Reasserting America in the 1970s: U.S. public diplomacy and the rebuilding of America’s image abroad

By Manchester University Press

Reasserting America in the 1970s brings together two areas of burgeoning scholarly interest. On the one hand, scholars are investigating the many ways in which the 1970s constituted a profound era of transition in the international order. The American defeat in Vietnam, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods exchange system and a string of domestic setbacks including Watergate, Three-Mile Island and reversals during the Carter years all contributed to a grand reappraisal of the power and prestige of the United States in the world. In addition, the rise of new global competitors such as Germany and Japan, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union and the emergence of new private sources of global power contributed to uncertainty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526104861

Book preview

Key Studies in Diplomacy

Series Editors: J. Simon Rofe Giles Scott-Smith

Emeritus Editor: Lorna Lloyd

This innovative series of books examines the procedures and processes of diplomacy, focusing on the interaction between states through their accredited representatives, that is, diplomats. Volumes in the series focus on factors affecting foreign policy and the ways in which it is implemented through the diplomatic system in both bilateral and multilateral contexts. They examine how diplomats can shape not just the presentation, but the substance of their state’s foreign policy. Since the diplomatic system is global, each book aims to contribute to an understanding of the nature of diplomacy. Authors comprise both scholarly experts and former diplomats, able to emphasize the actual practice of diplomacy and to analyse it in a clear and accessible manner. The series offers essential primary reading for beginning practitioners and advanced level university students.

Previously published by Bloomsbury:

21st Century Diplomacy: A Practitioner’s Guide by Kishan S. Rana

A Cornerstone of Modern Diplomacy: Britain and the Negotiation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by Kai Bruns

David Bruce and Diplomatic Practice: An American Ambassador in London, 1961–9 by John W. Young

Embassies in Armed Conflict by G.R. Berridge

Published by Manchester University Press:

Human rights and humanitarian diplomacy: negotiating for human rights protection and humanitarian access by Kelly-Kate Pease

Contents

Acknowledgments

1       Introduction: Reasserting America in the 1970s    Hallvard Notaker, Giles Scott-Smith, and David J. Snyder

2       Historical Setting: The Age of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt    Thomas W. Zeiler

Part One: A New Public Diplomacy for a New America

3       The Devil at the Crossroads: USIA and American Public Diplomacy in the 1970s    Nicholas J. Cull

4       The Sister-City Network in the 1970s: American Municipal Internationalism and Public Diplomacy in a Decade of Change    Brian C. Etheridge

5       The Exposure of CIA Sponsorship of Radio Free Europe: The Crusade for Freedom, American Exceptionalism, and the Foreign–Domestic Nexus of Public Diplomacy    Kenneth Osgood

6       USIA Responds to the Women’s Movement, 1960–1975    Laura A. Belmonte

7       The Low Key Mulatto Coverage: Race, Civil Rights, and American Public Diplomacy, 1965–1976    Michael L. Krenn

8       Paintbrush Politics: The Collapse of American Arts Diplomacy, 1968–1972    Claire Bower

9       Selling Space Capsules, Moon Rocks, and America: Spaceflight in U.S. Public Diplomacy, 1961–1979    Teasel Muir-Harmony

Part Two: The World Responds to a Reassertive America

10    America’s Public Diplomacy in France and Italy during the Years of Eurocommunism    Alessandro Brogi

11    Selling America between Sharpeville and Soweto: The USIA in South Africa, 1960–1976    John C. Stoner

12    Selling the American West on the Frontier of the Cold War: The U.S. Army’s German-American Volksfest in West Berlin, 1965–1981    Benjamin P. Greene

13    Unquiet Americans: The Church Committee, the CIA, and the Intelligence Dimension of U.S. Public Diplomacy in the 1970s    Paul M. McGarr

14    Time to Heal the Wounds: America’s Bicentennial and U.S.–Sweden Normalization in 1976    M. Todd Bennett

15    Something to Boast About: Western Enthusiasm for Carter’s Human Rights Diplomacy    Barbara Keys

16    To Arms for the Western Alliance: The Committee on the Present Danger, Defense Spending, and the Perception of American Power Abroad, 1973–1980    John M. Rosenberg

