The fighting stopped in 1975 with Hanois victory. But the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people continued and was propelled by politicians manipulating the mythical cause of POWs/MIAs. Postwar movies filled out the scenario of a war lost because of poor leadership in Washington combined with the baleful influence of the anti-war movement. Presidents wrestled with the legacy of Vietnam, including the controversy over the national Vietnam Memorial. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both attempted to move the nation beyond the grasp of the Vietnam Specter. Both failed. Ronald Reagan used it to help him win the presidency in 1980, after the debacle that followed the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran, which only seemed to emphasize the nations lost claims to world leadership after Vietnam. George H. W. Bush claimed that it had been buried in the sands of Iraq after the rapid victory in Gulf War I. Bill Clinton succeeded in establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. But it re-emerged with renewed force during the Second Gulf War and the never-ending war in Afghanistan. Even today it shapes much thinking about military interventionism.

Despite the conflicts in cultural exchanges that disrupted his first year in office, Gerald Ford hoped to use exchange diplomacy as one means to realize a successful summit trip to China in December 1975. This chapter shows, however, that this tactic proved largely unsuccessful: Ford’s primary interlocutor, Deng Xiaoping, was uninterested in expanding cultural ties before an improvement in the diplomatic relationship – even if the vice premier could not hide his interest in deeper Sino-American scientific cooperation. Growing Chinese interest in the US science and technology was already well known to American scientists and, while Ford and Henry Kissinger declined to exploit this interest to political ends, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) advocated that the United States must demand something more in return for the benefits that China was gaining from scientific exchange with the United States. Meanwhile, American politicians outside of the executive branch sought to fill the void left by Ford’s limp China policy during their own visits to the PRC – but often met the same uncompromising, even bellicose, Chinese response that Ford and Kissinger had grown used to.

This chapter considers the tensions in Sino-American exchange diplomacy felt in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation and replacement by Gerald Ford. Ford lacked domestic political authority and thus was unable to find the negotiating flexibility necessary to achieve a deal to establish official diplomatic relations with Beijing. The resulting deadlock in high-diplomatic negotiations was one cause of stasis and conflict over cultural exchanges in 1974 and 1975 that culminated in the last-minute cancellation of a tour by a famous Chinese performing arts troupe, news that made the front pages of US newspapers. This chapter also examines the more gradual accumulation of tension in exchanges arising from American resentment at tight controls on visitors to China and Chinese resentment at impolitic behavior by American guests, ranging from photographing evidence of Chinese “backwardness” to drunken brawls.

Helmut Schmidt’s Germany helped to found several multilateral institutions in the mid-1970s. Chapter 14 opens with the European Council, a thrice-annual gathering of EC-9 leaders that reasserted the primacy of European nation-states over supranational governance. Schmidt reconciled with Britain, acceding to the Regional Fund in hopes of swaying a British referendum on EC membership. The CSCE summit, held in Helsinki, was a milestone for East-West détente – though Bonn’s relations with the USSR remained strained, even as improvements with Poland were achieved. The Federal Republic fell into recession, and Schmidt fretted about Global South proposals for a New International Economic Order. Bonn’s response was to court major countries individually, highlighting Germany’s interest in positive trade relations while loosening controls on weapons exports and nuclear commerce. Economic anxiety also animated Schmidt’s urgent demands on allies to cooperate in staving off protectionism. Informal coordination with Britain, France, and the United States became commonplace, a more structured grouping, the G-7 (adding Japan, Italy, and soon Canada), reestablished confidence in Western leadership.

That 130,000 Vietnamese evacuated alongside US personnel in April 1975 was neither haphazard nor unanticipated; the Ford administration fought vigorously for precisely this outcome. The sheer horror of the fall of Da Nang in late March shook US officials out of their complacency and forced them to confront South Vietnam’s imminent collapse. From the beginning of earnest, if belated, evacuation planning, administration officials labored to include South Vietnamese allies, which made the process much more contested than it otherwise might have been. In the face of consistent opposition, the administration ensured that it had the authority to use the US military to evacuate South Vietnamese nationals as well as the legal approvals necessary to resettle those individuals in the United States.

Ford argued that the United States had a “profound moral obligation” to its South Vietnamese allies. While depicting the obligation as moral rather than legal permitted the United States to frame the evacuation as a rescue rather than a withdrawal, invoking morality also fashioned the American obligation in ways that did not have obvious limits, temporal or demographic. Future nonexecutive actors seized on this language to successfully expand resettlement opportunities for growing numbers of South Vietnamese.