2014
H-Diplo
H-Diplo Roundtable Review
h-diplo.org/roundtables
Volume XVI, No. 11 (2014)
1 December 2014
Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane
Labrosse
Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii
Introduction by Thomas A. Schwartz
Barbara Zanchetta. The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN: 9781107041080 (hardback, $95.00).
URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVI-11 or
http://h-diplo.org/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XVI-11.pdf
Contents
Introduction by Thomas A. Schwartz, Vanderbilt University.................................................... 2
Review by James Hershberg, George Washington University.................................................. 6
Review by Nancy Mitchell, North Carolina State University .................................................... 9
Review by Michael Cotey Morgan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill .................... 13
Author’s Response by Barbara Zanchetta, Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies in Geneva............................................................................................. 17
© 2014 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 11 (2014)
Introduction by Thomas A. Schwartz, Vanderbilt University
S
ome roundtables in H-Diplo resemble a love fest, with reviewers trying to outdo each
other with superlatives in describing the particular work in question. Not this time.
Barbara Zanchetta’s manuscript, with its determination to see a basic continuity in
the American foreign policy of the 1970s under Presidents as different as Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, encounters a critical buzz saw from its three commentators,
with criticism ranging from the copyediting and Zanchetta’s sources and methodology, to
the basic arguments and assumptions of the book. One suspects the book has hit a
sensitive point for many American historians, and the debate is only beginning.
Zanchetta’s book does not aspire to be a definitive history of American foreign policy in the
1970s. Rather, the author is selective, leaving aside much consideration of Vietnam, Latin
America, and Europe while focusing more on America’s Great-Power diplomacy with the
Soviet Union and China, as well as providing fascinating case studies dealing with Iran and
the Horn of Africa. This selectivity may help contribute to the type of conclusions she
reaches, in which she argues that American power was successfully transformed during
this period from a position of dominance to one of leadership. Washington adjusted to the
increase in the power of the Soviet Union and managed to maintain and secure its position
through partnerships in such key parts of the world as China and the Middle East.
However, Zanchetta does not view this uncritically. Pointing to the underlying basic
continuity which she sees in American foreign policy, Zanchetta asserts that “Washington’s
excessively Soviet-centric worldview” (310) blinded decision makers to the importance of
regional and local issues, especially in a country as significant as Iran. Ultimately she
concludes that America has yet to strike the proper balance between its global concerns
and the local dimensions to many conflicts. In the most important arena of American
foreign policy, U.S.-Soviet relations, she contends that “national security seems to always
have prevailed over the promotion of human rights and democracy.” (314)
Michael Morgan’s critique of the book takes direct aim at the change vs. continuity debate
so common among historians, as well as the particular significance of the 1970s. He notes
Zanchetta’s effort to “overturn this orthodoxy” of a sharp discontinuity between the
Republican Nixon-Ford and Democrat Carter approaches to foreign policy. In Morgan’s
view, Zanchetta’s emphasis on détente as a combination of negotiation and competition
could be used to characterize the Cold War as a whole, and obscures as much as it clarifies.
Morgan argues that Zanchetta has allowed some of the tactical similarities between the
three Presidents to obscure their important strategic differences, especially over the
importance of the competition with the Soviet Union. Arguing that Carter “explicitly
repudiated” the Nixon-Ford emphasis on the Soviet Union, Morgan sees the Carter
Presidency as recognizing a “newly multipolar world” and making an “unprecedented
commitment” to human rights. Questioning Zanchetta’s more traditional emphasis on
diplomacy and referencing the soon-to-be-published work of Daniel Sargent on the political
H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 11 (2014)
economy of this period, 1 Morgan contends that the central changes of the 1970s involved
the transformation of the global economy, and that the real challenge for Presidents in the
1970s was in reconciling their Cold War policies with the rapidly changing international
economic environment.
Nancy Mitchell is even more critical of Zanchetta’s book, noting that for the most part the
book does not break any new ground, and pointing out the surprising absence of European
archival sources. Having just completed her own soon-to-be-published study of Kissinger
and Carter’s policy toward Africa, a book which is based on multiarchival sources and
extensively detailed, Mitchell focuses on Zanchetta’s discussion of African issues, noting for
example her “mistakes and misinformation” over the number of Cuban troops in Ethiopia.
She asserts that Zanchetta’s argument that Carter “indirectly but inexorably” moved away
from his Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s emphasis on the regional dimensions of African
issues is simply “not true.” On this point she argues that Carter was determined to prevent
a Cold War confrontation in southern Africa and cites her personal interview with Carter in
which he told her that he spent “more effort and worry” about Rhodesia than the Middle
East. (Count me a little skeptical on Carter’s claim. While it is impossible to quantify
“worry and effort,” given the weeks that Carter spent personally in the Camp David peace
talks with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, as well as his time on the Iranian hostage
crisis, I find it hard to believe that Rhodesia could top those two Middle Eastern issues.)
Mitchell ends her review with a tough but justified criticism of Cambridge’s copyeditors for
missing several errors in the text.
Mitchell’s strong critique is echoed by Jim Hershberg, who cites Mitchell’s forthcoming
study in his review. Hershberg rightly notes that there are two very different narratives
coming out of the 1970s, and that these have much more to do with American domestic
partisan politics than with any reasonably objective assessment of developments within
the international situation. President Ronald Reagan’s conservative supporters argued that
Carter’s weakness had emboldened the Soviet Union and they wanted a more
confrontational policy. In effect, they ‘won’ the argument in the election of 1980. They
then proceeded to try to defeat the ‘evil empire’ through a massive arms buildup and covert
interventions in places like Afghanistan and Nicaragua. The collapse of the Soviet Union a
decade later was seen as proof of Reagan’s wisdom, a claim which historians have
subjected to critical analysis. Hershberg notes Zanchetta’s contribution, but thinks that the
book’s “conceptual confusion” and “somewhat outdated, mostly American, source base,”
limits its significance in this ongoing debate. Hershberg suggests that détente could be
seen as beginning even earlier than Zanchetta dates it, in the Johnson Administration’s
negotiation of a nuclear nonproliferation treaty in 1968 or in Kennedy’s limited test ban
treaty of 1963. Overall he concludes that a “truly synthetic international history of the
1970s” remains to be written.
