Before Urgent Fury: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Grenada During the Ford and Carter Administrations

Author

• Nicholas Jake Durell, Chapman UniversityFollow

Date of Award

Summer 8-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

War and Society

First Advisor

Mateo Jarquin PhD.

Second Advisor

Kyle Longley, PhD.

Third Advisor

William Cumiford, PhD.

Abstract

When the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, it experienced a military and psychological defeat unlike any in its modern history. Following President Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford, the House Minority Leader who had become Vice President, now assumed the presidency of a deeply fractured nation. As the Cold War persisted, Washington struggled to reassert its superpower status globally while desperately avoiding further foreign entanglements. Consequently, the Ford administration adopted a cautiously detached approach to foreign policy, a strategy vividly illustrated by its posture toward the Eastern Caribbean. This calculated ambivalence, continued by the Carter administration (1974–1981), demonstrates that when the United States invaded Grenada in 1983 under Ronald Reagan, Operation Urgent Fury was not a sudden Cold War flashpoint but rather the culmination of a decade of diplomatic negligence. Utilizing declassified State Department cables, National Security memoranda, memoirs, and the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) journals, this research demonstrates how Washington’s rigid prioritization of anti-communist stability over democratic governance led to the strategic tolerance of Prime Minister Eric Gairy’s erratic authoritarian regime. This ambivalence created a regional geopolitical vacuum, paving the way for the 1979 Marxist-Leninist coup by the New Jewel Movement. The Carter administration’s subsequent diplomatic hesitancy, its reliance on regional proxies, and its eventual shift toward covert subversion inadvertently pushed Grenada into the Soviet-Cuban orbit. By reorienting the historiography away from Reagan and his administration’s military mobilization and instead focusing on the preceding decade, this thesis asserts that abandoning nuanced diplomacy for ideological quarantine cemented a paternalistic “Monroe Doctrine mindset.” This reliance on overwhelming military force to address domestic anxieties and project hemispheric dominance remains an active blueprint for U.S. foreign policy today, rooted directly in the diplomatic miscalculations of the Ford and Carter administrations during the late 1970s.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Durell, Nicholas J. "Before Urgent Fury: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Grenada During the Ford and Carter Administrations." Master's thesis, Chapman University, 2026. https://doi.org/10.36837/chapman.000765