Afterword

17    Afterword: Selling America in the Shadow of Vietnam    Robert J. McMahon

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the following for their support, both in terms of the research workshop held at the Nobel Institute on 1–2 November and the Digital Diplomacy symposium at the Fritt Ord Foundation in Oslo on 31 October 2013, and the ensuing book project: the Walker Institute at the University of South Carolina; the U.S. Embassy, Oslo; the Norwegian Nobel Institute; the Norwegian Board of Technology; the Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, The Netherlands; the Fritt Ord Foundation, Oslo; and the University of Oslo. The editors are also grateful for the added intellectual contributions of USIA veteran and Director of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, Michael Schneider. Special mention should also go to the following: Asle Toje, Geir Lundestad, Bjørn Vangen, Helge Pharo, Tore Tennøe, Erik Rudeng, Tim Moore, and Kim Dubois.

1

Introduction:

Reasserting America in the 1970s

Hallvard Notaker, Giles Scott-Smith, and David J. Snyder

What was it about the 1970s that required the reassertion of America, as we claim in the title of this book, then as now the single most powerful nation in the world? The period under discussion overflows that of a simple ten-year decade—the long 1970s is now a common term—and it was deeply felt emotionally, psychologically, financially, and politically by those who lived through it. For this book, the 70s covers 1965–1980, what we can refer to as America’s post-confidence era. The 70s encompasses, emphatically, the dawning consciousness in the United States and around the world that the Vietnam War was a watershed of major proportions, encompassing the conviction that the war demonstrated the limits of American power (though not of American hubris). The 70s marks the disappointing end to the hopeful period of civil rights gains for African Americans that had begun years earlier, as well as the still very uncertain outcome of the feminist battle for women’s rights. It symbolizes a new era of American economic vulnerability in the world. Finally, the 70s is a shorthand for the deepening political mistrust that reached its peak in the convulsions of Watergate, but which also includes the increasingly desperate dissembling of the Johnson administration at the opening of the era and the apparent fecklessness of the Carter administration at the close, each bookending the underhand menaces of the Nixon administration. It was, as the opening essay by Thomas Zeiler makes clear, a time of FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Symbols of American decline seemed to be everywhere in the 70s. Inspiring political leaders were gunned down in public, as if law and order itself were evaporating. Riots in northern cities and slums seemed, for many, proof of America’s spiritual decline, a certainty verified when violence claimed younger lives on college campuses north and south. The excitement of the Apollo missions quickly died away, factories shuttered, American streets filled with Japanese cars, nuclear power plants cracked open. For many conservatives, the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion offered a shuddering imprimatur to the new era of brutal disregard for old verities. Progressives lamented the fracturing of the old liberal establishment, certified by George McGovern’s crushing 1972 defeat to Nixon. American mass culture, consumption habits, environmental norms, and gender practices came under intense scrutiny. Big Government was questioned by increasingly fervent market-oriented solutions to social and political dilemmas, with the restructuring of New York City’s debt-ridden administration according to a monetarist agenda in 1975 a harbinger of what was to come.¹ Strange new vocabulary entered the American lexicon: urban guerilla, stagflation, and gas guzzler among them, all heralding a shocking and unexpected end to certainties that had seemed to define the postwar generation since 1945. In this era of cultural pessimism, Americans turned inward, to the family, to a rapidly coalescing preoccupation with morality as a cause of the decline, and to cultural escapism via disco music, Saturday Night Live, and increasingly insipid television sit-coms.

For many Americans, it seemed as if overnight the United States had lost its way. Gone were the triumphant days of apparently easy American foreign policy successes, from the Marshall Plan to the Berlin airlift to any number of morally dubious, but nevertheless successful Cold War interventions in foreign lands. Gone too were the easy days of American economic supremacy when the dollar, growth rates, and consumer habits ruled the world. A (white) man with a gray flannel suit was no longer assured success in the 70s as he seemingly had been before. The rise of new global competitors such as Germany and Japan, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, and the emergence of new private sources of global power—the sudden recognition of the impermanence of American ascendancy that one influential anthology memorably terms the shock of the global—all assaulted American confidence in the nation’s purpose and decency.²

In that earlier postwar period, American culture seemed to reign supreme. The images and habits of American mass culture were everywhere, or at least to many foreign observers, appeared to be everywhere. Who did not know James Dean and Marilyn Monroe? Who had not considered, and perhaps even pined for, the luxuries of the American grocery store and the opulence of the American kitchen? Several European nations found it necessary to enact prohibitive import quotas on Hollywood films lest American cinema swamp their domestic film industries.

