Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10)

by James T. Patterson

Underlying their thinking were two other assumptions. The first was that the United States must maintain a strong economic and military posture. Without this, policy would not be credible. This quest for "credibility"—a consistent concern of virtually all American leaders after 1945—lay at the center of United States diplomacy throughout the Cold War years.53 The second was that the United States had the means—economic, industrial, and military—to control the behavior of other nations. This belief, which became widely shared by the American people during the postwar years, helped the Establishmentarians to shape what the historian John Gaddis calls the "inner-directed" nature of postwar American foreign policy: it often depended less on what other nations did or did not do than on what the experts thought the United States had the capacity to do.54 This capacity, the Establishmentarians thought, was vast, and they developed correspondingly grand expectations concerning the ability of the nation to prevail in the international arena.