics was focused on the so-called choke points and linchpin states. The new geopolitical concepts introduced by Zbigniew Brzezinski. These are terms described the places of extreme value to the United States, choke points meaning maritime straights, passes, and channels and linchpin states, the states whose location was extremely important to preserve and balance of power or to making the US position in terms of this global balance of power more stable and more strong. The logic of choke points was pretty the same to the one that was in the terms of traditional geopolitics, the mains, straits and canals while the logic of linchpin states was much closer to the logic of global balance of power. But with more science of geography. For Zbigniew Brzezinski, there were certain states that were of extreme value to the United States. These states were West Germany, states in the Middle East meaning Iran and Afghanistan, South Korea, the Philippines. These states were important in order not to allow further spread of Soviet influence or communist influence geographically. So the logic of how to preserve the achieved balance of power in order to limiting the power of your potential opponent. All in all we can see that these three concepts shatterbelts, linchpin states, and the logic of equilibrium or balance of power introduced by Henry Kissinger, brought a lot of new to geopolitics and made it even more closer to realism and to realistic explanation of power in the global world.