This easy confidence found its way into the work of the cultural relations officials in the State Department, the United States Information Agency, the Voice of America, the Economic Cooperation Administration, and the other agencies of what would later be called American public diplomacy. The 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s appear as a golden age of American culture as millions of foreigners, especially young people, hungered for the music, film, and fashion of the United States. During and after World War II, American information and cultural programs rested on a broad consensus that promoting American culture, and explaining American intentions, was an essential aspect of U.S. diplomatic practice. U.S. economic hegemony and cultural leadership helped legitimize the extension of military power, especially in areas traditionally suspicious of American culture. Misgivings and protest against American cultural exports only indicated that the message needed to be amplified, not adapted.

Yet the message was not universally accepted at the receiving end, and by the 70s the forces of rejection appeared to gain strength and combine into a more threatening cultural movement, often working in tandem with domestic U.S. criticism. European skepticism towards American-style modernity and perceptions of a culture obsessed with material progress were reinvigorated by waves of protest against global injustice and environmental destruction through the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the 70s came to represent not only a rupture, but also continuity—a crescendo of lingering doubts about America. Violence both in Vietnam and on the streets of America became inducements for the receiving end to talk back at, and even to reject, U.S. public diplomacy efforts that had previously been consumed with a seemingly healthy appetite. By the time of the 70s, the paramount confidence of the surprisingly short-lived American Century was gone.³

This volume explores this environment along two tracks which give organizing shape to our narrative. Firstly, the problems of projection. How did American cultural and information officials approach their work in the new 1970s era of fear, uncertainty, and doubt? What could they say about a nation now apparently no longer confident of its own righteousness? How did public diplomacy function when its claims of progress through the 1950s and 1960s no longer squared with the political, military, and economic limitations of the 1970s? Secondly, the encounters at the receiving end. How were public diplomacy programs received in various parts of the world, each often undergoing their own historic convulsions? How did global publics perceive the United States in an era when many Americans themselves were deeply pessimistic about their country’s performance and future? How far did U.S. propagandists reshape or reframe their methods and messages to deal with this new critical environment? In short, how did U.S. public diplomats sell America to an increasingly skeptical global public?

Several important themes run through the chapters in this collection, all of them relevant for understanding America’s role in the world and its public diplomacy strategies during the 70s. Firstly, civil rights and the Vietnam War were the two issues that overshadowed all public diplomacy efforts around the globe. With 1968 as a rough cut-off point, while the message before had been one of gradual progress and commitments worth the cost, the message in the 70s had to deal with a sense of broken promises, simmering social discontent, and military defeat. Nixon may have crafted one of the most remarkable landslide victories in the 1972 presidential elections, but Peace with honor did not sell well outside of the confines of the U.S. electorate.

A second theme is the importance of public–private cooperation in promoting and interpreting U.S. interests and culture abroad. This was not new—the private sector had always been a partner, and indeed a forerunner, of government initiatives in this field. What the ensuing chapters demonstrate, however, is the variety of private partners that were active, to varying degrees of autonomy. While the Sister City movement did team up with the State Department, its local interests did not always coincide with national policy. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army was running its own public diplomacy campaign in West Berlin, and the fragmentation of U.S. foreign policy elite opinion in the era of détente saw influential private organizations such as the Committee on the Present Danger actively opposing Washington’s designs.

