The Three-Headed Eagle: The United States and System Change

It is by now a commonplace observation that the “age of consensus” on questions of foreign policy was a casualty of the American involvement in Vietnam. This article focuses on the resulting domestic cleavages relating to foreign policy issues, and on their likely impact on American efforts to undertake basic systemic changes. The “Three-Headed Eagle” serves as a metaphor for a nation marked by three quite distinctive clusters of beliefs—described here as Cold War Internationalism, Post-Cold War Internationalism, and Isolationism“about the nature of the global system, the sources of threats to a just and stable world order, the appropriate international role for the United States, and the goals, strategies, and tactics that should guide American external relations. Will these cleavages persist? Efforts of the Nixon-Ford and Carter administrations to reestablish a foreign policy consensus, through policies of detente and human rights, have exacerbated rather than healed divisions. Systematic evidence from public opinion and leadership studies also appears to confirm the existence of the cleavages discussed here. Moreover, because the divisions exist within as well as between generations, it is unlikely that the ascendency of a new generation of leadership will automatically create a new foreign policy consensus.