1 Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the
1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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Full disclosure probably obligates me to mention that I was one of the ‘anonymous’
reviewers who read the Zanchetta manuscript and recommended that Cambridge publish
it. Although these roundtable reviews are largely critical, I think they should not obscure
the importance of the Zanchetta book in forcing historians to think more critically about
1970s American foreign policy. Particularly in her treatment of American policy toward
Iran, Zanchetta demonstrates how significant this commitment became over time, and the
scale of the disaster which the Shah of Iran’s fall brought to U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Her discussion of this era echoes a recently published survey of American foreign policy by
Stephen Sestanovich, which urges historians to recognize the cycles in American foreign
policy since World War II of interventionism followed by retrenchment that often led to
renewed activism. 2 The 1970s era was one of retrenchment, whose dilemmas and policy
choices resemble those of our own recent history. Will it be followed by a burst of
activism? Seen in this light, Zanchetta’s book is an important contribution to this ongoing
debate about the purposes and use of American power in the world.
Participants:
Barbara Zanchetta is a Senior Researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies in Geneva. Zanchetta earned her Ph.D. in History of International
Relations at the University of Florence in 2007, and her Italian university degree in Political
Science at the University of Urbino in 2003. A historian of the Cold War and of American
foreign policy, Zanchetta has studied U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms control, American policies
towards the Third World and, more specifically, U.S. policies in the Middle East and
neighboring regions. She has published various articles and book chapters on these and
related issues and has frequently offered comments for the media. She is the author of The
Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Transatlantic Relations since 1945: An
Introduction (London: Routledge: 2012). Currently, she is working on a monograph
provisionally titled The United States and the ‘Arc of Crisis’: American foreign policy, radical
Islam and the end of the Cold War, 1979-1989.
Thomas Alan Schwartz is a Professor of History and Political Science at Vanderbilt
University. He is the author of the books America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal
Republic of Germany (1991) and Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam
(2003), and with Matthias Schulz, the edited volume, The Strained Alliance: US-European
Relations in the 1970s, (2009). He is currently working on a biography of former Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger entitled Henry Kissinger and the Dilemmas of American Power.
James G. Hershberg is Professor of History and International Affairs at George
Washington University and former director of the Cold War International History Project at
the Woodow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Author, most
recently, of Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (Stanford University Press and
2 Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2014).
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Wilson Center Press, 2012), he is currently working on a book on Cuba, Brazil, and the Cold
War in Latin America.
Nancy Mitchell is the author of Race and the Cold War: Kissinger, Carter, and Africa, 19761980. Stanford University Press, forthcoming
Michael Cotey Morgan is Assistant Professor of history at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in 2010 from Yale University. He is writing a book on
the origins of the Helsinki Final Act. His publications include “The Seventies and the
Rebirth of Human Rights,” in Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel
Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The International History of the 1970s (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010); “The United States and the Making of the Helsinki Final
Act,” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: American Foreign
Relations 1969-1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and “North America,
Atlanticism, and the Helsinki Process,” in Andreas Wenger, Vojtech Mastny, and Christian
Nuenlist, eds., At the Roots of European Security: The Early Helsinki Process Revisited, 19651975 (Routledge, 2008).
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H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 11 (2014)
Review by James Hershberg, George Washington University
T
he international history of the 1970s remains contested territory—both for ColdWar historiography and for American domestic politics. In the latter half of that
decade in the United States—where most ‘Cold War history’ was then written, albeit
warped by one-sided partial access to U.S. and English-language sources, and buffeted by
partisan political passions—conservatives and a rising cadre of so-called ‘neoconservatives’ claimed that the Soviet Union was surpassing the United States in both the
nuclear arms race and international stature generally, the two then being regarded as
roughly synonymous. Gulled by détente (which the devious Soviets exploited) and gutted
by the American defeat in Vietnam, this argument went, Washington was retreating around
the Third world, while an emboldened Kremlin went on the offensive, projecting power
and amassing allies from Asia, in a now unified Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, to
Africa, in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, to Latin America, in Nicaragua; in this narrative,
Iran’s implosion and ensuing embassy hostage crisis symbolized a neo-isolationist U.S.
foreign policy malaise to match the domestic one Jimmy Carter famously discerned.
Fewer then, though many more in retrospect, contended that this view reflected less an
accurate gauge of global reality than a projection of a volatile post-Vietnam U.S. domestic
political funk, that Moscow’s motley crew of new allies were more burdens than bonuses,
that Washington’s losses over the decade were fully compensated by gains (China and
Egypt became de facto anti-Soviet allies, and the economies of Western Europe and Japan,
as well as cultural indices of soft power, flourished relative to the stagnant Soviet bloc), and
that even the Shah of Iran’s fall, undoubtedly a U.S. setback, would become an even bigger
headache for the Soviets, right next door (as did, of course, their invasion/occupation of
Afghanistan); this rival story line ends not with Moscow greedily eying further expansion in
the Persian Gulf (a warm-water port, oil), but facing a grave, ultimately terminal, crisis as a
workers’ uprising spread like wildfire in Communist Poland, inspired by a newly-elevated
Polish Pope.
We all know which side ‘won’ this argument, at least in terms of U.S. politics. Bellowing
that Carter’s America was ‘losing’ the Cold War and had ‘unilaterally disarmed,’ Ronald
Reagan swept the 1980 elections and brought the hard-right neo-con ‘Committee on the
Present Danger’ (in its second incarnation) crowd into power. When the ‘evil empire’
collapsed a decade later, his admirers argued that he deserved credit for reversing Carter’s
‘weakness’ and squeezing the Russians until they ‘cried uncle’—but to others, the Soviet
‘imperial overstretch’ (in Paul Kennedy’s 1987 phrase 1) in the 1970s had masked grievous,
growing internal faults that already set the clock ticking toward oblivion before Reagan
entered the White House.
Newly declassified evidence, both east and west, has been flooding out in recent years on
the ‘70s (including Foreign Relations of the United States volumes into the Carter years),
1
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987).
