Civilian Americans in The Period 1960–1980 Formation of Ideas About the Global Role of The United States in Reaction to Both the Civil Rights Movement and The Vietnam War
The international duty of the United States can be interpreted as the overall purpose, character, and direction of America’s participation in worldwide affairs and the nation’s general point of view and association to the rest of the world. After the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, the United States emerged as a dominant superpower while turning away from its conventional isolationism to enhance global involvement. It became an international influence in technological, economic, political, military, and cultural matters.
After the Civil Rights movement that started on 1st November 1954 to 1968, many aspirations were intensified to create worldwide designs that suit the peace of Americans and style of rebuilding order and modernizing it (Cohrs, 2018). During this period, there was attraction and legitimacy of the dominance in America. The American model of liberal capitalism was challenged in an international context, and it raised a lot of debates of the early 21st century (Cohrs, 2018). During Johnson’s administration, there was the great ambition to foster a new international deal and enhance the liberal dominance of America, specifically to the third world nations. The ambition was focused on developing the Marshall plan that would founder in Vietnam for Southeast Asia. Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, wanted to enhance the position of America in the international discourse and its structured competition with the Soviet Union. The aim was to renew and expand initial ideas of American peace for the globe. These, however, would fail the policies established by Johnson. They provoked widespread global resistance and killed the outcomes of America’s credibility as a progressive, dominant power. Lyndon’s aim to impose technological advancements and military defeat communist counter forces during the Vietnam War resulted in America behaving like a neo-imperialist power (Johnson, 1967). Johnson decided to look for surplus efficient manners to pursue the United States modernization policy and techniques in some nations, where colonial rule had been excluded by nationalist movements and were fragile independent states. Johnson seized ideas on a liberal development society whose aspects included a series of associations amongst government agencies, global organizations, and non-governmental activists, specifically agencies of the Social Council and economics of the United Nations. There were technological initiatives after the Civil Rights Movement, and the arguments that guided them were absolute. The concepts that informed these plans were based on scientific advances, economic theories, and documentation that could apply on an international scale to advanced and under-advanced nations.
Conclusions About the Origin of Conflicting Views Among Americans Regarding the Appropriate Role of The United States in Global Affairs
Thesis: The discourse of decolonization assists in explaining the perspectives of Southeast Asia on communism. As political leaders and local activists continued to create new independent nations from the formal colonial powers of the United States, the Soviet Union, China and America viewed these as great allies, hoping to gain as many into their activities as possible. Whether newly established nations created communist or non-communist governments mattered. Vietnam became a country where all three nations attempted to make their marks.
Americans wanted to prove their pronouncements concerning containing communism, aiding democracy, and giving aid to non-communist governments. In Truman’s administration, there was issuing an NSC-68 by the State Department that argued citing the Soviet Union as a newly fanatic belief system, focused on imposing an absolute authority over the rest of the globe. America wanted to prevent the threat from the Soviet Union and started building conventional and massive nuclear weapons. In 1956, president Kennedy argued that Vietnam represented the core of a freed world in Southeast Asia, an ideology that informed America’s foreign policy (Kennedy, 1956). The president also declared that every nation should know and ensure the success of liberty. He wanted to convince Americans that they had an ethnic duty to assist governments and political activists who tried to resist communism.
References
Cohrs, P. O. (2018). “Pax Americana”: the United States and the transformation of the 20th century’s global order. Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, 61. https://www.scielo.br/j/rbpi/a/BZzxp4wDN8sFLT9XpZKn5Pz/?lang=en
Kennedy, F. J. (1956, 1st June). Remarks of Senator John F Kennedy at the conference on Vietnam luncheon in the hotel Willard, Washington D.C, 1st June 1956. Presidential Library and Museum. https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/vietnam-conference-washington-dc-19560601
Johnson, B. L. (1967, 29th September). Speech On Vietnam. Uva, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-29-1967-speech-vietnam
