Daniel Sargent

University of California, Berkeley

Tuesday, April 19, 2016  |  12:15pm  |  Union Building, Eastwoods Room

e88c403143ae0a81dde94b0909e552aa

The United States remains the world’s predominant superpower, and institutions that the United States devised in 1944/1945 still buttress the international order. The nature of America’s superpower role and the sources of American strength in the international system have undergone radical change, even transformation, over the past 75 years. We still inhabit a Pax Americana, but ours is not the American world order that the Second World War bequeathed. Great forces, especially globalization and technological innovation, have remade international relations, requiring ongoing adaptation on the part of the superpower. This talk will assess key inflection points in the superpower career of the United States, especially the 1970s, and it will ask how American decision-makers have tried—and failed—to comprehend, corral, and command the forces that have transformed world politics since 1945.

Daniel J. Sargent is associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010).