The Collapse of the World Communist Movement and the Rise of Détente

At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, China’s army initiated confrontations and battles with Soviet troops along their contested border. Schism within the world communist movement now amounted to warfare among established communist states. Under these conditions, US-Soviet détente and the opening to China by the Nixon administration were made possible by skilled diplomacy and the fact that both the USSR and the People’s Republic of China came to view themselves each as closer to the United States in defending their national interests than they were to each other. Pragmatism prevailed over proletarian internationalism.

Why US-Soviet Détente Failed

Given the issues that remained on the table for later negotiation, given the rightward drift in US politics of the mid-1970s, and given the intense commitment on both sides to competing for influence in Third World countries, it may be that US-Soviet détente was destined to collapse. But the counterfactual must consider, what would have happened had the Nixon administration not collapsed due to the Watergate scandal?

A Balancing Act

Eager to regain control over the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Nixon administration claimed a new White House prerogative to review administrative rulemakings before they became law, citing the potential economic disruption of expensive new mandates as justification for this regulatory review. Fearing that the influence that business representatives seemed likely to wield on the process and the possibility that the White House would use the new process to water down congressional mandates, environmental organizations turned to Congress and the courts to push back against regulatory review. Caught in the middle and eager to protect the EPA’s ability to fulfill legislative mandates, the EPA’s senior leadership increasingly turned to economics to understand and moderate the adverse impacts of its regulations and to justify a strong intervention program to the White House and the American public.

To Test or Not to Test: Tools, Rules, and Corporate Data in US Chemicals Regulation

When the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was passed by the US Congress in 1976, its advocates pointed to new generation of genotoxicity tests as a way to systematically screen chemicals for carcinogenicity. However, in the end, TSCA did not require any new testing of commercial chemicals, including these rapid laboratory screens. In addition, although the Environmental Protection Agency was to make public data about the health effects of industrial chemicals, companies routinely used the agency’s obligation to protect confidential business information to prevent such disclosures. This paper traces the contested history of TSCA and its provisions for testing, from the circulation of the first draft bill in the Nixon administration through the debates over its implementation, which stretched into the Reagan administration. The paucity of publicly available health and environmental data concerning chemicals, I argue, was a by-product of the law and its execution, leading to a situation of institutionalized ignorance, the underside of regulatory knowledge.

The Vatican’s Monetary Wisdom

On Monday, the Vatican released an 18-page document titled «Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority.» Since then, it has been celebrated by advocates of bigger government the world over. What’s ignored is that the document —released to stimulate debate, not offer official doctrine— embraces a sound economic theory concerning the cause of the world financial crisis: the breakdown of the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system and the unleashing of fiat currencies and central-bank printing presses. Let’s look at a representative passage, while keeping in mind several important markers: 1971 was the year that the Nixon administration killed the gold standard, and along with it Bretton Woods and hard currencies; in the early 1980s, financial deregulation in many countries removed the last major barriers to virtually unlimited amounts of credit; and the 1990s was the decade when the drive to suppress interest rates became the common policy of central banks around the world. Since the 1990s, we have seen that money and credit instruments worldwide have grown more rapidly than revenue, even adjusting for current prices. From this came the formation of pockets of excessive liquidity and speculative bubbles which later turned into a series of solvency and confidence crises that have spread and followed one another over the years.

Implementing Grand Strategy

This chapter describes the Richard Nixon administration, particularly in its early months. Nixon and his indispensable partner Henry Kissinger took office with a coherent and well-developed grand strategy, based on ideas they had been developing and articulating for years. Much scholarship has been devoted, and rightfully so, to the strategic principles and policies that Nixon and Kissinger pursued while in office. Yet the way they organized their national security system and attempted to implement their strategy has received much less attention—despite the fact that Nixon and Kissinger themselves devoted considerable time and intellectual energy to these organizational issues. In other words, they were concerned not merely with what policies they wanted to pursue and why they would pursue them, but also how they would advance those policies. In the case of Nixon and Kissinger, this “how” included the remarkable centralization of power in the National Security Council, often at the expense of the State and Defense Departments. The chapter assesses how and why Nixon and Kissinger went about this, particularly focusing on how they connected their organizational decisions to their grand strategy.

George Shultz at the Negotiating Table

Of the countless graduate students whom the Labor Board vets taught, only one was as brilliant, fervid, and thick-skinned as their tutors. That student was George Shultz. This chapter begins by discussing Shultz’s family background, education, military experience, and career in industrial relations and teaching before he entered government. The bulk of the chapter explains how Shultz drew on his experience in industrial relations to help establish affirmative-action programs in industry and unions and desegregate southern public schools in the Nixon administration and forge peaceful relations between the United States and the Soviet Union by the end of the Ronald Reagan administration.

The Cold War and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967–74

During the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict became entangled in the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. American policymakers, particularly Henry Kissinger, believed that the Soviets wanted to exploit the Arab-Israeli conflict to drive the West from the Middle East and dominate the region. To prevent that, the Nixon administration sought to end Soviet influence there and exclude it from all efforts to reach a negotiated settlement. However, the American view was based on misperceptions about Soviet interests and objectives in the region. In fact, fearing American dominance and a war with the United States, the Soviets proposed a joint superpower-guaranteed or even imposed comprehensive peace settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Because the United States spurned these proposals, the Cold War was exacerbated, there were several near-confrontations between the superpowers, and important opportunities to reach a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict were permanently lost.