End of the war and its international legacy
The Fall of Saigon 1975
Following the withdrawal of US combat troops in March 1973, the Paris Peace Accords left South Vietnam to defend itself against a continuing North Vietnamese military campaign. The South Vietnamese government received continued US financial support but no military intervention. In early 1975, North Vietnamese forces launched a major offensive. On 30 April 1975, Saigon fell. Dramatic footage of US helicopters evacuating the last Americans from the roof of the embassy transmitted a powerful image of defeat around the world. Vietnam was reunified under communist rule as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The legacy of the war for the USA was profound. Approximately 58,000 American soldiers had died; South Vietnam had lost far more. The conflict exposed the limits of American military power, damaged public trust in government, and produced a generation of veterans dealing with physical and psychological injuries. Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973, requiring the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying forces and limiting deployments to 60 days without congressional approval.
Saigon fell on 30 April 1975. The USA had lost approximately 58,000 soldiers in a war that ended in the victory of the side it had fought against. The War Powers Act (1973) was Congress’s direct response to the way the President had bypassed congressional approval throughout the conflict.
Détente and the Relaxation of Tensions 1969–1979
Alongside the Vietnam War, a broader shift in superpower relations was underway. Détente — the French word for “relaxation” — described a policy of managing rather than winning the Cold War through negotiation. Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger led this approach. In February 1972 Nixon made a landmark visit to communist China, opening diplomatic relations after more than two decades of hostility. This triangular diplomacy played the USSR against China, exploiting the Sino-Soviet split.
In May 1972, Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT I agreement, the first treaty to limit the growth of nuclear weapons. It froze the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The Helsinki Accords of 1975, signed by 35 nations, recognised the existing European borders established after 1945 and included a commitment to human rights that Soviet dissidents later used to challenge the Kremlin.
Détente ended abruptly in December 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up a communist government. The USA boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics and Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty from Senate ratification. The invasion marked the return of intense superpower competition, sometimes called the “Second Cold War”. The episode showed how the structure of détente — based on negotiation rather than shared values — was vulnerable to a single decisive military action.
Cold War Historiography: Orthodox, Revisionist and Post-Revisionist
Historians have debated responsibility for the Cold War across three broad schools of thought. The orthodox school, dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, blamed Soviet expansionism: Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe and his hostile ideology made the Cold War inevitable. Early Cold War historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. held this view.
From the 1960s, revisionist historians such as William Appleman Williams shifted emphasis toward American responsibility, arguing that US economic expansionism — the “Open Door” policy — and atomic diplomacy provoked Soviet defensiveness rather than Soviet aggression causing the conflict. The Vietnam War and revelations about CIA activities deepened public receptiveness to this reading.
The post-revisionist school, developed by John Lewis Gaddis from the 1970s, rejected simple blame narratives. Gaddis argued that both superpowers pursued their own interests and that the Cold War arose from their interaction, not from one side’s aggression alone. Post-Cold War access to Soviet archives from the 1990s gave historians new evidence that largely supported post-revisionist conclusions.
The interpretation of appeasement has also shifted across three schools. The Guilty Men reading, originating in Michael Foot’s 1940 pamphlet, condemned Chamberlain and other appeasers as culpably naive men who handed Hitler advantage after advantage. A.J.P. Taylor’s revisionist approach in “The Origins of the Second World War” (1961) argued that appeasement reflected a genuine popular desire to avoid another catastrophic war. Later work by R.A.C. Parker argued the opposite: that Chamberlain had genuine strategic alternatives that he refused to explore, making appeasement a deliberate choice rather than an inevitable response to public pressure.
Name these schools and anchor each to specific evidence: for Guilty Men, the Munich Agreement and Chamberlain’s claim of “peace for our time”; for the revisionist reading, British public opinion in 1938; for Parker’s reply, the rejected Soviet alliance proposals of 1939. Quoting a phrase from a given interpretation and linking it to one of these schools is the key technique for the highest band.