H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 11 (2014)
and now Barbara Zanchetta wades into this decadal debate. Although The Transformation
of American International Power in the 1970s unfortunately doesn’t address such debates
explicitly, it adds to the mounting stack of studies attempting to make sense of a confusing,
tumultuous transitional period, which, in retrospect, besides foretelling the Cold War’s
demise—with the onset of Soviet decline—also presaged the post 9/11-world—with the
rise of Islamic/Islamist fundamentalism as a potent political and military force.
Transformation does not purport to be a comprehensive study of the decade or U.S. foreign
policy during it, but offers some plausible, if mostly familiar, short case studies of some U.S.
foreign policy decisions during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, dealing with
such topics the Sino-American opening, ties with Iran, SALT, and the Horn of Africa crisis;
the last chapter usefully documents the episode’s impact on Carter’s turn to normalizing
ties with China, accepting the urgings of his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
to punish Moscow for backing Cuba’s military intervention to defend Ethiopia from a
Somali invasion of the Ogaden. A close study of U.S. handling of the 1971 India-Pakistan
crisis and war, which unified many policy strands, might have enhanced Zanchetta’s
analysis.
However, the book suffers from conceptual confusion as well as a somewhat outdated,
mostly American, source base. The title alludes to the U.S. response to a dramatically
altered international environment in the 1970s—the Soviet attainment of nuclear parity,
the rise of détente, and the collapse of bipolarity brought about by the Sino-American
opening—yet, as the narrative in fact shows, U.S. foreign policy was not really
‘transformed’ but essentially continued the post-World War II path of containment with
adjustments to particular developments. The Adjustment of American International Power
in the 1970s would have been a more accurate if less marketable title.
A related argument that also lacks much oomph is that President Carter, contrary to his
vaunted idealism and championing of human rights, was also a consistent cold warrior who
maneuvered for advantage vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. While true, this does not come as
much as a surprise to anyone who followed his administration at the time, (even before the
Brzezinski wing clearly triumphed over Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, or seriously
examined it in retrospect. For an incisive analysis of how both sides of Carter influenced his
decisions, see Nancy Mitchell’s forthcoming study of his policies in Africa, particularly
toward the Horn and the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe crisis.
Stressing the continuity in Cold-War tactics between the Nixon/Ford and Carter
administrations, Zanchetta denies the thesis—most prominently advanced by Fred
Halliday 2—that the collapse of détente inaugurated a ‘second cold war.’ However, this
claim is for the most part a straw man. It is pretty widely accepted that there was one Cold
War that never truly disappeared with détente but persisted until 1989, albeit along an
evolving course as East-West relations hardened, softened, and/or complicated.
2
Fred Halliday, The Making of the Cold War (London: Verso, 1983).
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Zanchetta could have also applied her continuity theme backwards. Rather than the
conventional approach to détente as having started with Nixon, the book could have
located the policy’s roots well back into the Lyndon Johnson administration, especially in
the superpowers’ negotiation, despite Vietnam, of a nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which
should have led to the SALT talks opening under Johnson had not Moscow’s invasion of
Czechoslovakia intervened, or even back to John F. Kennedy’s administration and the
improved ties after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as exemplified in the limited test-ban treaty in
the summer of 1963. 3
The author relies mostly on U.S. and Western memoirs and secondary sources, with limited
archival materials from College Park and the Ford and Carter presidential libraries. This
source base includes some nice nuggets but also misses some important resources. For
example, it neglects the on-line State Department cable traffic (now available from mid1973 through 1977 at the Access to Archival Databases [AAD] page on the National
Archives and Records Administration website 4); the records of the Carter-Brezhnev project
on the fall of détente, organized by James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, and other collections,
available through the National Security Archive; the on-line Declassified Documents
Reference Service (DDRS), which, to take one random example, for many years has made
available the records of Brzezinski’s May 1978 talks with Deng Xiaoping, a key event in the
chapter on Sino-U.S. normalization.
A truly synthetic international history of the 1970s, in other words, that would at least
plausibly tackle—if not satisfactorily resolve—the stark disputes raised above, and exploit
the truly vast array of sources now available on all sides of the cold war, remains to be
written.
On this point, see, e.g., Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European
Settlement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. chapter nine.
3
4
See http://aad.archives.gov/aad/series-list.jsp?cat=WR43
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Review by Nancy Mitchell, North Carolina State University
‘D
étente’ and ‘human rights’ bewitch historians of the 1970s. They are like machines
pumping fog onto a theater stage, distracting the audience and obscuring the
actors’ feet.
The very word ‘détente’ is alluring, promising balm after decades of nervous dread.
But what was détente? When all is said and done, when the fog machines are turned off,
détente was not much more than a pile of SALT. That Moscow and Washington hammered
out arms control agreements in the 1970s is significant, but it did not mean that a new era
of cooperation had dawned. Far from it. One need only recall the agonizing years of
President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War, the opening to China, the nuclear alert during the
October War, and the U.S. covert operations in Chile and Angola to puncture any illusion
that President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, or President
Gerald Ford were driven to cooperate with the Kremlin.
Détente was a chimera masking the harsh reality that the Cold War had matured and
spread. In the 1970s, the cold warriors in Washington diversified their tactics and dug in
for the long haul.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, Ford – reeling from the attacks of his challenger,
Ronald Reagan – banished the word ‘détente’ from the Republican Party lexicon.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter, the outsider to beat all outsiders, picked up the torch and
proclaimed the centrality of ‘human rights’ to U.S. foreign policy.
More fog.
Let’s get to Barbara Zanchetta’s The Transformation of American International Power in the
1970s. It is an ambitious book. Zanchetta analyzes key Cold-War crises one after another in
order to trace the transformation of American power, in Kissinger’s words, “from
dominance to leadership” (310). In the process, Zanchetta leads the reader through a series
of case studies from 1969 to 1980, including the opening to China, SALT I, the Nixon
Doctrine, Angola, the Ogaden war, normalization with China, SALT II, the Iranian
Revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This is a daunting agenda.
