The Foreign Policy of the United States

For example, Ambrose writes that Ronald Reagan, perhaps the most ideologic of the insensate contend chairs, had to face the rising evidence of the limits of U.S. spot in shaping the area in an era of globalism. Globalism includes the acknowledgement that no nation, no matter how powerful, can control the solid ground as it was at least imagined a nation (the U.S. or the Soviet heart) could have in the past. As Ambrose writes with respect to Reagan and the slack lesson of Vietnam:

The failure of containment in Indochina led to another basic veer in attitude toward America's role in the world. . . . It was a normal realization that, given the twin restraints of fears of provoking a Russian nuclear strike and America's reluctance to use her full soldiers power, there was relatively little the U.S. could accomplish by advertise of arms. President Reagan showed an awareness of these limits in Poland, Afghanistan, and even Central America, and in withdrawing from Lebanon (xv).

However, it is also true that Reagan tried to install a crazy missile defense in the heavens, saw the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and referred to the Vietnam nightmare as a " fearful" war. The change in Lebanon indemnity was a matter of state-supported horror at the Marine deaths from a terrorist bombing, and not every well- casted realization of the limits of U.S. power in that nation

If this is true, and U.S. leaders continue to deal increasingly pragmatically with unknown affairs, it may not be the disaster some swear it will prove to be. It may be precisely what the U.S. necessitate in an era of globalism. Clinton's apparently makeshift approach to orthogonal affairs reflects, after all, a complete rethinking of U.S. foreign policy. Bush's desert Storm was perhaps the last gasp of Cold war policy, a throwback to battling the "evil empire," with Saddam Hussein and basal Islam replacing Stalin and communism. Clinton's slapdash approach, including a willingness to pull out of a nation (Somalia, for example) when the policy proves to be disastrous and counter-productive, may be the wisest policy the U.S.

can moldinesser in a world where it still has some scoke, but must ration that clout to retain it and to be able to wield it effectively in the future.

Ambrose, Stephen E. Rise to Globalism. New York: Penguin, 1993.

If we criticize Reagan on the right, we also must criticize Kennedy on the left, in terms of the willingness of every President from Truman through Bush to profit politically from the exaggerations of Cold War containment policy. Kennedy certainly entered office under the pall of the same Cold War ideology and its containment policy, as evidenced by his "missile gap" rhetoric, his increase in advisors in Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs encroachment of Cuba. We will never know whether he would have change U.S. policy, though his test-ban treaty with the Soviets, his denunciation of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and his picture to withdraw from Vietnam indicate at least a willingness to consider to a greater extent flexibility in that policy. With his assassination (a result, in part, of just that flexibility?) and the ascension of Lyndon Johnson, strict Cold War ideology was re-established, with the Vietnam War its major consequence.

Ambrose effectively argues, then, that American foreign policy in the period under study was often more a reaction
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