Chapters 28 through 30 all considered how economic growth and rising prosperity became central features of the post-World War II era. Growing national wealth meant increasing American power. That wealth and power sustained an interventionist foreign policy that included the ill-fated Vietnam War. This chapter shows how the economic woes that followed Vietnam and the disillusion that grew out of the turmoil of political and social reform forced a reconsideration of the nation's limits. The optimism of the previous quarter-century, which led to a belief in the supremacy of American power and the boundlessness of economic prosperity, received a series of shocks during the 1970s.