U.S. public diplomats aimed to channel, package, or manage ideas, texts, and discourses emerging naturally, and chaotically, from American society. They wrestled with the ideological tensions of promoting U.S. diplomatic interests abroad while at the same time fairly representing a diffuse, pluralist, and often deeply conflicted domestic culture at home. Too determined management of public diplomacy campaigns would have invited charges of propaganda, but too little management would have left the cultural field open for accusations by critics of American racism, sexism, and materialism. These tensions were diluted somewhat in the triumphalist consensus culture of the 1940s and 1950s, but the 70s reveal more than ever the rich and problematic relationship between domestic American culture and official public diplomacy policy. Scholarship on U.S. public diplomacy tends to generalize the multiple sources of American cultural influence abroad, as if everything was guided by enlightened management. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the unexpected, multilayered sides to U.S. public diplomacy, in contrast to many studies that tend to flatten it out as a one-dimensional practice of selected one-dimensional agencies. By investigating public diplomacy as a fraught process of cultural management, as opposed to a peripheral marketing or branding of an American image, new directions for historical research are opened up.

Ensuing from this public–private relation as a key analytical lens for public diplomacy studies is the related observation that many of the domestic upheavals and social, political, and cultural protest movements which sapped American morale at home escaped the capacity of public diplomacy officials to manage them abroad. This is the third theme—the fact that America’s increasingly raucous social and political diversity produced unexpected results abroad. Even while government officials often failed to counter the image of an America in irrevocable decline, that very image opened new avenues of cultural prestige abroad. For many foreign observers, it was precisely the new uncertainties that made American culture less threatening, despite its prevailing ubiquity. The emancipatory potential of American culture, so confidently asserted at mid-century, had always been a force of cultural subversion, a fact often dismissed by American officials. Now it had to be less assertive, more accommodating, civilized, and ultimately agreeable. A new era of American prestige had arrived, but it was one that officials found difficult to perceive, or promote.

Going against the grain of much of the scholarship on the 70s, therefore, this book presents an array of reasons for claiming that American culture enjoyed a curious renaissance precisely because its shortcomings were most apparent.⁴ The activism and radicalism of the other America resonated abroad and picked up admirers along the way, even if these (often youthful) admirers were not the standard publics sought out by public diplomacy campaigns. At the same time, new public diplomacy initiatives offered both pro- and anti-American voices a moment to appropriate American cultural power, allowing them to reinvent and revive themselves. Moments such as the 1976 Bicentennial allowed pro-American interests to parade their cause with added fervor, precisely because the limits to American power were evident for all to see. Many still yearned for clear signs of U.S. decisiveness and clarity of vision, even if they were afraid to say so.

Facing up to what America meant in the world involved challenging narratives of decline and reinventing U.S. global leadership in an effort to re-boot American power. This links the chessplay of Nixon–Kissinger realpolitik with the human rights agenda of the Carter administration—both sought to re-position the United States, in different ways, within a rapidly changing, post-colonial global environment.⁵ Reasserting America in the 1970s therefore complements the arguments put forward by other recent studies on this period. Barbara Zanchetta’s The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s, for instance, is a close fit, although it restricts itself to power politics and the U.S.–Soviet relationship, and this volume goes much further to explore the domestic and global socio-political ramifications of these processes.⁶ More appropriate is Daniel Sargent’s A Superpower Transformed, which argues that the developments of the 1970s redefined the sources of American power … not according to a coherent design but in a chaotic pattern. Similar to Sargent, Reasserting America links the history of globalization (for which the 1970s is a phase of breakthrough) with changes in the U.S. domestic experience,⁷ but it goes further in order to explore the ways and means U.S. public diplomacy necessarily emerged from this transformation and tried to explain it, positively and credibly, to skeptical (and often hostile) global publics.

A fourth theme concerns the changing worldwide context. U.S. public diplomacy had always maintained a global conceit and a universalist ethos. U.S. officials claimed to be acting for The Free World or even For All Mankind, part of the mission through the twentieth century to recast international affairs according to a stable, just, (U.S.-led) world order. Instead of demolishing this mantra, the 70s actually gave the universal message a new resonance. Technological superiority had laid out the path for reaching the moon, and this, perhaps paradoxically, also provided revelatory images of a precarious and imperiled world. Likewise, the global south moved from being an occasional and abstract field for American image management to becoming a high stakes arena for ideological conflict, the litmus test for designs of future world orders. This was a terrain littered with both opportunity and danger.

