ABSTRACT
It is by now a commonplace observation that the “age of consensus” on questions of foreign policy was a casualty of the American involvement in Vietnam. This article focuses on the resulting domestic cleavages relating to foreign policy issues, and on their likely impact on American efforts to undertake basic systemic changes. The “Three-Headed Eagle” serves as a metaphor for a nation marked by three quite distinctive clusters of beliefs—described here as Cold War Internationalism, Post-Cold War Internationalism, and Isolationism—about the nature of the global system, the sources of threats to a just and stable world order, the appropriate international role for the United States, and the goals, strategies, and tactics that should guide American external relations.
