Foreign Policy under President Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1953-1961
I. Eisenhower and Dulles
1. Dwight D. Eisenhower followed two principles in shaping his foreign policy. First, communism must not be allowed to expand. Second, capitalism must not go bankrupt in trying to contain communism.
2. John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower’s militantly anti-Communist secretary of state; Dulles was a significant figure in the early Cold War era. He advocated an aggressive stance against communism throughout the world.
3. Eisenhower’s foreign policy was given the name “the New Look”. It reflected Eisenhower's concern for balancing America’s Cold War military commitments with the nation's financial resources and emphasized the use of nuclear weapons.
II. Massive Retaliation
1. The strategy of massive retaliation requires that in the event of an attack from an aggressor, a state would massively retaliate by using a force disproportionate to the size of the attack. When Dulles introduced this policy in 1954, he was referring to the use of nuclear weapons for retaliation.
i. This policy was worked out under the code name “Operation Solaris” throughout 1953 by Eisenhower, Dulles and other advisers.
ii. It proposed the use of containment and nuclear weapons to deal with the Soviets instead of fighting expensive and unpopular conventional wars.
iii. In 1955, the president said it directly: nuclear bombs were to be considered conventional weapons and "used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else."
2. Eisenhower cut Truman’s military budget of $50 billion to $34 billion in 1954 to reduce expenditures. To contain communism however, the number of nuclear warheads was increased from 1 000 in 1953 to 18 000 by early 1961.
i. Although U.S. superiority was already overwhelming, one additional nuclear weapon soon rolled off the American production line each day.
ii. In 1955, the huge B-52 bomber appeared. The eight-engine giant was the first true jet bomber designed to carry nuclear weapons. The two-stage ballistic missile, Polaris, capable of being fired from a submerged submarine, provided a capability in 1960 to launch a nuclear attack from deep within the oceans.
3. Eisenhower claimed to use massive retaliation in Korea.
i. In February 1953, he announced the so-called "unleashing" of Chiang Kai-shek, who could now threaten to attack the mainland. But the crisis peaked in early summer 1953, when peace talks were at a stalemate and Communists broke off the talks and began a military offensive.
ii. Eisenhower and Dulles hinted, through Indian officials close to the Chinese, that unless the Communists signed a truce, the United States would "not be limited" in its use of weapons.
iii. The effect of the warning is unknown. The Chinese later denied they were frightened by it. Strong evidence exists that they and the Soviets had actually decided to end the war immediately after Stalin's death three months earlier. But U.S. officials believed that the threat ended the climax. In any case, in mid-summer both sides signed a truce, and the war finally stopped.
4. In 1955, Eisenhower his advisers agreed that if China invaded Indo‐ china, they would ask Congress for a declaration of war and then use "new weapons" on China itself.
i. In 1958, when the Chinese shelled the small offshore islands held by Chiang Kai-shek, Eisenhower moved "tactical" nuclear weapons into place.
5. During the Berlin crisis of 1958‐ 1960, U.S. fighter-bombers went on regular airborne alert. Some planes carried weapons 1,000 times more powerful than the 1945 bombs.
6. The U.S. Navy flew bombers loaded with nuclear weapons off China's coast— partly to see how Chinese radar reacted.
7. Supporters claimed that the threat of "massive retaliation made the Soviets and Chinese behave, but it did not achieve Dulles's goal of "liberating" the Soviet bloc.
i. However, after Stalin’s death in spring of 1953, frustrated East Berlin workers seized the opportunity to strike and even riot against the Communist regime. Red flags were ripped down as the protests threatened to spread, and U.S.-government-sponsored radio programs encourage workers to continue.
a. When Soviet tanks suddenly appeared to smash the riots and execute the leaders, the United States did nothing but issue protests.
III. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC)
1. Despite Eisenhower’s military experience and his instinctive concern about the rapid development of nuclear race, he was unable to foresee its amazing costs.
2. By the time he left office in 1961, America’s nuclear arsenal was close to 30.000 megatons, and a new breed of atomic-powered submarines, capable of launching missiles from under water anywhere in the world.