Fifth, and central to the approach of this book, is the often unrecognized but crucial fact that both ends of the transmission and reception axis are important to understand the full dynamics of public diplomacy practise. In contrast to much public diplomacy literature, Reasserting America in the 1970s consciously sets out to highlight the problematic and contested nature of public diplomacy practises both in the U.S. and abroad, and examines how responses to those practises actively shaped policy formulation back in Washington. Drawing on the themes presented above, this produces three critical analytical contexts for understanding public diplomacy as a historical process: the roiled, democratic, variegated, and messy domestic mass culture that produces narratives active in the international sphere; the attempts to manage those mass cultural discourses by Washington; and their reception by foreign audiences, involving a sorting, sifting, appropriating, and rejecting of U.S. information and cultural management.

Sixth, we observe the profound linkages between what is often referred to as hard and soft power. A prevailing current in the existing literature on public diplomacy considers soft power as a deployable asset separate from the operations of hard economic and military power proper. This analytical conceit we reject. Rather, we closely calibrate American soft power to the hard power wielded by the United States, even in this period. This intertwining is rare in the field, where the analytical norm is to separate the two and thus consider soft power an independent variable in international relations. As this anthology clearly shows, no extension of so-called soft power can be decoupled from considerations of hard power, at either the transmitting or the receiving end. No public diplomacy campaign could fully counter the real and perceived narratives of U.S. decline in this period. The public diplomacy blowback at home and abroad from the revelations of the CIA’s misuse of its powers demonstrates this powerfully. Soft power also had a temporal dimension. Short-term rhetorical statements of intent could boomerang into longer-term critiques of American hypocrisy. Nowhere is this dynamic more in evidence than during the Carter years, when a new human rights rhetoric echoed back to the United States as a powerful critique of American domestic practice.

These six themes constitute fresh perspectives on U.S. public diplomacy and global cultures, delving into activities that conventional scholarship on U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s has bypassed as being of only secondary importance. Détente may have been the signal policy of the Nixon administration, but it was formulated in a context of profound political battles over control of U.S. foreign policy. Fall-out from the constant revelations of CIA skullduggery had an impact both at home and abroad. Shifting foreign policy interests caused domestic political elites to reach abroad for allies, looking for greater leverage and an amplified voice for their causes. The collapse of Cold War consensus opened up new space for fresh policy debates, requiring in turn fresh public diplomacy campaigns. The north–south debate, détente, an evolving transatlantic relationship facing up to the rise of the rest, the emergence of the human rights agenda, all of these opened up new directions for public diplomacy, not only in terms of programming, but in terms of reconceptualizing what public diplomacy was and what it could achieve. The creation of vantage points that were no longer constrained by mere anti-communism attracted novel partners. Women’s rights, pan-Africanism, human rights campaigners, transnational elites, artists, left-leaning intellectuals, and municipal officials now became vectors of public diplomacy, both complicating the work of public diplomats and offering new opportunities for diplomatic leverage and intrigue. Bipolarity was no longer the sole scaffolding for public diplomacy in the 1970s. By knocking this away, the novel diplomatic complexities of the period, and the multiple ways in which public diplomacy tried to both deal with these contrasting narratives and somehow craft a positive message in response, are there to be explored. This book charts what we hope is a beginning to this exploration.

Notes

1David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44–47.

2Niall Ferguson et al. (eds), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010).

3See the differing opinions in Andrew Bacevich (ed.), The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

4See for instance Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2012); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Beth Bailey and David Farber (eds), America in the 1970s (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

5See for instance Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: Harper, 2007); Mario del Pero, The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6Barbara Zanchetta, The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

7Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2, 10.

2

Historical Setting: The Age of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

Thomas W. Zeiler

A list of problems facing the United States at home and abroad, as the country entered the 1970s, prompts one to recall an acronym that appeared during the decade: FUD. Meaning fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the abbreviation was employed in business marketing contexts by rivals in the tech sector in the mid-1970s. FUD was a tactic for disseminating false information through negative advertising by computer industry competitors like IBM and (later) Microsoft. Such scare-mongering aimed to raise doubts among consumers regarding new, and old, products.¹ If applied more broadly than to the IT sector, FUD offers an accurate description of the outlook of many Americans in the 1970s, one that captures the mindset and policy conundrums of leaders and the public during an era of great tumult and worry. All perceived a United States in decline. The American Bicentennial celebration in 1976 epitomized FUD—people became nostalgic patriots but mainly to divert attention from the recent Watergate trauma and persistent economic crises that seemed to worsen as the decade wore on. In short, this was an age of anxiety at home, a period of unease and challenge not encountered in such depth of emotion since the Great Depression.