It is also important. As Zanchetta writes, the 1970s are “a particularly interesting and
challenging decade to study” (5). An incisive, synthetic analysis of the foreign policy of the
decade is needed. Zanchetta comes to the task with what I consider a potential strength – a
non-American point of view. This book emerges from her 2007 University of Florence
dissertation, “Ambivalent Times: Détente, Cold War and the Making of American Global
Power, 1969-1980.” She has taught in Finland and is currently at the Graduate Institute in
Geneva.
I was looking forward to reading The Transformation of American International Power in
H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 11 (2014)
the 1970s. I was, sadly, disappointed.
There are two reasons. Zanchetta’s case studies are, by and large, competent overviews
(the one on Angola is the weakest), but they add little to what most scholars of the decade
already know. The reason is obvious: for each case study, Zanchetta relies on a handful of
well-known secondary sources and a small sample of American documents.
I was surprised that Zanchetta, based in Europe, did not consult any European archives. In
the introduction she explains this by writing that “this book does not study the relations
between the United States and its Western allies.” (13) However, seeing U.S. policy
through many different eyes – as many as possible – always enriches our understanding
Multi-archival research is not just the pursuit of more information; it is the pursuit of a
deeper perspective.
With the exception of her discussion of Nixon’s policy on Iran, which is interesting,
Zanchetta’s book therefore does not break new ground. And, because it is spread so thin
and relies on a small number of sources for each case study, often uncritically, the author
makes mistakes and repeats misinformation.
I will give one example. In her discussion of the Horn, Zanchetta writes that the Americans
misjudged the number of Cuban troops, citing an estimate of 2,000 and contrasting it with
the approximately 17,000 Cubans that Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin mention
(215). 1 There are two problems with this. First, the U.S. estimate of 2,000 was made in
December 1977– when it was, in fact, accurate – while the figure Andrew and Mitrokhin
give is of the grand total of Cubans in Ethiopia by late March 1978. By conflating these two
figures, Zanchetta conveys the erroneous impression that Washington’s intelligence in
1978 was so ludicrously poor that it wasn’t aware that an extra 15,000 Cubans were in the
Ogaden. It is true that the Carter administration did not anticipate the scale of the Cuban
intervention – but it is also true that U.S. intelligence sources tracked the build-up carefully
and accurately. Secondly, Piero Gleijeses, in his magisterial Visions of Freedom, corrects the
mistake made by Andrew and Mitrokhin. At their peak, there were 12,000 Cubans in
Ethiopia. 2
This, however, might be beside the point. The case studies of The Transformation of
American International Power in the 1970s are not primarily intended to break new ground;
they are the building blocks of Zanchetta’s thesis.
This is where the fog enters.
1 Christopher M. Andrew, and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle
for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 458.
2 Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern
Africa, 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 45.
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Zanchetta asserts, correctly, that détente “generated unrealistic expectations on the part of
the American public” (301). It also seduces scholars.
Time and again, Zanchetta calls Nixon’s foreign policy “revolutionary” (8). She writes that
the Nixon administration intended “to place cooperation, and not competition and
antagonism, at the center of its foreign policy making” (60). After reifying this unrealistic
vision of détente as a revolutionary rupture that transformed Cold War competition into
cooperation, Zanchetta’s book systematically shows that, to the contrary,, the Cold War was
still alive and well.
Her discussion of Nixon’s opening to China, she promises, “will unequivocally show that the
main purpose of the China opening was to put pressure on the Soviet Union” (26-27). As for
the Nixon Doctrine, “once again, it was evident that détente had not changed Washington’s
notion of a fundamentally competitive relationship with Moscow” (110). U.S. policy during
the October War “unquestionably confirms … Washington’s determination in seeking to
strengthen its own position in the region to the detriment of Moscow’s” (125). In Angola,
“Ford and Kissinger confirmed that their way of thinking was shaped by a classic Cold War
logic” (172).
Is this in dispute?
Likewise, about the Carter administration, Zanchetta’s argument is based upon a false
premise – that President Jimmy Carter entered office after “bitterly criticizing” Ford’s
foreign policy (214, 248, 304). In fact, the 1976 campaign between Ford and Carter was
remarkable for its lack of debate on the basic direction of U.S. foreign policy. (The
Republican primary between Ford and Reagan, on the other hand, was a slugfest about
détente.) Carter embraced the term ‘détente,’ and the most sustained criticism he leveled at
Ford’s foreign policy concerned method, not substance: Carter strongly condemned
Kissinger’s ‘Lone Ranger’ style and penchant for secrecy.
Zanchetta further asserts that under Carter “the realistic approach to international
relations was rejected” (9). She seems to be referring to Carter’s emphasis on human rights
and his belief that the United States was free of its “inordinate fear of communism.” 3 Carter,
however, never rejected realism. For Carter, morality was one aspect of a realist foreign
policy, and by declaring that Americans were free of their inordinate fear of communism,
Carter was simply voicing a premise that had clearly underpinned Nixon’s arms talks with
the Soviets and his opening to China.
Having constructed a Jimmy Carter who rejected the Cold War, Zanchetta then asserts that
the war in the Horn of Africa caused Carter to undergo “a remarkable shift … a return to the
priority of geopolitics” (220) … “a return to militarism” (193) … “a refocus on US-Soviet
relations” (303). Moreover, after the Horn, Zanchetta writes, Carter “indirectly but
inexorably moved away from Vance’s insistence on understanding the complexity of
3
Carter, “Address at Commencement Exercises at the University of Notre Dame,” 22 May 1977.
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African dimensions” (219).
This is not true. The focus of the Carter administration in Africa – before, during, and after
the crisis in the Horn – was preventing a Cold War confrontation in southern Africa, where
it would divide the region along racial lines. “I spent more effort and worry on Rhodesia
than I did on the Middle East,” Carter told me. 4 There, in Rhodesia, the Carter
administration did not move one iota away from “Vance’s insistence on understanding the
complexity of African dimensions.”
The easiest way to understand the Carter years is to interpret them, as does Zanchetta, as a
narrative in which a naïve Georgian who arrived in Washington intending to implement an
idealist foreign policy was relentlessly reeled back to the grim reality of the Cold War. In
fact, however, the Carter years, and Jimmy Carter himself, are much more complex. The
Cold War was central to Carter’s foreign policy in 1977, as it was in 1980. Although he was
indecisive about how to handle the Shah of Iran, Carter was, in fact, a very decisive and
even arrogant man. For example, after previous presidents had waffled, Carter took the
tough decisions on the Panama Canal and Taiwan.
