Lecture 13 The Great Shift of the 1970s: Realism, Globalization, and Human Rights

Question 1

What were the main causes of the collapse of the “Cold War consensus”?

Answer 1

♠ Vietnam
♠ Costs/Means
♠ Liberal Failures
♠ Domestic Breakdown and Violence
♠ End of New Deal compromise/coalition

Question 2

Elections of 1968

Answer 2

♠ Electoral Re-alignment & End of the New Deal coalition
♠ Crisis of Cold War Liberalism
♠ Necessity to manage partial retreat

Question 3

The New Deal coalition

Answer 3

the alignment of interest groups and voting blocs in the United States that supported the New Deal and voted for Democratic presidential candidates from 1932 until the late 1960s. It made the Democratic Party the majority party during that period, losing only to Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956. Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a coalition that included banking and oil industries, the Democratic state party organizations, city machines, labor unions, blue collar workers, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), farmers, white Southerners, people on relief, and intellectuals. The coalition began to fall apart with the bitter factionalism during the 1968 election, but it remains the model that party activists seek to replica.

Question 4

What are the main axioms of Cold War Liberalism that began to be contested in the 1970’s?

Answer 4

♠ Unlimited means
♠ Unlimited knowledge
♠ Necessity to globally contain Communism and USSR
♠ Necessity to have large and expensive military apparatus

Question 5

From early-cold war hubris…to crisis of confidence/consensus

Answer 5

“For the first time in twenty years, the scope, ideological temper, means, and purposes of American foreign policy were open for discussion”

[Robert Tucker, 1968]

Question 6

How did Nixon and Kissinger try to address the problem of the collapse of the “Cold War consensus”?

Answer 6

♠ Realist discourse v. Idealism/Exceptionalism
♠ (Geo)Politics before Economics
♠ Limits: Means and Possibilities

Question 7

The Nixon Doctrine (1969)

Answer 7

The U.S. will “assist in the defense and development of allies and friends, but it cannot, and it will not, conceive, all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.”

Question 8

Kissinger and «realism» (Geo)Politics before Economics)

Answer 8

«Evolutionary theory» had been used by the West «as a bromide,» in the belief that «democratic institutions developed after industrialization and as a result of economic development.» «To rely on economic development to bring about enlightened political institutions» meant instead «to reverse the real priorities.»

Question 9

What were the main objectives of Nixon & Kissinger realist turn?

Answer 9

♠ Co-opt USSR: Status Quo in Europe
♠ Contain centrifugal tendencies within US-led bloc (i.e.: Ostpolitik)
♠ Disengage from Vietnam
♠ Reduce Global Commitments (and Defense Expenses)
♠ Contain domestic “limitationist” pressures & build new consensus for internationalist foreign policy

Question 10

What were the main achievements and diplomatic successes of Nixon and Kissinger?

Answer 10

♠ De-escalation and end of conflict in Vietnam
♠ Opening to China
♠ Dialogue with USSR and SALT accords

Question 11

Why China from an absolute enemy became a quasi-ally?

Answer 11

♠ Sino-Soviet conflict: no communist monolith
♠ Failure of radical Maoist experiments («cultural revolution», 1966): realism and change of leadership
♠ Crisis of Cold War liberalism: “age of limits”
♠ “De-ideologization” of Cold War

Question 12

Why did China need now [1970’s] the US?

Answer 12

♠ Strategically: vs. USSR (while limiting defense expenditures)
♠ Economically: trade partner + US technology
♠ Diplomatically: to complete end of isolation

Question 13

Why did the US need now China?

Answer 13

♠ Burden-sharing, i.e.: regional containment of the USSR
♠ Play on Sino-Soviets tensions
♠ Help to pull out of the Vietnam quagmire

Question 14

What were the main limits of the US-Sino rapprochement?

Answer 14

♠ Declaration of intents/scant results on the short term
♠ Mutual suspicion
♠ No help with Vietnam
♠ Taiwan

Question 15

What were the bases of the Détente with the Soviet Union?

Answer 15

♠ SALT I

♠ ABM Treaty

Question 16

ABM Treaty

Answer 16

1972 - The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty or ABMT) was a treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the limitation of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems used in defending areas against ballistic missile-delivered nuclear weapons. Under the terms of the treaty, each party was limited to two ABM complexes, each of which was to be limited to 100 anti-ballistic missiles.