Putting to one side the success of the American football champions Pittsburgh Steelers (a symbolic band-aid for the labor devastation facing the American Midwest), Toyota salesmen, and suddenly wealthier Norwegians (fueled by North Sea oil discoveries in the latter part of the decade), much of the rest of the world also experienced fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And even those wealthy Norwegians worried about a buildup of Soviet military power near their shores and a waning NATO presence on the high seas that gave a strategic edge to the Russians.² In this age of uncertainty, the global and the local political, social, and economic contexts intertwined, shaping decisions made under the duress of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

An age of FUD

This was clearly an age of angst, of concern, for American leaders in both the domestic and international arenas. Of course, of top worry was the Vietnam War—a conflict that had dragged on for a half decade and had wasted lives and money, American and foreign both. The war eroded public support not only for military interventions abroad but for leaders as well (and would have a role in the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974). Some believed the Cold War might be turning in favor of the Soviet Union, thereby jeopardizing American interests. Nixon himself understood the change, and he knew the consequences; the Soviets had gained strategic parity with the United States. Allies were unhappy with American policies. Neutrals such as the Swedes, under Prime Minister Olaf Palme, ripped U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, Chile, and elsewhere. Europeans in general prominently pushed for détente between the superpowers. A rising communist China and war in India joined domestic concerns about economic health and human rights abroad to add to the list of headaches. President Nixon, along with his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, faced an increasingly hostile public and intrusive Congress that were tired of war and a weak economy.

At home, as most historians agree, the 1970s witnessed the death pangs of the New Deal order, and the advent of conservatism. The economy largely drove this change. The divisive politics of inflation witnessed the reemergence of old conflicts from the nineteenth century—business versus labor—that had been subsumed by the consumer politics and the bigger-pie philosophy of the postwar era of middle-class abundance. Even Major League Baseball faced challenges to its labor contracts that threatened to topple the financial structure and governance of the national pastime. In short, fear, uncertainty, and doubt swept through many sectors of the American economy. Although it did not become a household acronym, FUD emerged as a common feeling of dread.

At least one historian has likened America in the 1970s to Great Britain a century before.³ The resemblance was clear; both were the most powerful nations in the world, in their times, and both were in decline—or at least perceived to be in decline. Perceptions were important, but there were facts to back up such thinking. Britain and America had been strong hegemons that oversaw formal and informal empires, largely dictated international arrangements, and ruled the global economy. For both, that dominance waned. Attempts were made to recapture their strength, but the very process of doing so—military interventions, propping up faltering currencies, protecting their trade interests—only led to a further weakening in the international order.

In the early 1970s, working-class and middle-class Americans woke up to the realization that times had, indeed, become tougher, and would likely remain so. Such struggles had largely not been the case since World War II. Things were falling apart, despair and depression reigned, and popular culture reflected the declinist sentiment. For instance, as the 1977 hit movie Saturday Night Fever suggested, disco dancing was now an acceptable escape from dead-end jobs and mounting racial and cultural tensions. Americans were fighting with each other: racial strife over schools and busing, women and men over diminishing economic returns; southern boomtowns against decaying northern cities; suburbs against cities; consumers versus labor and, on occasion, big business.

