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There are good reasons to doubt that the Vietnam War, grim though it was, was
sufficiently cataclysmic to produce a long-term change in attitudes toward the role of the
military in American global activism. After all, the Korean War was also very
unpopular, and produced a similar number of American casualties, yet few argue that it
transformed these attitudes. However, even if the Vietnam War itself was not enough to
change the attitude of Americans most concerned with the economic aspects of world
order, it may haven acted as a catalyst, making broader changes in the postwar world
clear. Two such changes that bear on the value of military spending for maintaining the
postwar economic order deserve mention. First, the fact that major developed allies of
the United States did not wholeheartedly support its efforts in Vietnam made it clear that
they were far less dependent on American security guarantees than they had once been.
Early Cold War era military spending was intended not only to deter potential Soviet
aggression, but also to psychologically reassure American allies and thus facilitate their
postwar recovery (Gaddis 1982, 90-5; Leffler 1992, 383-90). After the death of Stalin
and a long period of peaceful (albeit tense) coexistence in central Europe, Soviet
intentions appeared less ominous than they had during the immediate postwar era.
Moreover, once Western European states had recovered from the war they were much
better able to provide for their own defense. Military spending to insure the security of
major U.S. trading partners had thus lost much its urgency by 1970.
As the focus of American military attention increasingly shifted away from the
security of major developed trading partners, it focused more on areas that had much less
economic value to American traders and investors. The annual frequency of American
military action in less developed areas rose from an average of 2.9 instances between
Convention