Zanchetta calls détente “revolutionary” and seems to argue that it was intended as a grand,
bilateral Kumbayah moment. She asserts that Jimmy Carter was an idealist who rejected
the Cold War. After outlining these two false premises, she arrives at the conclusion that
U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s was in fact characterized by containment and continuity.
She stresses that even in the era of détente, U.S. foreign policy – whether Nixon, Ford or
Carter was in the Oval Office – was fundamentally a realpolitik struggle to gain an
advantage on the Soviet Union, rhetoric about cooperation and human rights
notwithstanding. I have no disagreement with this conclusion. Nor would Richard Nixon,
who summed it up in one simple sentence more than forty years ago: Détente, he told the
Shah, was “a way for the United States to gain influence.” 5
I would like to add one additional note: a criticism of Cambridge University Press. It is
depressing that the copy editor of a book published by a reputable press and priced at
$95.00 did not catch errors that would not show up on spellcheck. I spotted many such
errors – many of them the ‘false friends’ of non-native speakers – before page 170, when I
stopped writing them down. There are mistakes on p. 77 (inserting ‘effusively’ into a
quotation); p. 79 (‘in precedence’ for ‘originally’); p. 106 (‘preoccupations’ for ‘worries’); p.
114 (‘substantially’ for ‘substantively’); p. 124 (‘The North Carolina University Press’ for
‘The University of North Carolina Press’); p. 163 (‘organism’ for ‘organization’); p. 170
(‘punctual’ for ‘point by point’). Is it quixotic to expect more rigor?
4
Interview of Jimmy Carter, Atlanta, Georgia, 23 May 2002.
5 Memorandum of Conversation (Shah, Nixon, Kissinger), Tehran, 31 May 1972, FRUS 1969-1976, vol.
E-4, doc. 201.
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Review by Michael Cotey Morgan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
D
uring the 1976 U.S. Presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter
relentlessly criticized his Republican opponent, Gerald Ford, and Ford’s
predecessor, Richard Nixon. In Carter’s view, the two men had led the United States
down the wrong path, and their conduct had disgraced the office of the presidency. The
“Nixon-Ford administration” had governed the country by “vetoes and not vision…scandal
and not stability…rhetoric and not reason,” Carter told a New Hampshire rally. Nixon’s
faults, culminating in his resignation in August 1974, spoke for themselves. Ford may have
lacked Nixon’s propensity for secrecy and deception, but he was not immune from criticism
either, having for too long neglected “the basic responsibilities of leadership”. 1
Carter’s electoral victory seemed to vindicate his assessment. He won many votes by
promising a fresh start in Washington, and repeated that promise in his inaugural address.
His administration would steer a different course and reestablish the moral foundations of
the U.S. government, he said in January 1977. “Let our recent mistakes bring a resurgent
commitment to the basic principles of our Nation,” he said, “for we know that if we despise
our own government we have no future.” 2 Carter presented himself as the anti-Nixon in
both style and substance in both foreign and domestic policy. He emphasized openness
over secrecy at home and moral imperatives over geopolitical expediency abroad.
In analyzing American foreign policy during the 1970s, most historians have followed this
model, stressing the differences between the decade’s two Republican presidents and their
Democratic successor. “Where Ford had sought continuity in US foreign policy, Carter was
committed to change,” George F. Herring writes. “More than was appreciated at the time, he
redirected US foreign policy in important and enduring ways.” 3 Carter’s record in foreign
affairs included both important breakthroughs, notably the 1978 Camp David accords, and
embarrassing failures, above all the Iran Hostage Crisis. Carter made mistakes. But
because he had broken with Nixon and Ford’s approach to international affairs, these
mistakes owed little to his predecessors. They were—to paraphrase Henry Kissinger,
Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State—completely his own. 4 This, at
least, is how most historians have summarized Carter’s record.
1 Helen Dewar, “‘Nixon-Ford Administration’ Lambasted by Carter in N.H.,” Washington Post, August
4, 1976, A1.
Inaugural Address of Jimmy Carter, Jan. 20, 1977. Available at:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/carter.asp .
2
3 George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008) 831.
4 Henry Kissinger quoted in David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine,
1992) 664.
H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 11 (2014)
In her new book, Barbara Zanchetta sets out to overturn this orthodoxy. Drawing on a
range of archival research that spans the 1970s, she insists that Carter had more in
common with Nixon and Ford than we usually think. Far from steering the United States in
a new direction, the 39th President continued on the course that they had charted. All
three Presidents negotiated arms control agreements with Moscow. All three worked with
Beijing to constrain Soviet power. The Shah of Iran benefited from the largesse of both
Nixon and Carter, and for similar geopolitical reasons. In order to check Soviet influence in
Africa, both Ford and Carter involved the United States in that continent’s conflicts, the
former by sending covert support to the National Liberation Front of Angola, the latter by
aiding the Somalis in the Ogaden War against Ethiopia. In campaigning for the presidency,
Carter repudiated Nixon and Ford’s legacy, but, Zanchetta argues, once in office he made
decisions that resembled theirs in more ways than he might like to admit.
The idea of détente looms in the background of any discussion of American foreign policy
during the 1970s. Détente has long been a tangled concept, and its multiple meanings are
sometimes confused. Depending on the context, the word can refer to the generic
reduction of tensions between any two countries; or to the period of improved U.S.-Soviet
relations in the 1960s and 1970s; or to Nixon and Kissinger’s specific policies toward
Moscow and Beijing. To complicate matters further, the Soviets and Chinese—to say
nothing of other players, especially the French and West Germans—understood détente in
ways that sometimes contradicted Nixon and Kissinger’s vision. It’s no surprise, therefore,
that scholars still argue about why détente emerged, what exactly it meant, and why it
eventually declined. 5
Zanchetta steps forcefully into this debate, arguing that détente did not constitute simply “a
period of relaxation of tensions between the superpowers that enabled the conclusion of
significant agreements” (5). “Détente was about both negotiating and competing,” she
writes. It “was not primarily about restraint” (299). Certainly, any historian would be hard
pressed to argue that U.S.-Soviet relations enjoyed a cloudless honeymoon during the
1970s. In many cases, American policy was hardheaded, even brutal. Few would
characterize Nixon and Kissinger’s conduct in Indochina as restrained, for example, and
their response to the 1973 Yom Kippur War indicated that they did not see diplomacy as
the solution to every problem. They negotiated when they thought it advantageous and
relied on military power when they thought it necessary. The same could be said for Ford
and Carter.