3. Examples: the hydrogen bomb, thermonuclear bomb, intercontinental jet bomber, B-52 (capacity to deliver hydrogen bomb to target, in the Soviet Union); Atlas missile, first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); able to send 1 megaton over 5000 nautical miles, the Thor, intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), two years later the Minuteman.
4. US’s commitment to new missile projects during the 50’s should not be taken to denote Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for the arm race.
5. He was disturbed by the rapid escalation in the destructive capacity of the new weapons.
6. For example, the introduction of the hydrogen (thermo-nuclear) bomb in 1952, and by Soviets in 1953, profoundly worried him.
7. In December 1953, Eisenhower delivered a speech at the United Nations (atoms for peace plan) in which he spoke of two “atomic colossi” facing each other across a trembling world and threatening the “annihilation of the irreparable heritage of mankind.”
8. Moreover, Eisenhower’s "Farewell Address" (1961): warned Americans of the dangerous growth of the military-industrial-complex:
9. "In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence...by the military-industrial-complex.
10. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
11. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes”
IV. CIA and covert operations
1. Massive retaliation controlled the Soviets, but the growing number of revolutionaries in the newly emerging nations required other kinds of action. Eisenhower understood that using nuclear weapons to defeat these rebels was wildly out of proportion.
i. He devised a second policy to deal with communism: covert operations handled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
ii. The policy's attractions were many: cheapness, secrecy, speed, and no need to deal with Congress.
2. Eisenhower alone supervised the CIA's activities, working closely with its director, Allen Dulles, the secretary of state's brother. Both the president and the director had extensive experience running such covert operations during World War II.
i. Within eighteen months after entering the White House, Eisenhower and Dulles used the CIA to destroy supposed revolutionaries in two nations.
3. The CIA also functioned within America, although its 1947 charter forbade this.
i. from the 1950s onward the CIA opened letters that Americans mailed overseas (some 13,000 such letters a year by 1959) and wire-tapped journalists and other private citizens.
ii. Meanwhile, Eisenhower's popularity jumped. As a leading journalist wrote in 1954, "That man has an absolutely unique ability to convince people that he has no talent for duplicity."
V. Covert Operations in Iran
1. The first was Iran. In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddeq had become prime minister. President Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson sympathized with Mosaddeq, however US policy sharply changed when Dulles replaced Acheson. The new administration feared Mosaddeq’s nationalism.
2. Mosaddeq was a shrewd politician, fervent nationalist and revered figure in Iran. He challenged the monopoly over his country's oil long held by the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
i. The British oil company exploited Iran for decades, allowing the country to have about 20 percent of the profits from its own oil. In 1950, when the U.S. oil company Aramco gave Saudi Arabia 50 percent of the profits from Saudi oil, Mosaddeq demanded the same. The British refused.
ii. In 1952, as the Iranians moved toward seizing the British company's resources, the Truman administration tried to mediate.
3. The new administration agreed with British warnings that he was becoming dangerously dependent on Iran's Communist party, the Tudeh. With Washington's approval, the large international oil companies cooperated to prevent Iranian oil from reaching world markets and Mosaddeq could not sell oil.
4. In early summer 1953, Mosaddeq asked Eisenhower for economic help. The president responded that he would provide aid after Mosaddeq reached agreement on the oil dispute.
5. Mosaddeq called a public referendum to approve his policies, and then fixed the results to gain more than 95 percent of the vote. Having tried and failed to remove Mosaddeq, the young Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had replaced his father as ruler of Iran, left the country suddenly for a "rest cure." Pro-Mosaddeq mobs took to the streets, Eisenhower and the British decided to move in with the CIA.
6. CIA agents found supporters in the capital of Tehran, especially in the military, then bought off other Iranians and arranged massive street demonstrations that threw the city into chaos. Mosaddeq was arrested, and the shah returned to claim his throne.
i. Shortly after, major U.S. oil companies forced the British company to cut them in on the production of Iran's oil.
