Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HAYDEN, playing at radical politics in California, disturbs Salisbury. Robert Bly explains his Freudian theory of the Vietnam War, and this intrigues Salisbury. A convention of elderly black worshippers in their finest clothes cheers him--they are "almost the only persons I met in the whole of the United States that I could truly call ladies and gentlemen." All of these people, in some way, seem to elude...
...western Europe and Japan. The "stability" of the international order depends on the containment of the liberation movements and the preservation of pro-US regimes in this strategic area more than in any other. Finally, a successful Persian Gulf intervention appears as the master-stroke that can reconstitute the Vietnam-torn fabric of the bipartisan domestic consensus on foreign policy...
Furthermore, in the arid desert terrain of Arabia all the military excuses for the Vietnam disaster are missing: there is no jungle for the enemy to hide in; no demographic sea for the "guerilla" fish to swim in; and no safe sanctuaries protected from destruction by fear of world opinion. Instead of a long, protracted war fought for no clear reason, the planning here calls for a quick, surgical operation with minimal loss of American life against a popularly-understood threat to the "American way of life"--a swift and decisive move which will unite the nation, rather than divide...
...task of constructing a new domestic concensus on foreign policy in place of the Vietnam-shattered doctrine of limited wars, a Persian Gulf may appear as a vital tool. The restoration of that consensus necessitates what Kissinger has aptly termed a "legitimizing principle of social repression": an ideological justification which would ensure the support of the American people and Congress for an aggressive policy abroad. The language of realpolitik offers a poor basis for popular support for a corporate ideology. Hence, modern myths have been a mixture of destiny and demonology: the British "white man's burden" and the French...
...Vietnam war put an end to the simple, powerful imperatives of the cold war. Detente accelerated the end of the old consensus. By juxtaposing enmity and alliance, confrontation and camaraderie, diplomatic sell-outs and revolutionary solidarity, the policy of detente ended the certainties which had defined the cold war consensus in the US. Hence a new mission and a new demon have to be invented as a substitute for the old. Intervention may be a part of the process...