Question 17

Moscow summit I

Answer 17

It was held May 22–30, 1972. It featured the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), and the U.S.–Soviet Incidents at Sea agreement. The summit is considered one of the hallmarks of the détente at the time between the two Cold War antagonists.

Question 18

Bipolar Détente

Answer 18

♠ Interest in the stability of the system and preservation of European status quo
♠ Preservation hierarchy of power
♠ Limit risk accidental war & Institutionalize strategic interdependence

Question 19

What were the main limits of the US/Soviet Détente?

Answer 19

♠ Euro-centric
♠ Competition elsewhere
♠ Domestic opposition & political culture
♠ New Problems: Oil, Human Rights (Globalization)

Question 20

Causes of 1970s globalization

Answer 20

♠ Economic Trends: De-regulation, “financialization”
♠ Technology: greater interdependence
♠ Energy costs and environmental concerns
♠ New rights: human rights
→ Identity Space ≠ Decision Space (Charles Maier)

Question 21

Globalization as crisis of “territoriality”

Answer 21

Territoriality means simply the properties, including power, provided by the control of bordered political space, which until recently at least created the framework for national and often ethnic identity.

Question 22

Economic/Environmental Globalization:

Oil Shocks 1973 & 1979

Answer 22

♠ Higher costs in Western oil production
♠ Centrality of Middle East and conflicts: Israel, Iran
♠ Vulnerability of “West”

Question 23

Political/Cultural Globalization: Human Rights

Answer 23

♠ New Universalism
♠ Alternative to other utopias (communism overall)
♠ Political content Vs. absolute sovereignty

Question 24

Why did the American public increasingly reject Nixon and Kissinger’s policies?

Answer 24

♠ Impact of Watergate
♠ Rejection of Kissinger’s “Realpolitik”
♠ Vs. implicit normalization/de-exceptionalization of the US
♠ Values v. Politics

Question 25

Why did the issue of political dissent and its repression in the USSR become so central?

Answer 25

♠ Proof of inner ambiguity of détente
♠ Appeal to the strategic and moral lessons of the 1930s:
♠ Dètente as new “Appeasement”
♠ Solzhenitzin case (The Gulag Archipelago, 1973)
→ Jackson-Vanik amendment
→ End of détente (SALT II)

Question 26

Jackson–Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974

Answer 26

provision in United States federal law intended to affect U.S. trade relations with countries with non-market economies (originally, countries of the Communist bloc) that restrict freedom of emigration and other human rights.

Question 27

What were the main discontinuities in Carter’s foreign policy?

Answer 27

♠ Human Rights & Morality
♠ North/South vs. East/West Eurocentrism
♠ Anti-realism
♠ Public diplomacy (vs. backchannels)

Question 28

Daniel Sargent, The United States and Globalization in the 1970s in Sargent, Manela, Ferguson and Maier (eds.), The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Historical Perspective, 2010

Answer 28

“Globalization enabled Washington to draw on global capital markets to sustain its deficits; it helped preserve the dollar as the world’s dominant currency, allowing the US to borrow without currency premiums; and its affirmed liberal ideals - freedom, human rights, and consumer choice - that informed a wave of democratic revolutions in the Eastern block and the global South. To a certain extent these sources of structural power compensated for the dwindling of traditional power assets - money, industrial output, and military force - that have been declining in relative terms, since August 1945” (p. 63)

Question 29

Mario Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist, 2010, ch. 2

Answer 29

• Kissinger is interested in usable power; coming from a realist point of view, what is the point of being the most powerful country in the world if you cannot use that power?

Question 30

Robert Osgood (NSC Staff), Analysis of changes in international politics since World War II and their implications for our basic assumptions about U.S. foreign policy, 20 October 1969 (FRUS)

Answer 30

One of the fundamental points of this memo: questioned containment but defended it, now considers containment as no longer the organizing principle of American FP

Question 31

SALT II

Answer 31

An agreement to limit strategic launchers was reached in Vienna on June 18, 1979, and was signed by Leonid Brezhnev and Carter. Six months after the signing, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and in September of the same year, the United States discovered that a Soviet combat brigade was stationed in Cuba. Although President Carter claimed this Soviet brigade had only recently been deployed to Cuba, the unit had been stationed on the island since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.) In light of these developments, the treaty was never ratified by the United States Senate. Its terms were, nonetheless, honored by the U.S. until it expired. The Soviet Union never abided by either of the SALT treaties.