7. Allen Dulles declared that Iran had been saved from a "Communist-dominated regime."
VI. Covert Operations in Guatemala
1. Second was Guatemala. In 1944, a student—middle-class revolt overthrew a corrupt, stagnant dictatorship and installed a reform-minded government. Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán came to power in 1951 after perhaps the fairest election in the country's history. Among other measures, Arbenz planned to give the poor land by seizing 234,000 acres from the United Fruit Company.
2. He singled out UFCO simply because it owned 42 percent of the country's arable land but was using less than 10 percent of it. The Dulles brotherswere afraid that the seizure of U.S. property would be copied by other governments in Latin America. But most of all, they and Eisenhower concluded that Arbenz's action indicated that Guatamala was turning Red.
i. Arbenz and his top advisers, were not Communist, nor certainly were the most powerful national institutions—the Roman Catholic church and the army.
3. Dulles flew to an inter-American conference in Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1954 and demanded the condemnation of "international Communism."
4. In May, he asked for help from the Organization of American States in taking action, the Latin Americans refused.
i. Dulles later admitted that it was "impossible to produce evidence clearly tying the Guatemala Government to Moscow.”
5. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to train Guatemalan exiles to overthrow Arbenz. The frightened Guatemalan government accepted a shipload of arms from the Soviet bloc.
6. That was enough for Eisenhower. In June, the CIA-led exiles moved from bases in Honduras and Nicaragua to eliminate Arbenz. The exile army nearly failed, but at the decisive moment Eisenhower ordered American-flown planes to drop small sticks of dynamite on the capital, Guatemala City.
7. Arbenz's army then deserted him, the turning point. As Arbenz fled, the exile leader, General Carlos Castillo Armas, became president and put hundreds of Arbenz's followers in front of firing squads until the reform movement was destroyed.
8. In 1957, one of his own palace guard murdered Castillo Armas. He was the first in a long line of military dictators who brutalized and exploited Guatemala during the next three decades.
9. Nevertheless, in 1954, John Foster Dulles concluded that the country had been saved from "Communist imperialism" and that Castillo Armas's victory added "a new and glorious chapter to the already great tradition of the American States."
VII. “Falling Domino” Principle
1. With Vietnam, Eisenhower and Dulles learned that in some cases neither "massive retaliation" nor the CIA could achieve U.S. policy objectives.
2. Communism in Indochina: Reasons for containing Chinese communism only became more powerful after 1952.
i. With the British fighting revolutionaries in Malaya and the Philippine government facing a rebellion, U.S. leaders believed that Ho Chi Minh's Communists (Viet Minh) in Vietnam had to be defeated or no place in the region would be safe.
ii. With massive U.S. help, the Filipinos did contain their revolutionaries. The British, on their own, began winning in Malaya, thus convincing U.S. officials that Ho could also be beaten.
iii. Southeast Asia, moreover, had both the strategic materials (such as oil and tin) and locations (for air and naval bases) that the West required for its cold-war build-up.
iv. The area seemed especially important because its markets and raw materials were necessary for Japan's stability. If Southeast Asia became Communist, a top-secret National Security Council paper concluded, it could mean "Japan's eventual accommodation to Communism."
a. Eisenhower later finished that thought: "Should Japan go communist (in fact or in sympathy) the U.S. would be out of the Pacific, and it [the Pacific] would become a communist lake."
3. Eisenhower summarized all of this in a press conference on April 7, 1954, where he describe Indochina’s fall as a “domino” effect.
4. The United States poured over $4 billion into the French attempt to defeat Ho between 1950 and 1954, but neither French arms nor French-controlled Vietnamese governments could stop the revolution.
i. During early 1954, France's commander decided to fight a climactic battle at Dien Bien Phu, near the northern Vietnamese border. The Communist army bombarded the French garrison and were victorious.
5. Dulles stressed in March 1954 that Vietnam had to be saved even if it "might involve serious risks". In early April, Eisenhower asked congressional leaders for authority to use, if necessary, U.S. forces to save the French position.
i. Led by Democratic Senator Lyndon Johnson from Texas, the congressmen refused to go along unless the British also joined.
ii. Prime Minister Churchill, who considered the French effort a lost cause, flatly rejected any plan for intervention.
iii. Dulles suggested use of small nuclear weapons in Vietnam but Eisenhower refused.
iv. Eisenhower knew that Vietnam was pivotal, but he refused to go in alone. His army chief of staff, Matthew Ridgway, had helped convince him that even nuclear weapons would not work without sending in a U.S. ground force. That was something neither Eisenhower nor Ridgway would seriously think of doing.
