Cold War linkage theorized that the various issues on which the United States and the Soviet Union interacted should be viewed as interconnected.
For example, Nixon and Kissinger did not believe that arms control negotiations could or should be able to proceed in isolation from other issues reflecting political sources of tension such as Berlin or Third World conflicts in Vietnam or the Middle East. More positively, it was believed that an improvement in US-Soviet relations would be more durable if it proceeded on a broad front, embracing progress on regional conflicts as well as on more central issues.