American policy toward the Soviet Union was similarly Janus-faced throughout the Cold
War. Washington trod softly in some areas but pushed hard in others. Every period of the
conflict featured both cooperation and confrontation. Consequently, when Zanchetta
characterizes détente as a combination of negotiation and competition, she might as easily
be describing the Cold War as a whole. President Dwight Eisenhower tried to reach an
See, for instance, the essays by Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Noam Kochavi, Thomas A. Schwartz, Jeremi Suri,
and Vladislav Zubok in Cold War History 8:4 (November 2008); and the H-Diplo roundtable in response, Vol.
X, No. 26 (July 24, 2009).
5
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Open Skies agreement with Nikita Khrushchev at Geneva, but also approved CIA-led coups
in Iran and Guatemala. President Lyndon Johnson concluded the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty with the USSR, but also escalated America’s involvement in Vietnam. Zanchetta’s
interpretation highlights the fundamental consistency of American foreign policy, which
worked to contain Soviet power by using the full range of tools at Washington’s disposal.
Similarly, it demonstrates what Zanchetta calls the “remarkable and not always unintended
continuity” that linked Nixon and Ford to Carter (303). But these insights come at the cost
of obscuring what made détente special and why historians usually draw a bright line
between Carter and the two men who had occupied the Oval Office before him.
Nixon and Kissinger’s détente was not just a matter of tactics. Rather, it was a strategy,
which sought to use a variety of means in order to achieve particular ends. Explaining
détente—or the strategy of any presidential administration, for that matter—therefore
demands as much attention to ends as to means. Put simply, Nixon and Kissinger aimed to
rebuild American influence and reduce the burdens on American power in the wake of
Vietnam. They wanted to stabilize the Cold War and transform an ideological
confrontation into a system in which the great powers respected each other’s domestic
political systems and geopolitical interests. They used every tool available in the service of
this vision.
Even if the common framework of containment defined the broad outlines of American
policy throughout the Cold War, different administrations understood it in different ways
and, as a result, devised different strategies and pursued different policies. Real conceptual
disagreements separated Dwight Eisenhower from John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson
from Richard Nixon. They may have used similar means, but not in pursuit of identical
ends. Zanchetta is therefore right to say that Carter, like Nixon and Ford before him,
sometimes stood up to the Soviets and sometimes bargained with them, but pointing this
out only gives us half the picture. It tells us about the means that he used, but not what he
wanted to achieve.
Zanchetta hints at the underlying strategic differences between the three Presidents of the
1970s. In the shadow of Vietnam, Nixon “sought to restore US power and face the new,
unprecedented challenges to America’s global position” (28). The same strategic objectives
informed Ford’s approach to foreign policy, Zanchetta points out, not least because
Kissinger continued as Secretary of State and National Security advisor after Nixon’s
resignation (143-44). Carter explicitly repudiated this approach in favor of a new design.
He “promised not to view the complexity of world affairs exclusively through the
restricting prism of the Soviet-American rivalry.” Instead, he focused on repositioning the
United States in the newly multipolar world, which demanded “trilateral cooperation
between the three centers of democratic, economic, and technological power—the United
States, Western Europe, and Japan” (194). This outlook, further leavened by Carter’s
unprecedented commitment to human rights, differed dramatically from that of Nixon,
Ford, and Kissinger. The three Presidents’ tactical similarities belied their strategic
disagreements.
When Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter in 1981, he took charge of a country that had
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changed profoundly over the preceding decade. Many of these changes were the
inescapable consequences of the transformation of the global economy during the 1970s.
The Bretton Woods system, which had enabled thirty years of remarkable growth in the
Western world, had imploded. Capital and goods alike moved from country to country with
unprecedented speed. The leading economies, especially the United States, found
themselves in the midst of a structural transformation that they themselves did not fully
grasp, as old industries fled abroad, especially to Asia, and new ones emerged to take their
place. The American imagination had changed too. Human rights, to which Carter had
given so much attention, had become a household term and a central consideration of
American foreign policy, albeit one that American leaders honored only imperfectly. The
old way of dividing the world into East and West still had its uses, but so too did new ways
of thinking about global interdependence. The metaphor of worldwide networks now
made as much sense as that of competing camps. The Presidents of the 1970s had faced a
profound challenge in reconciling the imperatives of the Cold War with the demands of
globalization. The results were mixed at best. 6
The situation that Reagan inherited reflected both these structural changes and the
decisions that his predecessors had made. It should come as no surprise, then, that Reagan
picked up where Carter left off, upholding the American commitment to the Persian Gulf
and expanding the military buildup that Carter had initiated. On this basis, Zanchetta
concludes that the origins of the end of the Cold War lay not in the early 1980s with Reagan
himself, but in the early 1970s, with Nixon and Kissinger (313). This provocative claim
ignores Reagan’s first-term policies that raised tensions with Moscow to levels unseen
since the early 1960s. Yet even if his strategy differed in crucial respects with Nixon’s, it is
now nearly a truism to point out that each new President, once in office, often continues his
predecessor’s policies, no matter how fiercely he denounced them on the campaign trail.
The improbable continuities between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama
administrations offer only the most recent example. The events of the 1970s, like those of
other eras, confirm the old saw that presidents make their own policies, but never in
circumstances of their choosing.
6 See Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the
1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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Author’s Response by Barbara Zanchetta, Graduate Institute of International and Development
Studies in Geneva
I
am extremely grateful to H-Diplo for organizing this roundtable review and to James
Hershberg, Nancy Mitchell, and Michael Morgan for their thoughtful remarks. I will
address some of their specific comments first, and then move onto underlining some
major points of my book that unfortunately seem not to have not been fully grasped by the
reviewers.