6. On May 7, 1954, Dien Bien Phu fell. The French traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, where an international conference met to settle the war. The Geneva Conference finally produced two agreements.
i. The first, signed by the French and Ho's Vietminh, provided for a cease-fire, the temporary division of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel, and regrouping French forces south of the line while the Vietminh moved north.
a. This agreement emphasized that the seventeenth parallel was not to be seen as "constituting a political or territorial boundary."
ii. The second agreement, or Final Declaration, provided that neither north nor south would join a military alliance or allow foreign bases. General elections were to be held in 1956. Neighbouring Laos and Cambodia were to be neutral.
iii. Unwilling to deal away half of Vietnam to communism and have his picture taken as he did it, Dulles refused to have the United States sign the Geneva Accords.
7. Eisenhower and Dulles then devised a dual policy to contain China and Ho Chi Minh. First, they used economic and political pressure to push out the French and bring in Ngo Dinh Diem to lead the South Vietnamese. The second Eisenhower-Dulles response was to create the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954. It included the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan.
8. Diem’s failure to hold elections seriously divided the country.
9. Communist guerrillas in the south increased campaign against Diem and China continued to support North Vietnam.
10. From 1955 to 1961, the United States gave over 1 billion in economic and military aid to Vietnam, and sent in military advisors to train South Vietnamese forces.
VIII. Suez Crisis
1. Egyptian army officers had begun pushing the British out of the Suez Canal area in 1954. The following year, the Egyptians turned to the Soviet bloc for a supply of arms. 1955, Egyptian and Israeli forces had been involved in sharp border skirmishes.
2. Dulles condemned British colonialism for alienating the Egyptians and driving them toward the Soviets. He decided to pull the Egyptians back by helping finance the building of the Aswan Dam on the Nile. In the interest of their new leader, General Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dam was to help tame the river and create rich lands for cotton, among other crops.
3. Within six months, Dulles changed his mind and hoped that in return for the money, Nasser would move toward peace with Israel and end the dangerous fighting between Egyptian and Israeli armies. Nasser refused.
i. To do so could be his ruin both within Egypt and throughout an Arab world that refused to recognize the existence of the Jewish state.
4. Egyptian cotton would compete with the U.S. crop because Nasser was becoming friendly with China.
5. Dulles announced that the United States would not fund the dam just when Nasser's foreign minister was flying to Washington to sign the contract.
6. Nasser seized and nationalized the Suez Canal to obtain his own funds and to defy the West.
i. He now controlled the waterway through which the West’s oil supply went
ii. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the French secretly decided to use force to regain the canal.
a. Paris officials especially hoped destroying Nasser would stop the aid going to Algerian revolutionaries who destroying what remained of the French Empire.
b. Israelis agreed to cooperate with Paris and London.
c. Eisenhower and Dulles were not informed but intelligence reports warned that something was occurring.
7. On October 29, 1956, Israel, according to plan, attacked Egypt and drove toward the Suez. However Eden and the French delayed sending in their forces.
i. Eisenhower was furious and was afraid that the Soviets would use the crisis to provide massive help to Nasser.
8. As the Middle East became engulfed in war, Khrushchev had seized the chance to smash protests in Poland and Hungary with Soviet tanks.
9. Preoccupied with Suez (and the final hours of his own re-election campaign), Eisenhower did not know how to respond.
i. He rejected sending U.S. troops or supplies because Hungary was inaccessible.
ii. He rejected a suggestion of using atomic weapons because he did not want to destroy Hungary.
iii. He decided to focus on the Middle East and end the war before Khrushchev moved in to help Nasser.
10. U.S. officials threatened to cut off oil to Great Britain and ruin the British currency unless the war stopped.
i. By November 5, Khrushchev was proclaiming that he would use Soviet missiles for "country busting" in Western Europe, unless the British and French left Egypt. Eisenhower warned him to let off.
