622 Chapter 17 | Foreign PolicyAmerica also maintained large military forces, beginning its first peacetime draft
in the 1950s and building a large store of nuclear weapons. These weapons were
intended to deter war with the Soviet Union through the threat of mutually assured
destruction: the idea that even if the Soviet Union unleashed an all-out nuclear assault
on U.S. forces, enough American weapons would remain intact to deliver a similarly
devastating counterattack. The United States stationed hundreds of thousands of
troops in Western Europe and elsewhere to deter the Soviet threat. War nearly broke
out during the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviets tried to site nuclear missiles in
Cuba—within striking range of the United States. However, the issue was defused once
the Soviets withdrew in the face of an American naval blockade of Cuba and a secret
American promise to withdraw similar missiles from Turkey in return.
In the early 1960s America became involved in the conf lict in Vietnam,
believing that North Vietnam’s drive to take over South Vietnam was part of the
Soviet Union’s plan for world domination.^23 The domino theory held by many
Americans at the time posited that if the United States did not prevent the fall of
South Vietnam, the next step would be a Soviet-backed conf lict in the Philippines,
in Australia, or in the territory of some other American ally. The Vietnam War
demonstrated that the domino theory was fundamentally inaccurate; the conf lict
between North and South Vietnam was a civil war rather than an international
event.^24 Though the North Vietnamese accepted Soviet support, they did not take
orders from the Soviets.
Beginning in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon and his National Security
Advisor, Henry Kissinger, began a process of détente with the Soviet Union, which
involved a series of negotiations and cultural exchanges designed to reduce tensions
and promote cooperation.^25 These efforts culminated in the 1972 Strategic Arms
Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which limited the growth of U.S. and Soviet missile forces.^26
At the same time, the Arab nations’ embargo prohibiting oil shipments to Western
countries after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war served as a reminder that containment of
the Soviet Union could not be America’s only foreign policy priority. Tensions over
oil increased again when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) raised prices in 1979. Both events contributed to a recession in America and the
electoral defeats of two incumbent presidents: Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter
in 1980. Carter’s defeat was also, in part, the result of the Iran hostage crisis, in which
Iranian students, with government backing, held American embassy staff hostage for
more than 14 months.^27
Tensions with the Soviets increased again with their support for the Sandinista
rebellion in Nicaragua in the late 1970s and then with their invasion of Afghanistan
in 1980.^28 In response to Soviet military actions in Afghanistan, President Carter
withdrew the U.S. Olympic team from the 1980 games in Moscow, suspended sales
of wheat to the Soviets, and increased defense spending. These increases steepened
under Ronald Reagan, who vowed to put communism “on the ash heap of history.”
Notwithstanding this rhetoric, Reagan also worked to negotiate arms control
agreements with the Soviet Union.^29
The real change in U.S.–Soviet relations began with the selection of Mikhail
Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 and his policies of glasnost
(“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”). The Warsaw Pact was dissolved
in 1991, and most of its former members became democracies. The Soviet Union
splintered into 15 countries in 1991, effectively ending the Cold War. Scholars still
debate the reasons for these changes. Some argue that the costs of responding
to America’s military buildup bankrupted the Soviet state, while others point to
disaffection of Soviet citizens with the communist ideology and the inability of the
Soviet economy to provide goods and services.^30mutually assured destruction
The idea that two nations that possess
large stores of nuclear weapons—like
the United States and the Soviet
Union during the Cold War—would
both be annihilated in any nuclear
exchange, thus making it unlikely
that either country would launch a
first attack.domino theory
An idea held by American foreign
policy makers during the Cold War
that the creation of one Soviet-backed
communist nation would lead to the
spread of communism in that nation’s
region.détente
An approach to foreign policy in
which cultural exchanges and
negotiations are used to reduce
tensions between rival nations, such
as between the United States and the
Soviet Union during the 1970s.Full_18_APT_64431_ch17_614-654.indd 622 16/11/18 11:21 AM