<a href="/keyword/alan-brinkley/" >alan brinkley</a> , The <a href="/keyword/unfinished-nation/" >unfinished nation</a> : Study Guide Chapter 33: From &quot;The Age of Limits&quot; to The Age of Reagan 1. Three blows to the confident, optimistic nationalism that had characterized much of the postwar era were the defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate crisis, and the decay of American economy. 2. Jimmy Carter's greatest diplomatic success was arranging a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. 3. The two major diplomatic setbacks for the Carter Administration in late 1979 were the Iranian hostage crisis (by late 1979, power in Iran resided with a zealous religious leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was fiercely anti-western and anti-American. In late October 1979, the deposed Shah arrived in New York to be treated for cancer. Days later, on November 4, an armed mob invaded the American embassy in Teheran, seized the diplomats and military personnel inside, and demanded the return of the Shah to Iran in exchange for their freedom. Fifty-three Americans remained hostages in the embassy for over a year) and the invasion of Afghanistan (only weeks after the hostage seizure, on 12/27/79, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. The Soviet Union had in fact been in power in Afghanistan for years, and the dominant force since April 1978. But while some observers claimed that the Soviet Union invasion was a Russian attempt to secure the status quo, Carter claimed it was a Russian &quot;stepping stone to their possible control over much of the world's oil supplies&quot; and the &quot;gravest threat to world power since World War II.&quot; Carter angrily imposed a series of economic sanctions on the Russians, canceled American participation in the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow, and announced the withdrawal of SALT II from Senate consideration). 4. Evangelical Christianity is a religion with a belief in personal conversion (being &quot;born again&quot;) through direct communication with God. In the 1970s, some Christian evangelicals became active on the political and cultural right. Alarmed by what they considered the spread of immorality and disorder in American life, they were concerned about the way a secular culture was intruding into their communities, schools and families. Many evangelicals feared that the growth of feminism posed a threat to the traditional family, and they resented the way in which government policies advanced the goals of the women's movement. Particularly alarming to them were Supreme Court decisions eliminating all religious observance from schools and, later, the decisions guaranteeing women the right to an abortion. Along with other organizations of the Christian right, they opposed federal interference in local affairs; denounced abortion, divorce, feminism, and homosexuality; defended unrestricted free enterprise; and supported a strong American posture in the world. Some denied the scientific doctrine of evolution and instead urged the teaching in schools of the biblical story of the Creation, or--beginning in the early twenty-first century--the idea of &quot;intelligent design.&quot; Their goal was a new era in which Christian values once again dominated American life. 5. Several factors giving rise to the new right were conservatives finding themselves almost always better funded and organized than their opponents; they succeeded in building mechanisms to raise money, mobilize activists, and project their ideas to a broad audience; the emergence in the late 1960s and early 1970s of Ronald Reagan; and the presidency of Gerald Ford, who touched some of the right's rawest nerves. 6. Elements of the Reagan coalition included a relatively small but highly influential group of wealthy Americans firmly committed to unfettered capitalism and a small but influential group of intellectuals commonly known as &quot;neo-conservatives&quot; 7. Supply-side economics operated from the assumption that the woes of American economy were in large part a result of excessive taxation, which left inadequate capital available to investors to stimulate growth. The solution, therefore, was to reduce taxes, with particularly generous benefits to corporations and wealthy individuals, in order to encourage new investments. 8. The Reagan Doctrine was a strategy orchestrated and implemented by the United States to oppose the global influence of the Soviet Union during the final years of the Cold War. While the doctrine lasted less than a decade, it was a centerpiece of American foreign policy from the mid-1980s until the end of the Cold War in 1991. Under the Reagan Doctrine, the U.S. provided overt and covert aid to anti-communist resistance movements in an effort to &quot;roll back&quot; Soviet-backed communist governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The doctrine was designed to serve the dual purposes of diminishing Soviet influence in these regions of the world, while also potentially opening the door for democracy in nations that were largely being governed by Soviet-supported dictators. The most conspicuous examples of the new activism came in Latin America. In October 1962, the administration sent American soldiers and marines into the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to oust an anti-American Marxist regime that showed signs of forging a relationship with Moscow. In El Salvador, whose government was fighting left-wing revolutionaries, the administration provided increased military and economic assistance. In neighboring Nicaragua, a pro-American dictatorship had fallen to the revolutionary &quot;Sandinistas&quot; in 1979; the new government had grown increasingly anti-American (and increasingly Marxist) throughout the early 1980s. the Reagan administration supported the so-called contras, an antigovernment guerilla movement fighting (without great success) to topple the Sandinista regime. 9. The Bush Administration was unsuccessful in its approach to domestic issues partly because the president himself seemed to have little interest in promoting a domestic agenda and partly because he faced serious obstacles. His administration inherited the burden of debt and a federal deficit that had been out of control for nearly a decade. Any domestic agenda that required significant federal spending was, therefore, incompatible with the president's pledge to reduce the deficit and his 1988 campaign promise of &quot;no new taxes.&quot;