11. By mid-November restored some order to the Suez area as the British-French-Israeli forces retreated
i. By defying Great Britain and France, Nasser helped trigger immense pride and ambitions in the newly emerging nations.
ii. Eisenhower and Eden effectively split the Western alliance
iii. Khrushchev imposed order and restore hard‐ line Communist leaders in Poland and Hungary through sheer force. The Soviet bloc was also fragmented.
IX. Eisenhower’s Big Stick
1. Between 1945 and 1960, approximately 40 nations with 800 million people revolted against their colonial masters, which United Nations. Its original 51 members exploded to 100 and then to 114 by 1965. The United States could no longer assume support from a majority in the UN.
2. Eisenhower and Dulles emphasized that communism could not be stopped unless the West outraced the Communists economically.
i. Dulles complained that the Soviets were "increasing their own productivity at the rate of about 6 percent per annum, which is about twice our rate". He said this was the reason why Communism was appealing to poorer nations over capitalism and democracy.
3. The US ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge, asked in 1959: The U.S. can win wars but the question is can we win revolutions?
i. Dulles wanted to try to lock the newly independent peoples into SEATO, OAS, and various Middle East arrangements (such as the Baghdad Pact).
ii. This was because the Soviets believed that a neutral is one who does not participate in America’s collective security arrangements
iii. Eisenhower also enlarged the Export-Import Bank funding, agreed to easier World Bank loans to the new nations, and even set up new regional development banks (for Latin America and the Middle East) to provide economic carrots..
4. When the Belgian Congo became independent in 1960, Eisenhower viewed its leader, Patrice Lumumba, as a possible Communist.
i. Lumumba was an ardent nationalist, but CIA agents saw little difference and prepared plans to eliminate the Congolese leader.
5. In Indonesia, the CIA was sent when Dulles thought that President Achmed Sukarno was turning leftward. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, tried to overthrow him with $10 million of support for anti-Sukarno rebels.
i. A long-time hero and leader of Indonesia, Sukarno was also a nationalist, colorful and effective, who used Communists for his own purposes
ii. Eisenhower publicly claimed that the U.S. policy was only "careful neutrality," but Sukarno's forces shot down a CIA plane, damned the U.S. involvement, and destroyed the rebellion.
X. The Eisenhower Doctrine
1. The Suez disaster set off major political changes in the Middle East, including the rise of General Nasser to hero's status among many Arabs.
i. He worked with Syria and Jordan to spread his pan-Arab policies which had strong Soviet support.
2. Eisenhower asked Congress to give him authority to use force whenever he thought it necessary to prevent "international communism" from conquering the Middle East.
i. Some Democratic senators protested giving such a blank check to the president, but it was granted to Eisenhower
3. Congress passed the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, which allowed him to use armed forces to help any nation resist "armed attack from any country controlled by international communism."
i. Congress, again giving the president an enormous amount of power, never tried to define what it meant by "international communism."
ii. The doctrine had little effect on Nasser's popularity.
a. Jordan finally broke with Nasser however and received massive military help from the United States as a reward.
4. Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic in early 1958.
5. On July 13, 1958, the weak Iraqi kingdom fell to nationalist army officers who admired Nasser.
6. Eisenhower was afraid that Lebanon would be next.
i. The nation's Maronite Christian officials were under fire from the much larger Moslem majority.
ii. On July 14, with little hesitation or preparation, Eisenhower ordered 5,000 U.S. troops to land on Lebanon's beautiful beaches and maintain order. The president never invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine.
7. The president was afraid that the dominoes were falling in a strategic area where the last to fall could land on U.S. companies that controlled the world's largest oil reserves. It was too late, however, to restore the Iraqi kingdom or the U.S.-created treaty system (the Baghdad Pact) in which Iraq was the key link.
i. U.S. troops finally left Lebanon in October.
ii. They also left a Middle East that was greatly changed since the Suez crisis, one much less friendly to the United States.
The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad
Book by Walter Lafeber; W. W. Norton, 1994. 842 pgs.
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