An examination of the several reasons for the failure of foreign
policy reform during the controversial administration of President
Jimmy Carter.
In "Reversing Course," David Skidmore argues that President
Carter's initial foreign policy agenda required a scaling back of
U.S. commitments abroad, reflecting a decline in resources, as well
as influence, in a world developing in ways necessarily reducing
U.S. hegemony. By probing beneath the obvious and carefully sifting
the abundant but poorly understood evidence, Skidmore finds at the
root of Carter's failed effort an irresistible pressure to reverse
a liberal foreign-policy agenda in order to address the effect at
home of well-organized conservative criticism. For Skidmore,
Carter's course "reversed" toward a traditional containment
strategy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union not because of Soviet
intransigence or faulty idealism but because Cold War politics sold
better in the polls.
While offering significant theoretical arguments, Skidmore
carefully anchors his thesis in the day-to-day political give and
take among those personalities and events that provoked headlines
and commentaries long before they were the stuff of history. Among
the telling factors and events analyzed in this book are the
Vance/Brzezinski conflict, the support and opposition of Howard
Baker, the SALT II Treaty, the Panama Canal Treaties, and the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, to mention only a few.
Although Skidmore draws conclusions that apply to the Reagan,
Bush, and Clinton administrations as well, his focus is not on
personality but on theory and underlying structures. He provides a
demonstration that this structural approach can "be helpful not
only in unraveling the mysteries of policy change under Carter but
also in specifying the underlying sources of policy vacillation
over much of the past two decades." .
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