@arrowiv's comment made me think of an interesting point. One of the really important things about the first two Red Scares is that they tapped into 1) America's deep well (I like to call it the unacknowledged third party in American politics though it has burst free on its own a few times and now has taken over the White House) of reactionary nativist populism, and about 2) fears not just of the moment but of what
might happen in the near future. In the early Fifties for example the economy was now booming but the Soviets now had the H-bomb and things were rough overseas and many of the parents of the Boomer generation (then young kids) were cultural veterans of the racist populism and isolationism of the interwar period, despite their experience of WWII in the meanwhile. So they felt they had a lot to lose (newfound prosperity that felt to them more fragile than it looks in retrospect because we know it continued into the early Seventies, plus now their kids' futures) and those old instincts that predated the war could be played like a fiddle by McCarthy, the Birchers, and others, besides the golden opportunity for both Old and New Right to score political points making the left and middle look weak. By the Seventies in terms of foreign policy everyone was indeed exhausted by Vietnam other than a few die-hard supporters of Saigon, and some of it could be dealt with by psychological projection as well: instead of asking "who lost South Vietnam" there was a fair amount of "it's Saigon's own fault because they suck" across the political spectrum, which had the added virtue of being in large part true, it was a corrupt and incompetent regime. But a lot of the reactionary nativist populism was now caught up in
domestic issues: in white backlash against civil rights, in blue-collar anger about the tanking economy, in some of the early culture-war issues like abortion (mostly a wedge to split hard-line Catholics from the Democrats at this point), busing, and the early battles over gay rights. So less of it was directed at foreign policy issues, its dark energy was well-occupied elsewhere.
But I'd add two things. First that's correct I think but it did have outliers: Reagan made up a lot of ground on Ford in the '76 primaries by banging on and on about "giving away
our Canal" in Panama, that this kind of "surrender" right on top of losing South Vietnam was too much. The other was, despite all our modern retrospective talk about "Vietnam syndrome" and the state of the American military in the Seventies, America's hawks, particularly while Ford was still in power, were absolutely
spoiling for a fight, somewhere, wherever came up, to prove we still had it in us. It accounts for Kissinger's shit-fit about Cuba interfering in Africa, likewise for Henry almost single-handedly driving the clumsy, needlessly bloody response to the
Mayaguez incident by being almost apoplectic about the need for some kind of massive ass-kicking response to take people's attention away from the just-weeks-old evacuation from Saigon (and indeed the original plan called for substantial bombing of the Cambodian mainland too, which had been one of Kissinger's favorite hobbies earlier in the decade and helped pave the way for the Khmer Rouge in the first place.) During the "Axe Murder Incident" in South Korea the following year, you had B-52s buzzing the DMZ while the team of engineers went in after to cut down the offending tree, and Nelson Rockefeller, so often held up as a darling of Republican liberalism, talking about the possible need for battlefield nukes in case of a North Korean counterattack to the tree-chopping. And you had Team B and the reckless overestimation of the Soviets, driven not just by rigid ideology or the promise of talking up the need for lots of juicy defense contracts, but also by very complex feelings of grief and shame about "losing one" to the Commies in Southeast Asia and a determination to return to the main struggle -- the nuclear balance with Moscow -- with relentless vigor. That's why, also, when the hostage crisis came along in Tehran -- where with relatively ordinary decent diplomats suddenly seized against their will America could finally feel like the wronged good guys again -- there were such calls for action that even George McGovern backed leveling Iran's oilfields with strategic bombing if any of the Americans were harmed. And why Jimmy Carter himself's first instinct -- a good one actually, probably the only use of force as pressure that would have yielded up positive results without excess risk to the hostages -- was to mine the harbors at Bandar-e-Abbas and Kharg Island, Iran's two export points for its oil. He was talked out of the move in part by his most hawkish advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, because Zbig was worried this would drive the volatile Tehran regime towards the Soviets and spoil his (Zbig's) grand design for sucking Moscow into Afghanistan and bleeding the Soviets white, causing their already rickety power structure to crumble under the stress of "their own Vietnam."
So I suppose I'd say this: the closest fit in the period for your model is actually not the ME or Africa but Panama and the Canal issue, which reaches deep into the recesses of first-generation (Teddy Roosevelt-era) American imperialism (back when it was straight-up imperialism, i.e. the taking of colonial possessions at strategic locations overseas like the Canal and the Philippines). Otherwise we tend now to underestimate the power of hawkishness as a response to the post-Vietnam doldrums, because
Mayaguez aside the opportunities to indulge it didn't ever quite present themselves during that time. But that was an externally-focused response, rather than an internally-focused Red Scare. All of that kind of energy was instead being poured into domestic issues: the Culture Wars were, if you will, filling the Red Scare void.
