For the generation of John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr., one of the most important changes of all was the fact that the United States did not return to 'normalcy" after World War II as it had in the 1920s, and this was as true of foreign policy as domestic policy. Washington's foreign policy was more active and internationalist in the Historical Exception Period of 1945-73 than it ever had been before, and only the backlash against Vietnam changed this. From the American point of view, though, the Cold War was not uniform, but followed the same cyclical, manic-depressive pattern that exists in the nation's cultural, political and economic life. In this case, the moods of withdrawal, isolationism and limited involvement overseas in the 1950s (mildly) and 1970s (intensely) were backlashes against the unpopular wars of Korea and Vietnam and a temporary consensus against big ground wars in the future. This had happened before in American history.
Cycles in domestic politics are better known than those in foreign affairs, although there is an oscillation between activism and withdrawal-or introversion and extroversion, as Frank Klingberg described it. Robert Dallek asserted that the "periodic outward thrust of U.S. foreign policy is a product of domestic frustrations and disappointments", such as the failure of reform. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, there was a Post-World War I Consensus that held intervention in 1917 had been a "mistake" and should never be repeated. As late as 1939, 70% of those surveyed thought American involvement in World War I had been an error, while 94% thought that the U.S. "should do everything possible to stay out of future wars."
After World War II, especially after the election of a conservative Congress in 1946, there was every possibility of a 'return to normalcy' in both foreign and domestic policy of the kind that had taken place after 1918. Initially, this Congress was elected on a platform of a 20% tax cut, an end to wartime economic controls, and "no large-scale economic and military program to help Europe, particularly if Stalin remained quiet." For a time, it seemed he would oblige the nationalist conservatives in America, until the Russians became extremely upset and agitated over plans for the creation of West Germany. Robert Taft, the "last major isolationist of American politics", certainly favored such a course, and like his father the president, distrusted an imperial role for the United States, as did his small town constituency, still rooted "in an America of the past-pre-war and pre-superpower." Truman was eager to reduce taxes and military spending, and also to disband wartime agencies like the OSS, which he found "un-American". Even the internationalist wing of the Republican Party, centered in the Northeast around the Rockefeller-Lodge faction, sometimes worried about the loss of congressional authority to the executive in the name of national security, which was routine in the HEP before Vietnam. Republicans like Taft had always intended to return to 'normalcy' and laissez faire, and realized that intensification of the Cold War would only strengthen big government as it had emerged out of the New Deal and World War II, and this indeed happened during the Historical Exception Period, although not all at once.
In 1945-47, for example, the American military fell from 12 million to 1.5 million members, in line with the planned return to normalcy. After all, for most of American peacetime history before World War II, there had hardly been an army, and sometimes not even a navy, and in 1946-50, the U.S. not really prepared for war, but had "reverted to the 'offshore' naval and air power it had been before 1941." As Dean Rusk noted, "by the summer of 1946, we didn't have a single division in our Army or group in our Air Force rated ready for combat", and Congress, the executive branch and very likely Stalin all knew it. During the Berlin Blockade in 1948-49, breaking though on the ground was never "a real option because of our demobilization and lack of conventional forces." Only after the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949 beginning of the Korean War in 1950 did the US rearm again in earnest. Thus began an era of global interventionism from which the US did not retreat again until after the Vietnam War--and then only temporarily.
