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In 1978, the Carter administration abandoned its preoccupation with world order politics and focused US foreign policy on the containment of the Soviet Union. This strategic reorientation turned not on singular events so much as on the frustration of Carter’s attempts to implement his initial world order concept in the face of rising Soviet-American tensions. Meanwhile, Carter’s bid to manage economic interdependence via policy coordination faltered during a second oil shock, which owed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Evidently unable to manage the international economic order, the United States and its allies instead began to adapt to the discipline of invigorated globalization. Confronted with the dual challenges of energy interdependence and a resurgent Soviet Union, the Carter administration synthesized a new grand strategy, which centered on the use of US military power to preserve access to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and keep the world economic order safe for globalization.

The chapter takes off from Kennedy’s assassination and the beginning of Johnson’s administration. It then briefly overviews the eight years of Republican presidents Nixon and Ford during which détente was at its peak but also began to decline. The chapter focuses on the Carter administration, which began as a strong supporter of détente—although on a completely different basis than the previous administrations, emphasizing liberal factors instead of realist ones—but ended up with a totally different view of the Soviet Union which in turn was reflected in a hard-line policy and culminated in the Carter Doctrine and the intensification of the Cold War into the 1980s. The discussion of Carter's strategy outlines its initial policy defensive liberal orientation based on the worldviews of the key policymakers.

What happens to our understanding of liberal international order--its history, material bases and ideological claims--if we read its development not solely as a social formation built by the West and exported around the earth, but rather as an economic and political encounter with the world of the Global Indian Ocean? This chapter analyzes how the Global Indian Ocean was built and how it evolved over time: its origins in so-called "archaic globalization" as well as the shape it took following the post-1750 "Great Transformation" which, through successive waves of imperialism, spawned a first liberal international order. British-dominated hegemony was replaced after 1945 with a more ambitious system of liberal governance under American leadership. Such reworked "thin hegemony" spurred renewed integration and exchange but also violent resistance and heterodox imagination, processes that further intensified after 1989.