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A Superpower Transformed explores the predicament of American foreign policy in the 1970s. This was a phase when the dilemmas of an emerging post-Cold War era buffeted the United States even as the makers of American foreign policy struggled for stability in an enduring Cold War. Clashing imperatives made the 1970s a difficult phase. Amidst conflicting pressures, leaders struggled to devise strategic frameworks to guide the exercise of American power in the world. 1970s-era choices nonetheless proved consequential. The Nixon administration`s efforts to stabilize a faltering Pax Americana faltered, but Nixon`s choices ultimately helped the champions of human rights to wrest control of American foreign policy away from the practitioners of amoral realpolitik. So too did Nixon`s efforts to reverse the decline of American economic power help to open the doors to financial globalization, which accelerated quickly in the years following the 1971-73 collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system.
Choices proved consequential, but American decision makers remained the captives of unmasterable circumstances, as the oil crisis of 1973-74 made clear. Coinciding with Watergate, the oil crisis plunged the world economy into disarray. It also pushed American decision makers to begin to devise new strategies to manage-or mitigate-the consequences of economic globalization. Henry Kissinger, who led this effort, was less successful in his attempts to terms with a human rights movement that flourished in the mid-1970s. Not until the inauguration of the Carter administration would American decision makers embrace human rights promotion as a central task for foreign policy. Carter`s efforts to devise a post-Cold War foreign policy nonetheless faltered, confounded in the last years of 1970s by the resurgence of Soviet-American hostilities. While the Cold War resurged, the new forces of globalization and human rights that mobilized in the 1970s left the United States a superpower transformed.ISBN - 9780195395471
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Pages : 456
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