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China’s entry into the conflict in November 1950 created a new phase of the war lasting until the beginning of the armistice talks the following July. This “new war” created a severe test of President Truman’s ability to maintain national unity. Preserving Democratic Party harmony proved equally challenging. A combination of sharp GOP criticism, rebellion within his own party, and the possibility of losing the war forced the chief executive to actually practice the gospel of bipartisan foreign policymaking that he so often preached. As he prepared to declare a national emergency in response to the Chinese involvement, Truman reached out to congressional Republicans like never before. The bipartisan mood, however, soon vanished, demonstrating the impracticalities of a foreign policy jointly implemented by the president and Congress.

In the middle of December, Truman and his senior advisers announced their broader policy response to the Chinese intervention. They would massively expand and expedite the nation's overall Cold War mobilization posture. They also proposed sending additional troops to Europe. And, to drive home the extent of the crisis, the president declared a state of emergency. In Congress, nationalist Republicans immediately challenged this new program, sparking a “great debate” that focused mainly on the desirability of sending additional U.S. troops to Europe. As mobilization gathered pace, labor unions also rebelled, convinced that the government had frozen them out of the policy process. These were serious challenges, but ultimately the administration was able to beat them away, helped partly by the more vigorous rhetoric senior officials adopted in the aftermath of China's intervention.

Having sketched out a model of how and when cognitive ability associates with heuristics and biases tasks in Chapters 6 and 7, this chapter uses the model to summarize the empirical findings on the nature of the relationship between intelligence and rational thought. It argues that the relative dissociation between intelligence and rationality is consistent with the tri-process model sketched in earlier chapters and reinforces the usefulness of that framework. This chapter revisits the Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science in light of the findings on individual differences discussed in previous chapters.

The massive Chinese intervention also led many Americans to question the wisdom of the Korean War: in January 1951, one Gallup poll even found that two‐thirds of the public wanted to withdraw from Korea altogether. Although the administration had successfully defused the broader debate over Cold War mobilization, it had far more trouble explaining why it was necessary for Americans to continue fighting and dying in faraway Korea. In fact, the government's mobilization campaign was part of the problem: in the first months of 1951, senior officials spent so much time trying to win the “great debate” that they said very little about Korea. But even efforts to reach out to the mass public by using emotive letters or the power of Hollywood movies largely backfired.

This chapter, “The Ten Million Will Happen: Expanding Socialism, 1963–1970,” traces the revolution's trajectory from “heroic idealism” in the early 1960s to what came to be known as the Great Debate among different socioeconomic models during 1963–66 to a “compromised idealism” formula toward the end of the decade, a phase epitomized by the epic drive to produce ten million tons of sugar in 1970. Major topics include the strengthening of Cuba-USSR relations, based on generous Soviet terms for the importation of sugar and exportation of oil; the negative repercussions of focusing on a single crop (sugar); the expansion of internationalism and interventionism headed by Guevara; and the creation of the Cuban Communist Party.

This chapter examines the impact of World War II on U.S. cultural diplomacy in particular and foreign policy more generally. It considers the first concrete steps taken by the United States to expand its cultural programs from a series of limited, bilateral educational exchanges with various Latin American countries to a comprehensive global initiative explicitly designed to advance the overall objectives of its foreign policy. It looks at the U.S. government's adoption of a more expansive view of cultural relations which incorporated economics and politics, high and low culture, as part of an increasingly global vision. The chapter describes “cultural relations” envisioned by U.S. officials as part of efforts to shape the nation's image in the global arena during the years of the Great Debate over the future of U.S. foreign policy. Finally, it discusses the changes made in the overall structure of the U.S. Department of State to transform it into a “twentieth-century institution”.

Facing increasing aggression abroad with the German reoccupation of the Rhine, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, Japan's attack on China, and Germany's absorption of Austria, and the failure of the Munich Conference and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, Roosevelt began a campaign to educate the American people to understand the threat these actions posed to the United States and to support preparedness and his internationalist foreign policy. Beginning with the Quarantine Speech, the president challenged sought revisions of the Neutrality Act as he challenged the position of non-intervention, began a buildup of American forces, and forged a closer relationship with Great Britain. While his efforts failed to prevent war, Roosevelt launched a great debate over America's role in the world that began moving public opinion away from neutrality to internationalism.