326 { China’s Quest
overwhelmed Saigon shocked Mao. This was not how Mao had expected the
United States to act. After creating the South Vietnamese state and support-
ing it for nineteen years (1954–1973), Mao was convinced, as he told visiting
North Vietnamese leaders, that the United States would not simply abandon
that state. Yet it did. The United States watched passively as North Vietnamese
forces overwhelmed South Vietnam. Other US allies in Asia immediately
began to question the credibility of US security guarantees. US acquiescence
to Hanoi’s overrunning of South Vietnam reflected congressional and pub-
lic opinion in the United States. Executive power had been weakened by the
Watergate episode, Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, and congressio-
nal assertions of its war powers. Following the Vietnam debacle, US opinion
swung sharply against US military involvement around the world, or at least
in areas beyond Europe. An increasingly popular strain of thought was that
the entire Cold War had been a huge mistake; there had never been a need to
contain communism and/or the USSR. The entire containment project was
an unnecessary, self-invented quest that had proved too costly and ultimately,
in Vietnam, a failure. The United States needed to take a new course, away
from being “the policeman of the world.” Congress rejected President Ford’s
proposals for actions to counter Cuban-Soviet involvement in Africa. There
was in the United States a strong desire to reap a “peace dividend.” US defense
budgets and size of military forces were cut.
Many of these trends contributed to the election of Jimmy Carter as presi-
dent in November 1976. One of Carter’s first actions as president was to order
the withdrawal of US forces from Korea. (The move was soon reversed.)
Carter believed that US foreign policy had long been in the grip of “an inor-
dinate fear of communism” that had led the United States to intervene un-
necessarily around the world. Many of the places that seemed to require US
intervention in the 1970s, at least according to the old “inordinate fear” line of
thinking, were to block Soviet advances. The United States seemed no longer
willing to bear the burdens of being a world policeman, and was retreating
into its traditional isolationism. A confidential report on the world situation
by Foreign Minister Huang Hua in July 1977 summarized very well Beijing’s
concern over the direction of US policy:
Isolationism is rising in the United States while [US] alienation of friendly
nations is increasingly growing.... With American power shrinking
and isolationism surging, the revisionist Soviet social-imperialists are
filling the vacuum left by the United States and are taking advantage of
US weakness to make expansionist and infiltrative moves. The retreat
of US influence, and the policy of appeasement and conciliation fueled
by Western countries, will ... help increase the haughtiness of the revi-
sionist Soviet social-imperialists, and confront other countries ... with a
more dangerous and horrendous enemy. It is the business of the whole