Another way to view the misery index of the decade is to compare it to those that preceded and succeeded it. Although riven by the Vietnam War, the 1960s represented a highpoint of American capitalism and power, and confidence abounded—so much so that the U.S. government undertook a war to eradicate poverty as the culmination of the New Deal social reform system. Pundits spoke in terms of (over)abundance, unions were strong, and even the Europeans denounced the Americanization of their region by powerful American multinationals. Fast forward to the 1980s, and with the end of the recession in the early years of the decade, President Ronald Reagan could talk of morning in America again, at least for the upper middle class and wealthy, and even some workers. The economy picked up in this decade of nascent globalization, as did U.S. confidence in its foreign policy as the Vietnam War receded into the past. To be sure, neither the 1960s nor 1980s ushered in eras of perfect happiness for all Americans; there were signs of distress even in these good times, such as racial conflict, urban demise, and political battles at home and abroad over American interventionism. Nevertheless, the 1970s have increasingly been seen as the dark decade between two brighter periods, in which America seemed to fall apart entirely.

The country’s postwar bounty of natural, booming, and seemingly thought-free prosperity had apparently run out. For a nation that had taken to heart the mantra of the supposed American Century, in which the trajectory of growth would continue steadily upward and the world looked to the United States’ economy for markets and credits, the struggling bottom line was jarring. Not only were the domestic and international scenes changing for the worse for the United States, but the very foundations of its leadership were being questioned. Core values—of work being the road to success, of perseverance and effort, initiative and individualism, and freedom from an overweening state—seemed in a slow fade. Whining and insecurity replaced confidence and vigor; Americans did not project the values of a winner and a leader as much as before. By the end of the decade they were suffering a crisis of confidence, in the words of President Jimmy Carter, as energy costs surged and caused gas shortages for the automobile—what many Americans perceived as a brutal attack on the key icon of American power and prosperity. Assembly lines and schools shut down, lights dimmed, and speed limits slowed—President Carter even appeared in a cardigan on national television to plead with Americans to conserve by turning down the heat in their houses. Another president, Gerald Ford, became a symbol of the tough times as he stumbled down the exit stairway of Air Force One, tumbled down a ski slope, and banged his head on a helicopter doorway. He was subsequently ridiculed for these gaffes on the new hit satirical television show, Saturday Night Live, but they signified a stumbling country bumbling and lurching into decline as well. Comedic satire and irony seemed to gain new prominence in this era of diminished expectations, which fomented a new skepticism about the future. As novelist John Updike noted, the great American ride of outright dominance, progress, and unfettered prosperity was over.⁴

A consensus among commentators now labels the 1970s as the kick-off to an age of fracture—talk of society, history, and power gave way, writes Daniel Rodgers, to individuals, contingency, and choice. Americans no longer consolidated their institutions and their commonalities in pursuing the notion of the powerful (though often elusive) American Dream of success.⁵ The explanation was, in part, due to the emergence of an age of inequality, writes political scientist Judith Stein (in a judgment echoed by labor and political historians), which has shaped the history of the last forty years.⁶ Abroad, despite the efforts of public diplomacy to project firm leadership and faith in individualism, the work ethic, and the future, the country appeared to be reconceptualizing the values that had guided it in the postwar years, and perhaps even shrinking from its global responsibilities of the past.

Economic challenges and globalization

The FUD felt by many Americans was not merely symbolic, however, but had roots in real global transformations. The early 1970s were a time when the United States, powerful still, experienced economic decline relative to the rising European Community and Japan, spurring class struggle at home. Although politicians across the political spectrum abhorred referring to the troubles as class warfare, which was such a divisive, European term, in fact the United States experienced a widening class divide. The 1970s, in other words, were the socio-economic seed grounds for the Occupy and Tea Party movements of forty years later.

Circumstances were not all the fault of the United States; structural changes were underfoot. What we now know as globalization emerged from the bifurcation of the Cold War, a conflict that spurred regionalization and helped the efforts of transnational corporations to capture markets without regard to national interests. The new phenomenon of globalization suggested to many Americans that the United States had lost its autonomy in world affairs by the 1970s—lost it to competition from allies in Europe and Japan, to Third World nations demanding reform, to people (mostly liberals and workers) tired of American unilateralism, to multinational companies that undercut government control over economic policies, and to transnational and nongovernmental organizations that operated independently of the state.⁷ Many talked of decline, fearing that the United States, even the West in general, was in a downward slide.

