Viewed through the prism of public narrative, the Cold War consensus takes on a surprising shape. A narrow shared narrative of national security regarding the Communist adversary and the interconnected nature of global politics rose to dominance in the first half of the 1950s, amidst a frustrating war in Korea. It fell apart in the early 1960s, even before the Johnson administration ramped up the US commitment to South Vietnam. A new consensus regarding the protagonists in global politics and their relationship failed to coalesce through the mid 1970s. However, a common elite narrative on America's role in the world emerged from the domestic turmoil unleashed by the Vietnam War. These were not the faithful and straightforward reflections of global realities, nor were they the usual expected responses to policy failure and success.

Rather, as this chapter shows in detail, they were the result of the narrative politics of the military and diplomatic battlefield, per the theoretical logic of Chapter 5. As expected, opposition hawks and doves alike responded to battlefield setbacks by reproducing the narrative in whose terms the war had been legitimated. Thus, during the Korean War, conservative hawks in the Republican opposition blamed the Truman administration not for wasting blood and treasure in a peripheral conflict, but for having left East Asia vulnerable to Communist predation through its inconsistent pursuit of containment – that is, for a policy that was not global enough. They thereby deprived a non-globalist alternative narrative of its leading voices and helped to consolidate the Cold War consensus. During the Vietnam War, “responsible” critics in both parties – all but the most extreme doves – did not take advantage of the faltering and increasingly unpopular intervention to break with the logic of the Cold War. Rather, they maintained that the war was not worth the candle or that it was a misapplication of containment. Both lines of argument re-inscribed the Cold War, rather than upend it. Meanwhile, hawks in the Republican Party did not seize upon the US military's setbacks in that faraway land to revive the nationalist narrative, but rather embraced their new role as standard-bearers of Cold War globalism and aggressive internationalism. In so doing, they joined liberals to beat back the “radical” challengers to American exceptionalism.