This is the second question I'm posting. These are a couple questions that have been kicking around inside my head for a loooong time ever since I read Kissinger's memoirs in detail.
During detente, relations warmed up between the U.S. and the USSR. As a result, many European countries grew increasingly restless about detente, and started to speak out against the possibility that the U.S. might get too friendly with the USSR. The possibility that the two superpowers could strike a grand bilateral bargain for permanent peace and friendship (also known as "condominium") was seen by European states as a huge threat to their national security, interpreting it as essentially the U.S. and USSR teaming up to rule the world and individual European states would have little to no say in how world affairs are operated.
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If this came to pass, it sounds awfully unrealistic to me to think the European states would be disadvantaged somehow. Would a condominium have meant the U.S. wouldn't defend Europe anymore or something? The way I see it, world peace would have been strengthened if the two superpowers had struck a grand bargain and laid aside their nuclear disagreements. Why was Europe so worried about this?
In graduate school, I have only seriously studied US foreign policy through 1968-early 1969, as my thesis analyzed US-Czechoslovak relations before and during the Prague Spring. But while the period of "Detente" proper begins with Nixon's presidency, Nixon's negotiations with the Soviets really were an extension of Lyndon Johnson's attempts at detente, which were disrupted at the end of 1968 by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (Johnson, however, initially misinterpreted the invasion as somehow constructive to a Soviet-American detente and he spoke to ambassador Dobrynin as though the invasion had finally put to an end the largest obstacle to Soviet-American detente, until his advisers explained to him that this was not the case... but that's another story). Johnson, however, faced similar challenges in US-European relations that you describe here, as outlined by the definitive work on these relations, Thomas Schwartz's Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Harvard University Press, 2003). In short, the Europeans feared exactly what you call a "condominium" between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this term does not mean "peace."
What the European feared was that they would lose their autonomy, much of which they had already lent to the United States in the early phase of the Cold War, to a Soviet-American co-ownership of Europe (this is a "condominium"). This would, of course, reduce the likelihood of nuclear war, but it also give the Soviet Union greater influence over all of Europe. For example, the Europeans wanted their own nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union but the Soviets opposed this. This put American policymakers in an awkward position--should they support the creation of an independent European nuclear force, which would destabilize the bilateral nature of the Cold War? If they did not support such a force, it would certainly seem that the American were more concerned with their own safety, as well as their relations with the Soviet Union, than they were European security. This led American policymakers to propose the "Multilateral Force," a multinational naval force that would ostensibly give Europeans control over the European nuclear deterrent, but which required American approval to use and so was more an illusory transfer of control than a substantial one. Even this plan was scrapped in favor of Soviet-American detente. And so Europe, without control of the nuclear deterrent that protected it from Soviet influence, had to rely entirely on American initiatives. If the Americans became more concerned with ending the arms race with the Soviets than they were with European security, then this might give the Soviets free rein in Europe. This could take on several forms. Most notably, the Soviet empire could swallow West Berlin if the Americans allowed... but the Soviets could use the threat of military intervention to realize a number of goals in Europe. We can see this European fear erupt after Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia, which put the Soviet war machine into motion and which, brought it closer to the doorstep of Western Europe, and proved that the Soviets could use the Red Army to achieve political goals in Europe. Given that the invasion occurred while Johnson openly sought a Soviet-American detente, coupled with the tepid American response, it seemed to many Europeans that Johnson had actively colluded with Brezhnev in planning the invasion. The historical record shows something far more absurd; the Soviets believed that the invasion would anger Johnson and ruin the nascent detente, while Johnson viewed the entire Czechoslovak affair as a matter "internal" (his administration's term used in conversations with the Soviets prior to the invasion) to the Eastern Bloc. Thus while Johnson did not collude with the Soviet Union, he was not entirely sure that he hadn't--his initial conversation with Dobrynin after the invasion makes for some bizarre reading. In any case, Johnson's response to the Soviet invasion, which was to cancel a summit meeting with Premier Kosygin and to immediately attempt to reschedule that meeting, left the impression among those Europeans who feared Soviet intervention in Western Europe with the feeling that the United States might indeed sell them out in the name of world peace. Joint Soviet-American control over all of Europe was a frightening prospect for Western Europeans.