Daniel J. Sargent. A Superpower Transformed

“A superpower is different,” Daniel J. Sargent reminds us at the beginning of his magnificent history of U.S. foreign relations in the 1970s. “Unlike most other international actors, it operates on the world scale and even presumes responsibility for the international system as a whole” (1). And yet, in A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s, Sargent writes eloquently, comprehensively, and persuasively about the limits of power in a pluralizing, chaotic, interdependent world. Confronting new and unpredictable challenges, successive U.S. policymakers struggled to devise new strategies, reconciling Cold War commitments to a fractious world order that they strained to comprehend. A Superpower Transformed covers a critical phase in the Cold War—from the beginning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods order until the dawn of the 1980s—but this book is not solely about the East-West conflict. Sargent examines the reactions of U.S. policymakers to an array of global challenges, including but not limited to the rise of Soviet power. The efforts of U.S. administrations to limit or transcend the Cold War are chronicled here alongside concurrent struggles in the interrelated realms of energy security, monetary stability, and domestic economy. So, too, did the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter wrestle with the proliferation of non-governmental actors in the 1970s, the post-Vietnam crisis of authority, and the unprecedented moral challenge of human rights politics.

Cold war · Economic history · Economics · Foreign policy · Great power · International relations · Order (exchange) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Superpower · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies