REFLECTIONS FROM A DECADE FORGOTTEN . . . BUT STILL DEEPLY FELT

Ferguson, Niall, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, & Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2010) ("Yet if the seventies appear to have launched a 'second wind' for the United States in it career as global superpower, as historian Charles Maier proposes, we ought to recall that the republic has paid for its reinvigorated primacy with new kinds of vulnerability. Globalization has eroded public authority over the economy and has encouraged the outsourcing of industrial labor, devastating the manufacturing heartland; it has subjected U.S. actions at home and abroad to the oversight of global opinion (Abu Ghraib being an exception that demonstrates the rule); and it has facilitated the violence of transnational terrorists, as we learned on 9/11. Historically, to return to the question of agency, globalization has been anything but an imperial project imposed on weak nations by the United States. As the experience of the 1970s implies, the United States has been an object as much as an agent of globalization. Its autonomy in an integrating world has been diminished, while its leadership role, the nature of its power among nations, and the character of its influence in the world have been transformed." From Chapter 3, Daniel J. Sargent, "The United States and the Globalization in the 1970s," at 49, 63-64.).