Chapter in Perspective

Chapters 27 through 30 all considered how economic growth and the containment of communism became central features of the post-World War II era. Growing national wealth meant increasing national power. That power sustained an interventionist foreign policy that included the ill-fated Vietnam War. This chapter shows how economic woes growing out of domestic and international circumstances, plus a sense of disillusion over both Vietnam and the results of political and social reform, forced a realization that wealth and power faced limits. Twenty-five years of sustained economic growth ended, the United States recognized defeat in the Vietnam War, a President resigned in disgrace, the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity, and the United States suffered from dependence on unstable suppliers of foreign oil. The optimism of the previous quarter-century, that American power was supreme, that its prosperity might grow indefinitely, reeled from a series of shocks in the 1970s.