THE STATE OF CARTERS MIND

(i) The inheritance

Jimmy Carter's victory in the presidential election of November 4, 1976 marked a turning point in the foreign policy and domestic orientations of successive US Administrations. His victory came as a direct consequence of the lingering Vietnam agony and in the wake of the Watergate nightmare. It represented, in a sense, a revulsion by the American public at large against the secretiveness and the realpolitik pretensions of the previous two Republican Administrations.

To be sure, the foreign policy of the short-lived Ford–Kissinger team was essentially an extension of the geopolitical diplomacy of Nixon–Kissinger. Its image of American power in the post-Vietnam era and its perspectives of building a ‘lasting peace’ in a militarily bipolar and politically multipolar world were basically in tune with Kissinger's geopolitical conception of the balance of power that governed US global diplomacy during the Nixon era. Jimmy Carter's aims as he entered office must, therefore, be viewed in the light of policies which he inherited from his predecessors.

The essence of the Republicans' geopolitical diplomacy lay in the simultaneous pursuit of detente with the Communist great powers and a process of contraction from peripheral areas. These two objectives were mutually reinforcing, and the efficacy of one depended in large measure on that of the other.