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the senses in which politics had become global. Intercontinental rockets not only meant that the most destructive weapons known could now be propelled halfway around the world in minutes but also, because of the imminent nuclear standoff they heralded, that a Cold War competition would now extend into other realms—science and technology, economic growth, social welfare, race relations, image making—in which the Soviets or Americans could try to prove that their system was the best. At the same time, the decolonization of dozens of underdeveloped states in Asia and Africa induced the superpowers to look beyond the original front lines of the Cold War in Europe and East Asia.
These technological and political revolutions would seem to have raised the United States and the Soviet Union to unequaled heights of power. The Soviets and Americans advanced rapidly in the high technology required for spaceflight and ballistic missiles, while techniques for the mobilization and management of intellectual and material resources reached a new level of sophistication, especially in the United States, through the application of systems analysis, computers, bureaucratic partnership with corporations and universities, and Keynesian “fine-tuning” of the economy.
By the mid-1960s the vigorous response of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to the Cold War challenge seemed to ensure American technological, economic, and military primacy for the foreseeable future. A mere five to seven years later, however, it became clear that the 1960s, far from establishing an American hegemony, had in fact wrought a diffusion of world power and an erosion of the formerly rigid Cold War blocs. Western Europe and Japan, now recovered from the war, also achieved dynamic economic growth in the 1960s, reducing their relative inferiority to the United States and prompting their governments to exercise a greater independence. The Sino-Soviet split, perhaps the most important event in postwar diplomacy, shattered the unity of the Communist bloc, and Third World countries often showed themselves resistant to superpower coercion or cajoling. By 1972 the U.S.S.R., despite its achievement of relative parity in nuclear weapons, was obsessed with the prospect of a hostile China, while the United States, having squandered its wealth, prestige, and domestic tranquillity in the Vietnam War, was trying to scale back its global commitments. The Nixon Doctrine, détente with Moscow, the opening to China, and uncoupling of the dollar from gold were the symptoms of this American retreat.
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