A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s by Daniel J. Sargent (review)

Daniel Sargent’s A Superpower Transformed seeks to appraise how U.S. foreign policy-makers encountered the epochal ruptures of the 1970s and failed to impart coherence to a discordant and disintegrating international system. This is an intimidating enterprise, one that locates the author at the chronological focal point of current historiographical debate and invites comparison with some of the most eminent historians of U.S. foreign relations. Sargent’s first monograph competes with memoirs and analyses from the very subjects under study—not least the confident and complicated prose of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the multiple volumes of memoirs and reflections by Henry Kissinger. The book is remarkably bold in ambition and still more remarkable for its successful execution.

The research is impeccable, with good symmetry across the periods and a mastery of both the core archives and a vast array of secondary literature. Although conventional files of the executive branch and the Department of State stored at presidential libraries and the National Archives are the mainstay, they are supplemented by personal papers from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, documents from various non-governmental organizations, and collections from the United Kingdom. Although many of these materials have begun to be examined, the greatest sphere of novelty is not so much in their recovery as in the manner in which Sargent has approached them. Instead of the thematic, temporally stochastic sampling that historians tend to use when surveying foreign policy briefs and memoranda, Sargent has immersed himself in the sequence, reading all of the daily briefing items in the order they arrived to facilitate the “reconstruction of strategic assumptions” (p. 8).

Although no historian escapes teleology, Sargent at least makes a diligent attempt. The value of trying is amply demonstrated in his empathy and appreciation for the dynamism, contingency, and difficulty that hinder any effort to craft strategy. In myriad places, Sargent explains how events thwarted design, which is the central argument of the book, and a pattern that is manifest in his treatment of energy, economic, monetary, military, and humanitarian affairs. Alongside the chosen start point and end point for the book’s core periodization, 1968 and 1979, this technique revitalizes a field of history that has previously seemed to have exhausted any further insight. Less obviously, it produces an account that draws out much greater commonality between U.S. presidential administrations that have otherwise been seen as highly dissimilar. Sargent’s meta-description of strategy across the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter is that of “improvised responses amid dynamic circumstances” (p. 13), and the course of the narrative suggests an ad hoc tactical scramble from lily pad to lily pad.

The “long 1970s” have become the epicenter for U.S. foreign policy history and the marshaling point for an armada of diplomatic historians, most recently in a provocative book by Barbara Zanchetta, The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Although Zanchetta has found some meaningful continuities between previous ages and the 1970s, Sargent is closer to the “rupture” or “breakthrough” view characteristic of Thomas Borstelmann, Daniel Rodgers, and Samuel Moyn (p. 9). For Sargent, the 1970s were a radical reconfiguration of U.S. power, albeit not through the U.S. government’s own doing. At the close of the 1970s, he argues, the United States was “a superpower transformed, but its transformation followed no coherent design or strategy” (p. 12). Sargent speaks of the “chaotic pattern” (p. 3) of the 1970s. This was the global terrain of Conamara, with the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations all seeking to tessellate the debris field of a post–Bretton Woods, post-bipolar, postcolonial world into something manageable. Trying to reset a constellation of incongruous elements was a task that was mostly beyond all of the figures, almost all of the time. Vertiginous shifts in domestic attitudes and international conditions frustrated the implementation of each policymaker’s...