UN General Assembly
1973

9. Detente, as we envisage it, should be the extension to the whole of the international scene of this political will to pacify and co-operate. It should inject this political will into the body and system of our Organization. It should offer opportunity for finally implementing the purposes and principles of the Charter, and for the United Nations to pay its ethical debt to itself — namely, the eradication of underdevelopment. To reduce detente to a rationale for the use, and for the balance, of power, to regionalize its scope and objectives — and hence to forgo using it as an instrument for normative reconstruction and as an inspiration and guide line for a policy of global relaxation — would be tantamount to reviving the fallacy of arrangements based on considerations of power which are transient and fleeting because they fail to comprehend the dynamics of internatiotial problems and because they are uninspired by any sense of the future.