Both Hershberg and Mitchell criticize the sources and document base as being either too
small or outdated. For obvious reasons – the publication process of a book of this kind takes
some time – I could not use the very latest releases from the Carter Presidential Library.
However, apart from this rather logical shortcoming, the thousands of documents consulted
for this project cannot be called a “small sample.” A book that spans a decade and that – as
stated by Mitchell – has a “daunting agenda” because of the wide-ranging case studies
necessarily draws from a massive document base. The fact that I directly quote and
reference in the text a sample of these is the obvious choice for a book that deals with many
and diverse topics. I am well aware of the document sources cited by Hershberg, and the
choice not to use them was a deliberate one – the documents available via the National
Security Archive and the Carter-Brezhnev project had, in fact, already been consulted by
other scholars. I chose to primarily (although not exclusively) focus on the documents of the
National Security Council for all three presidencies, consultable at the Presidential Libraries,
because of the centrality of this organism in the decision making process on the topics I
studied. State Department cables, for example, would have added little substance to the
analysis of SALT, the China opening, Richard Nixon’s Iran policy, the Vietnam bombings, the
Horn of Africa crisis, the Iranian revolution, and the making of the Carter doctrine. Mitchell
criticizes me for not consulting archives in Europe. This, however, was also a deliberate
choice. My study intends to unveil the repercussions of the policy choices of the 1970s on the
making of American power itself. While including the point of view of other countries is
generally of vital importance, in the context of my study, adding more tons of documents
from non-U.S. sources would have been rather superfluous, given my purposes.
Another specific criticism of Mitchell’s concerns alleged mistakes and ‘repeated’
misinformation. But then she quotes just one, rather tedious, example concerning the exact
number of Cubans present in Ethiopia during the 1977-1978 war with Somalia. My purpose
in contrasting the two figures (American and Soviet) was to convey the general idea of
America’s misperception on the number of Cubans present in Ethiopia during the conflict (I
was well aware that the estimate was made at different moments of the war, but,
notwithstanding, the dimension of the U.S. misperception remains). Moreover, she claims I
made a mistake because I rely on the figure of 15,000, while Piero Gleijeses has corrected the
figure to 12,000, but, of course, the book cited was published only after mine had already
gone to print.
Mitchell’s attentive reading of my treatment of the Carter years stands in contrast to her
inaccurate discussion of the first part of the book on President Richard Nixon and President
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Gerald Ford. I never wrote that the Nixon administration intended to place cooperation and
not competition at the center of foreign policy making. This would contradict the main
argument of the first five chapters of my book. Her reference to page 60 is a clear-cut
mistake: I wrote that the opening to China and the signing of SALT I were initiatives that
provided evidence of the administration’s “alleged intention” to place cooperation and not
antagonism at the center of their policy-making. Missing and omitting the word “alleged”
completely reverses the meaning of the sentence, and the understanding of my general
points. In fact, after the misquoted sentence from page 60, I move on in the next paragraph
to underling that, even at the height of détente, the Nixon administration’s policies were very
much characterized by competition with the Soviets (the chapter assesses the policies in
Vietnam in 1972 and the next chapter studies the Nixon administration’s relationship with
Iran). The fact that Mitchell writes that I “reify” the “unrealistic vision of détente as a
revolutionary rupture that transformed Cold War competition in cooperation” and that she
interprets my treatment of the Nixon years as a “bilateral Kumbayah moment” makes me
seriously doubt that she has really read the first part of my book. My treatment of the Nixon
years points to the exact opposite: Cold War competition was always there, from the very
beginning of the administration.
I would add that this type of error is rather curious, given the criticism of some of my word
choices, which Mitchell claims are mistakes of a non-native speaker. In defense of my
Cambridge University Press copy editor, my word choices were perfectly viable in the
context of the sentences cited, and, moreover, are those of a bilingual speaker,
notwithstanding my Italian surname.
I am also critiqued for underlining that Jimmy Carter came into office bitterly criticizing the
Nixon-Kissinger policies, and for labeling him an “idealist.” But one needs only to read some
of Carter’s campaign speeches and statements from 1977 to conclude that he (rather
forcefully and proudly) intended to place values and ideals before crude national interests.
As Morgan underlines, “Carter presented himself as the anti-Nixon in both style and
substance in both foreign and domestic policy. He emphasized openness over secrecy at
home and moral imperatives over geopolitical expediency abroad.” I would also very much
dispute the claim made by Mitchell that Carter’s criticism of his predecessors concerned
mainly method and not substance. While the Nixon-Kissinger method was of course bitterly
rebuked, so too was some of the substance as, for example, the Carter administration’s initial
approach to SALT II shows (with the so-called ‘deep-cuts’ proposal that unrealistically
sought to go much further in the reduction of nuclear arsenals than Nixon, Kissinger, and
Ford ever envisioned). Another break from the past was the initial disinterest towards
China, which was not deemed a priority by the administration for all of 1977 and only
resurfaced later, when the administration refocused on the Soviet Union after the crisis in
the Horn of Africa.
Another point I would like to address concerns ‘African dimensions’. I obviously refer to the
Carter administration’s attitude in the context of the policies I am assessing – i.e. the conflict
in the Horn of Africa. Here my book shows that Cold War dynamics clearly prevailed over
local dimensions. Claiming that this is not true by citing Carter’s attitude in a different
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context has no logic – Rhodesia is, in fact, a totally different and separate story, that also had
important implications for American domestic politics.
In brief, I would underline that Hershberg and Mitchell miss some of the main points of my
book. As Morgan perceives, my book seeks to contribute to the broad debate on the 1970s. It
studies the importance of the decade within the history of the Cold War, and its impact on
the end of the bipolar conflict a decade later.
In 1969 Nixon inherited an unprecedented international context – with the rise of the
economic strength of Europe and Japan, Soviet attainment of nuclear parity, the Sino-Soviet
split – which called for a comprehensive rethinking of U.S. foreign policy. America was no
longer the overwhelmingly dominant world power, as had been the case for the previous
two decades. This makes the 1970s different from previous decades, with the one issue – the
unprecedented Soviet nuclear strength – being of crucial importance in my narrative since it
called for a total rethinking of U.S. policy. This major point seems to be missed by all the
reviewers. The Nixon administration responded to the new reality it inherited with the
policy of U.S.-Soviet détente, which inherently acknowledged the limits of American power.
