Introduction

Abstract

This chapter follows US foreign policy toward the unprecedented global negotiations from the beginning of the early 1970s to their abrupt and unexpected end in 1982. It asks and answers two basic questions: How did successive US administrations respond to the South's challenge, both inside and outside the various economic forums in which the New International Economic Order (NIEO) was debated? What was the North–South dialogue's legacy for US foreign policy as it moved out of the crisis-ridden 1970s and toward a new era of neoliberal reform, intensive globalization, and eventually post-Cold War triumphalism? The chapter also places the NIEO's significance within the larger context of US grand strategy through the 1970s. In doing so, it reveals how both Democratic and Republican administrations tried to pacify the countries of the South through new policies on everything from food, finance, and foreign aid to apartheid and the Panama Canal. The chapter focuses on the US domestic political economy, then highlights how the NIEO and North–South dialogue became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of the 1970s.