Impact of U.S. Foreign Policy

Any "re run to normalcy" and isolationism was prevented by the swift emergency of the Cold War afterwards World War II ended. American military forces remained stationed round the world, and the UN and NATO, along with another(prenominal) international organizations, were formed to advance American global interests. Conservative republicans did not revert to isolationism, since they viewed Communism as a fundamental threat to their own values. For some years, a bipartisan foreign policy consensus agreed on the major(ip) thrusts of Cold War policy.

The bipartisan consensus broke up as a result of the Vietnam War. Although it had been launched as a major trial by a liberal democratic administration, that of LBJ, much of the Democratic political base turned against the war. LBJ did not run for re-election in 1968, and in 1972 the Democrats nominated an antiwar candidate, George McGovern. Although doubts about the war were by then widespread, the antiwar movement, associated with affectionate turmoil, was besides unpopular, and McGovern lost by a landslide.

Vietnam hence contributed, along with the Civil Rights revolution and generalized "moral" anxieties to capture a cultural politics that became increasingly dominant in the 1980s. Many working-class whites, previously Democrats because of their economic interests, turned Republican in the Reagan era for cultural reasons, including a perception of the Democrats as "weak" on confronting the Soviet Union.

When World War II ended, many people hoped for a "return to normalcy," while some feared a return of the wide Depression. Instead, within a couple of years the US itself in a global confrontation with the Soviet Union that would turn something resembling wartime mobilization into a permanent state of affairs.

All of these mobilization-related developments also led to sheer movement of peoples, and thus exposure to bleak environments and circumstances.

In particular, large numbers of African-Americans found work outside(a) the South, or were stationed outside the South; while they still approach social discrimination, they no longer were subjected to legal segregation. Whites also had the wallop of new sorts of racial encounters (Bailer and Farber). Even if blacks returned to the South after the war, they took their experiences with them, and became little willing to accept "things as they had always been."

The 1920s had been in many respects a period of racial and social reaction in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan reached a height of influence. sumptuary immigration laws reinforced the racial heirarchies of the Jim Crow era. Though women had gained the rightly to vote, this achievement took the momentum out of the women's movement. Though the Depression and the upstart Deal weakened many forces of reaction, the sheer breadth and sense of economic turmoil drew attention away from minorities and other already-marginalized groups. The novel The Grapes of Wrath, for example, dealt with the poverty and mistreatment of white "Okies," not minorities.

Origins and Consequences of the Cold War, 1945-54

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