Joseph S. Nye

During his election campaign, Jimmy Carter dramatized a broad but inchoate popular concern when he promised that curbing the spread of nuclear weapons would be among his highest foreign policy priorities. Perhaps it is hardly surprising that public attention during 1977 tended to focus on his initial highly visible actions and especially on their confrontational aspects. Both critics and sympathizers tended to score what they saw as the Administration's policy as if it were a football game with clear-cut winners and losers, and in the process the wider outlines of policy were sometimes obscured.