US FOREIGN POLICY SINCE 1945

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US FOREIGN POLICY SINCE 1945

• April 30, 2007

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COLD WAR ON THE HOME FRONT

• -Domestic politics and foreign policy closely
  tied
• -Cold War made it even more so -- why?
• -because the United States claimed a position as
  a model nation, a model democracy
• -and because many thought that part of the
  enemy's strategy was to subvert American society

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OUTLINE

• I COLD WAR CONSENSUS
• II MCCARTHYISM
• III CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
• IV ANTI WAR MOVEMENT
• V END OF THE COLD WAR CONSENSUS

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COLD WAR CONSENSUS

• From the 1940s through to the 1960s
• Ingredients
• Containment the correct and justified defense of
  freedom
• Soviet Union and communism evil, need to be
  eradicated
• Anyone questioning the essential righteousness
  of US policy was a potential subversive
• Manifestations
• In presidential elections, being soft on
  communism was a popular charge, same applies to
  many senatorial, even congressional elections
• Careers of Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy and
  many others
• Defense spending a priority
• National Security State at home FBI

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MCCARTHYISM

• Six years ago, at the time of the first
  conference to map out peace -- Dumbarton Oaks --
  there was within the Soviet orbit 180 million
  people. Lined up on the anti-totalitarian side
  there were in the world at that time roughly
  1.625 billion people. Today, only six years
  later, there are 800 million people under the
  absolute domination of Soviet Russia -- an
  increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the
  figure has shrunk to around 500 million. In
  other words, in less than six years the odds have
  changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5
  against us. This indicates the swiftness of the
  tempo of communist victories and American defeats
  in the Cold War
• The reason why we find ourselves in a position of
  impotency is not because our only powerful,
  potential enemy has sent men to invade our
  shores, but rather because of the traitorous
  actions of those who have been treated so well by
  this nation This is glaringly true in the State
  Department. There the bright young men who are
  born with silver spoons in their mouths are the
  ones who have been worst ....
• Joseph McCarthy, 1950

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(No Transcript)
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CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

• There is no system more corrupt than a system
  that represents itself as the example of freedom,
  the example of democracy, and can go all over
  this earth telling other people how to straighten
  out their house, and you have citizens of this
  country who have to use bullets if they want to
  cast a ballot.
• America is a colonial power. She has colonized 22
  million Afro-Americans by depriving us of
  first-class citizenship, by depriving us of civil
  rights, actually by depriving us of human rights.
  She has not only deprived us of the right to be a
  citizen, she has deprived us of the right to be
  human beings, the right to be recognized and
  respected as men and women.
• Malcolm X, 1964

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ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
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END OF THE COLD WAR CONSENSUS

• We are people of this generation, bred in at
  least modest comfort, housed now in universities,
  looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
• When we were kids the United States was the
  wealthiest and strongest country in the world
  the only one with the atom bomb, the least
  scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United
  Nations that we thought would distribute Western
  influence throughout the world. Freedom and
  equality for each individual, government of, by,
  and for the people--these American values we
  found god, principles by which we could live as
  men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
• As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated
  by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the
  permeating and victimizing fact of human
  degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle
  against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from
  silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact
  of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of
  the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves,
  and our friends, and millions of abstract
  "others" we knew more directly because of our
  common peril, might die at any time. We might
  deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel
  all other human problems, but not these two, for
  these were too immediate and crushing in their
  impact, too challenging in the demand that we as
  individuals take the responsibility for encounter
  and resolution.
• Port-Huron Statement, 1962