In economics, the picture was far from rosy. Two oil crises in the decade not only linked the domestic arena to international developments, but they vastly transformed power relationships worldwide. And they brought into question American hegemony. One of the editors of a recent history of the global crises of the 1970s believes that actually, things were not so bad. In fact, there was solid growth, trade and capital market liberalization, and overall adjustment to the oil price hikes worldwide. The aggregate performance of the global economy was decent, asserts this view, when compared to previous decades, and the trend toward democratic regimes abroad continued as well. Surely, on a global scale, the economy of the 1970s staggered but maintained a good record. Scandinavia, again, provides an example of economic success, or at least instances when the bottom did not fall out. Some countries, like Norway, fared better by the end of the decade than the rest of Scandinavia, although the means used to prop up employment and real incomes would hardly have been sustainable without the country’s newfound petroleum riches. Economic integration in the region experienced fits and starts. Cod fishermen in Iceland sparred with the British and thereby dented the efforts at accommodation, and thus unity among these northern nations. Interestingly, Iceland and Norway both opted against joining the European Community (Iceland never applied, while Norway rejected it in a referendum), in part to preserve national control over rich natural resources, though they did make accommodations in trade and finance that gave their companies access to the Community. So, overall, the record of economic performance was decidedly mixed, and some scholars presume too much when applauding it. As a matter of degree of weakness, the 1970s represented a high rate of loss for the United States and many Europeans. In any case, American pessimism appeared to give hope to other nations that this superpower was properly chastened, and ready to assume a more equal partnership with them.

For the United States, the propping up of the dollar, rising pressures on the trade balance (which, from 1971, fell into deficit every year since), and the emergence of Japan as an effective industrial competitor meant a relative decline in power and hegemony. America remained the world’s largest exporter and the U.S. deficit served as a buttress for foreign production. Still, the country was losing ground to Western Europe, which was in the process of adding members to the European Community. The region had recovered vigorously from its postwar exhaustion, and along with Japan, enjoyed much higher rates of growth than the United States. Foreign producers continued to hurt core segments of the American economy, reminding confused Americans that overseas competitors that took their jobs and cut into profits were also strategic allies who benefited from costly American national security protection. That status allowed foreigners to challenge the United States in the global marketplace in such key sectors as electronics, computers and other high-tech manufactures, automobiles, and machinery. This competition underlay the FUD sentiment that grew throughout American society during the decade. While foreigners, too, suffered from inflation (price rises in Britain, France, Italy, and Japan averaged more than in America from 1968 to 1975), it was the lack of monetary and fiscal discipline in the United States that was largely the cause of global inflation.⁸ In short, the 1970s ushered in new actors and trends that promised a new balance of power in the world.

America’s performance in the world economy was certainly a worry for policymakers, for the trends in the 1970s tended to undermine U.S. strategic interests. For starters, American leadership was called into question when Nixon struck a death blow to the Bretton Woods monetary system—the central international financial structure founded, funded, and led by the United States itself for a quarter of a century after World War II—in order to bolster the dollar, stop the outflow of gold, and boost trade competitiveness.

In his economic shock announcements of 1971, Nixon, characteristically Machiavellian in employing tactical measures, orchestrated an end to Bretton Woods and ushered in the beginning of floating exchange rates. These developments indicated, however, weakness as much as power on the part of the United States. The dollar had come under such stress, as U.S. foreign and domestic spending policies prompted allies to draw down American gold reserves and place deflationary pressures on the greenback. Nixon (and the world) acknowledged the necessity of a decisive fix to the situation, or the entire financial and trade system would disintegrate. Thus, in August 1971, he severed the dollar’s link to gold, effectively setting a path to the eventual destruction of Bretton Woods. Policymakers around the world acknowledged the competitive threat from Japan and Europe, and the demise of the so-called American century of hegemony—indeed, that century had lasted just over twenty-five years. The subsequent two major oil crises, and the infusion of petrodollars alongside regular dollars, also indicated the changing of the guard and called into question America’s ability to achieve, or even maintain, its interests in the Middle East and other parts of the world. Inflation worries at home, and trade, energy, and monetary concerns abroad, revealed that the United States needed to overhaul its economic policies, as well as its stagnant economy as a whole.

A brand new approach would not occur until the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the advent of the modern-era