Consequently, foreign policy choices were prioritized on the basis of national interests. In
other words, a more clear-cut realistic approach entered the making of U.S. foreign policy.
This led to a de-emphasis on ideology, enabling arms control negotiations with Moscow and
the opening of relations with China. However, a more pragmatic prioritization of interests
did not mean a diminished determination on the U.S. part to seek supremacy in the context
of the Cold War. But as a consequence of the increased Soviet strength in the nuclear domain,
the U.S. had to put greater emphasis on its geopolitical struggle with the Soviets and on the
battle in the so-called periphery. This is the revolution I point to, not the one described by
Mitchell. And it is this new conception of how to exercise American power that characterizes
the ‘transformation’ that I point to and that gives the title to the book (I deem this a real
transformation, not a mere adjustment as stated by Hershberg, given that American policy
did not have a geopolitical tradition).
In my assessment of the Nixon-Ford years I identify a ‘dual track’ of competition and
cooperation. While the point that Nixon and Kissinger’s détente was a way to carry on the
Cold War with different means was made many years ago by John Gaddis (in Strategies of
Containment 1) and by other scholars since (most prominently by Jussi Hanhimaki in the
Flawed Architect 2), this point has not been fully elaborated by scholars. 3 Conventionally, the
1 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy
during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, Second Edition 2005).
Jussi M. Hanhimaki, The Flawed Architect. Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004),
2
3 For example, such scholars as Noam Kochavi, Vladislav Zubok, Jussi Hanhimaki, Thomas Schwartz,
and Jeremi Suri assess the rise and fall of détente in a special issue of Cold War History (Volume 8, November
2008) but none address explicitly the dual track of cooperation and competition. Similarly, in his chapter on
détente in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Olav Njolstad summarizes the debate on the fall of détente
into four interpretative strands: (1) it was caused by its own contradictions, (2) it was due to the fact that both
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competitive aspect of détente is said to have emerged after 1973, following the war in the
Middle East. The dominant vision of détente remains – as Morgan writes – one of a policy
meant “to stabilize the Cold War and transform an ideological confrontation into a system in
which the great powers respected each other’s domestic political systems and geopolitical
interests.”
My book, instead, disputes the idea that détente was meant primarily as a way to stabilize
the Cold War, thus signaling an acceptance of the status quo (i.e. the division of Europe and
of the world in two spheres of influence). This notion remains quite dominant in the
narrative on détente. Indeed, the whole debate around the ‘second cold war’ and on the
‘triumphalist’ policies of the Reagan administration would be pointless if U.S. policy in the
1970s was not seen as more accommodating compared to the 1980s.
My main purpose is to point to the emphasis on geopolitics that emerged in the 1970s and to
America’s increased attention on maneuvering in the Third World as the relationship with
the Soviet Union became more stable with respect to nuclear weapons (this makes the dual
track of the 1970s different from previous moments of the Cold War that were characterized
by both cooperation and competition). The book shows that this new way of exercising
American power, introduced by the Nixon administration, continued to guide the making of
U.S. policy throughout the entire decade. In fact, unveiling the continuity between Nixon and
Carter’s policies has a series of broad implications. I argue that Washington redefined its
international role by exercising a more pragmatic foreign policy that assigned an alwaysgreater importance to America’s global extension. While realizing that it was no longer the
dominant power on the world scene, America nevertheless sought to secure for itself the
role of world leader, ultimately seeking to prevail over its long-time antagonist, the Soviet
Union.
The book therefore alters the understanding of the 1970s and of the Cold War as a whole
because it sets forth the idea that this new conception on how to exercise U.S. power became
a rather permanent feature in the making of American foreign policy – with a whole series of
unintended consequences. By assigning greater importance to the American presence in the
periphery, the U.S. engaged in very complex regional settings – in Africa, Iran, and
Afghanistan, for example – without foreseeing the longer-term repercussions of such
interventions. The dilemma – that still haunts U.S. policies today – of how to reconcile global
concerns with local dynamics powerfully emerged in the policies initiated in the 1970s.
Moreover, while the early 1980s seemed to witness the return to the ‘first’ Cold War,
President Ronald Reagan’s second mandate marked a renewed pattern of high-level
negotiations with the Soviet Union on arms control. At the same time, the administration
superpowers pursued objectives incompatible with the rules of détente, (3) the rise of conservatism in the
United States caused the crisis of détente, (4) the bipolarity of the international system ultimately caused the
downfall of the policy; Olav Njolstad, “The Collapse of Superpower Détente” in Leffler and Westads (eds), The
Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The complex design of
cooperation in arms control amid geopolitical competition that I unveil in my book does not emerge in any of
these interpretations of détente.
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invested in increased efforts to drain the Soviets in the Third World. The Reagan doctrine
and the support for ‘freedom fighters’ can thus be seen as a revised version of the emphasis
on the periphery that is highlighted in my book. Therefore, one could argue that the pattern
emerged in the early 1970s not only continued during the Carter years, but also remained a
reference point later on. This would mean that the transition initiated in the 1970s had
repercussions throughout the rest of the Cold War and had an important impact on its
ending.
In conclusion, I agree with Hershberg that a “truly synthetic international history of the
1970s remains to be written.” But my purpose was not to write such a book. My scope is to
set forth a particular interpretation of U.S. policy throughout the decade. It does not want to
synthesize, nor does it intend to be comprehensive. I intended to propose another angle
from which to view the 1970s, and to trigger a wider reflection on the meaning and
implications of some (but not all) of America’s choices in moments of relative decline of
American power. In other words, I intended to make an argument for continuity (and on its
meaning and implications) where others have seen mainly change. Furthermore, though to a
lesser extent, I intended to provide a background history for some of America’s most
powerful current foreign policy dilemmas (mostly notably in Iran, but also in Afghanistan,
the Horn of Africa, and in the difficult relationship with China).
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