ABSTRACT
However, this assertion is not the only way to read these events. America did go through a period of navel-gazing after Vietnam and Watergate, but the Carter administration that followed could be seen as an attempt to restore a moral foundation to American foreign policy with its linkage of such policy with human rights. It did continue to assert American interests abroad, as Siebers notes with regard to the Ethiopian/Somalian conflict and the Carter Doctrine’s statement of America’s right to intervene in the Gulf. I am not saying that such a reading of America at this time as outward-looking, or certain of itself, is any more useful or accurate, just that the attempt to map the broad strokes of American foreign policy on to particular critical approaches seems fraught with difficulty. It should also be noted that Watergate-as a kind of seminal American loss of political faith-was not a cold war event, and that the seventies malaise was as much down to such internal events as to the external conflict with the Communist bloc. Even Vietnam, while clearly a cold war event, impacted on the United States as much as a military failure as it did as an example of the failure of cold war politics. To some extent it could even be said that it was the perceived loss for Americans of the cold war relevance of the Vietnam conflict that resulted in the domestic political pressure to withdraw: Americans went in to hold back the domino progress of Communism and ended up killing peasants in My Lai. Vietnam could thus be seen as a distraction from the certainties of the cold war which Carter’s ending of détente, and the so-called ‘second cold war’ under Reagan, actually sought to restore.
