The story of American foreign relations since Vietnam is the story of how Americans came to terms - and, more frequently, failed to come to terms - with the muddy complexity of life in the late twentieth century. The aftereffects of Vietnam were one cause of the failures; American history and American politics were two others. Between the politics of reductionism and the yearning for simplicity, Americans after Vietnam had great difficulty accepting the complexity of the world they lived in.

Sometimes they overcame the difficulty; sometimes the difficulty overcame them. What follows is the tale of both outcomes.