Abstract
During the Cold War, the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union served as a lens through which nearly every major international development was viewed. It is only with the gradual emergence from that configuration that other trends, ones more relevant to us today, have come into focus, causing us to reconsider the factors that shaped events. Daniel Sargent’s book offers one such re-examination. Surveying the formulation of American foreign policy during the 1970s, he challenges the Cold War paradigm to show the ways in which the forces of globalisation familiar to us today were the dominant influences defining it then.
What aided this process, in Sargent’s view, was the onset of détente in the late 1960s. As the two superpowers adopted a position of uneasy coexistence, their ossified confrontation played a diminishing role in defining international issues. Yet Sargent sees economics as the major cause of this shift. By the 1970s, the Western economies had lost most of the dynamism that had driven their postwar growth, prompting a cooperative search for solutions. The growing importance of oil as a fuel source was also a factor, as the shift of the United States from being a net producer to a voracious consumer illustrated the growing interdependence of Western nations upon the Middle East and Latin America for their energy needs.
Supplementing these trends was the efforts of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to spotlight human rights abuses, which often placed domestic political pressure on American leaders to do something about them. Faced with a new confluence of forces, successive presidential administrations struggled to adjust to the changing environment in which they found themselves, with the adoption of policies that continue to define international relations down to the present day.
Well-written and supported by a wealth of research, Sargent’s book is an impressive re-evaluation of the development of American foreign policy during the 1970s. But while he makes a persuasive case for looking beyond the Cold War dynamic, often he errs too far in the other direction. In particular, he never addresses why American policymakers never abandoned completely their pre-1970s Cold War mindset, which enjoyed a resurgence by the end of the decade and arguably played a far greater role in shaping US foreign policy in the 1980s than the forces of globalisation which Sargent describes. A more nuanced argument would have made for a more convincing reinterpretation, although one that might have resulted in a less thought-provoking book.