A Superpower Transformed

Abstract

Abstract During the 1970s, new forces-especially globalization and the rise of a transnational movement for human rights-transformed the postwar international order. This book explains how American decision-makers responded to the dilemmas of a tumultuous era, during which the United States confronted the challenges of an emerging post-Cold War world even as it confronted the enduring realities of Soviet power. It charts the efforts of policymakers in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations to sustain America’s superpower role amid difficult, dynamic circumstances. None of these decision-makers succeeded in imposing their will on the international circumstances they confronted; instead, their designs and strategies were recurrently confounded. Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the historical actors on whom this book focuses, were nonetheless figures of great consequence. They participated in a remaking of American foreign policy. Still, the outcomes of their decisions and choices were more often than not different from what they had intended; the transformation of American superpower in the 1970s resulted from chance and circumstances as much as from choice.

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