The Penguin History of the World

Such an outcome was particularly ironic. The United States had entered the war first and foremost to contain Chinese Communism – now closer relations with the Chinese Communists had made withdrawal possible. In the United States itself, an increasingly vocal right-wing believed that the military had not lost the war – it had been defeated by spineless politicians, anti-war activists and social radicals at home. During the late 1970s the loss in Vietnam may have contributed to American soul-searching about its purpose in the world and a temporary reluctance to get involved militarily elsewhere in the post-colonial regions. First and foremost it meant a beginning doubt about the possibility of détente with the Soviet Union, the country’s main rival in international affairs.

As 1980 drew nearer many Americans were confused and worried; national morale was not good. Vietnam had left deep psychological wounds as well as helping to feed a counter-culture at home which the majority found frightening. In the 1960s, the first voices of note had raised the alarm over environmental dangers; the 1970s had brought the oil crisis and a new sense of exposure at a moment when, for the first time, America’s Middle Eastern ally, Israel, no longer seemed invulnerable to her enemies. The disgrace and near-impeachment of President Nixon after a scandalous abuse of executive power had eaten away at confidence in the nation’s institutions. Abroad, the behaviour of other allies (themselves worried and confused by American disarray) seemed less predictable than in the past. For the first time, too, Americans’ confidence in the promise their nation had always been believed to hold out for mankind faltered in the face of what looked like blunt rejection by much of the Islamic world.

The situation was indeed not easy to read. Yet the American democratic system showed no sign of breaking down, or of not meeting many of the country’s needs, even if it could not find answers to all its problems. The economy had, astonishingly, been able to continue for years to pay for a hugely expensive war, a space exploration programme that put men on the moon, and for garrisons around the world. True, the black American’s plight continued to worsen, and some of the country’s greatest cities seemed stricken by urban decay. Fewer Americans, though, seemed to find such facts as worrying as their country’s supposed inferiority in missile strength to the Soviet Union (it was to be an issue in the presidential election of 1980). President Gerald Ford (who had taken office in 1974 on the resignation of his predecessor) had already had to face a Congress unwilling to countenance further aid to its allies in Indochina. When Cambodia collapsed and South Vietnam quickly followed, questions began to be asked at home and abroad about how far what looked like a worldwide retreat of American power might go. If the United States would no longer fight over Indochina, would she, then, do so over Thailand? More alarmingly still, would she fight over Israel – or even Berlin? There were good reasons to think the Americans’ mood of resignation and dismay would not last for ever, but while it lasted, their allies – including the key ones in Europe – looked about them and felt uneasy.

Europe was the birthplace of the Cold War and was for a long time its main theatre. Yet well before 1970 there had been signs that the terrible simplifications institutionalized in NATO and (even more rigidly) in the Warsaw Pact might not be all that was shaping history there. Although long insulated by Soviet power from external stimuli to change and by its command economies, there were signs of division in the eastern bloc nations. The violence with which Albania, the tiniest of them, condemned the Soviet Union and applauded China when the two fell out in the 1960s had to be endured by the Soviets; Albania had no frontier with other Warsaw Pact countries and so was not likely to have to take account of the Red Army. It was more striking when Romania, with Chinese support, successfully contested the direction of its economy by Comecon, asserting a national right to develop it in its own interest. It even took up a vaguely neutralist position on questions of foreign policy – though remaining inside the Warsaw Pact – and did so, oddly enough, under a ruler who imposed on his countrymen one of the most rigidly dictatorial regimes in eastern Europe. But Romania had no land frontier with a NATO country, and one 500 miles long with the USSR; her skittishness could be tolerated, therefore, because it could be quickly curbed if necessary.