A Superpower Transformed explores the predicament of American foreign policy in the 1970s. This was a phase when the dilemmas of an emerging post-Cold War era buffeted the United States even as the makers of American foreign policy struggled for stability in an enduring Cold War. Clashing imperatives made the 1970s a difficult phase. Amidst conflicting pressures, leaders struggled to devise strategic frameworks to guide the exercise of American power in the world. 1970s-era choices nonetheless proved consequential. The Nixon administration's efforts to stabilize a faltering Pax Americana faltered, but Nixon's choices ultimately helped the champions of human rights to wrest control of American foreign policy away from the practitioners of amoral realpolitik. So too did Nixon's efforts to reverse the decline of American economic power help to open the doors to financial globalization, which accelerated quickly in the years following the 1971-73 collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Choices proved consequential, but American decision makers remained the captives of unmasterable circumstances, as the oil crisis of 1973-74 made clear. Coinciding with Watergate, the oil crisis plunged the world economy into disarray. It also pushed American decision makers to begin to devise new strategies to manage-or mitigate-the consequences of economic globalization. Henry Kissinger, who led this effort, was less successful in his attempts to terms with a human rights movement that flourished in the mid-1970s. Not until the inauguration of the Carter administration would American decision makers embrace human rights promotion as a central task for foreign policy. Carter's efforts to devise a post-Cold War foreign policy nonetheless faltered, confounded in the last years of 1970s by the resurgence of Soviet-American hostilities. While the Cold War resurged, the new forces of globalization and human rights that mobilized in the 1970s left the United States a superpower transformed.

From the vantage point of the United States or Western Europe, the 1970s was a time of troubles: economic "stagflation," political scandal, and global turmoil. Yet from an international perspective it was a seminal decade, one that brought the reintegration of the world after the great divisions of the mid-twentieth century. It was the 1970s that introduced the world to the phenomenon of "globalization," as networks of interdependence bound peoples and societies in new and original ways.

The 1970s saw the breakdown of the postwar economic order and the advent of floating currencies and free capital movements. Non-state actors rose to prominence while the authority of the superpowers diminished. Transnational issues such as environmental protection, population control, and human rights attracted unprecedented attention. The decade transformed international politics, ending the era of bipolarity and launching two great revolutions that would have repercussions in the twenty-first century: the Iranian theocratic revolution and the Chinese market revolution.

"The Shock of the Global" examines the large-scale structural upheaval of the 1970s by transcending the standard frameworks of national borders and superpower relations. It reveals for the first time an international system in the throes of enduring transformations.

During the 1970s, American foreign policy faced a predicament of clashing imperatives-US decision makers, already struggling to maintain stability and devise strategic frameworks to guide the exercise of American power during the Cold War, found themselves hampered by the emergence of dilemmas that would come to a head in the post-Cold War era. Their choices proved to be of enormous consequence for the development of American foreign policy in the final decades of the twentieth century and beyond. In A Superpower Transformed, Daniel J. Sargent chronicles how policymakers across three administrations worked to manage complex international changes in a tumultuous era. Drawing on many newly-released archival documents and interviews with key figures, including President Jimmy Carter and Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sargent explores the collision of geopolitics and globalization that defined the decade. From the Nixon administration's efforts to stabilize a faltering Pax Americana; to Henry Kissinger's attempts to devise new strategies to manage or mitigate the consequences of economic globalization after the oil crisis of 1973-74; to the Carter administration's embrace of human rights promotion as a central task for foreign policy, Sargent explores the challenges that afflicted US policymakers in the 1970s, offering new insights into the complexities that emerged as the new forces of globalization and human rights transformed the United States as a superpower. A sweeping reinterpretation of a pivotal era, A Superpower Transformed is a must-read for anyone interested in U.S. foreign relations, American politics, globalization, economic policy, human rights, and contemporary American history.