The foreign policies of the Eisenhower administration represented American diplomacy at the height of the Cold War. From the perspctive of the post-cold war era, however, it is inappropriate to regard all of them as cold war policies, because some of them still have their own raison d'être, whereas others failed accompanied by the end of the Cold War. Moreover, Eisenhower diplomacy brought about such an ironic outcom that its cold war policies were rather straightforward toward the third world nations, where relations of communist movements with nationalist ones were ambiguous, while intervention into the Eastern European countries was cautiously avoided in spite of its provocative rhetoric of “roll back”. In order to investigate the reasons for this irony, it is necessary to distinguish various objectives or aspects of Eisenhower diplomacy and to identify their interrelationship. In this article, we break down such objectives and aspects as follows:
(1) Leadership style and its interaction with domestic politics or political moods.
(2) Eisenhower's public philosophy.
(3) Type of policy formation and decision-making.
(4) Strategies.
(5) World system-oriented policies.
The leadership style, such as the rethoric of anticommunist crusade, as Robert Dallek points out, greatly appealed to Americans of the 1950's, because they felt uneasy in the transitional period from individual ethics to organizational ones. Such strengthened popular anticommunism, in turn, constrained options of Eisenhower diplomacy. On the other hand, intentions to promote international economics as the world system did not work so strongly as to restrain the cold war policies in the cases of the third world countries. The type of the policy formation and decision-making was not so flexible, either, while it made the Eisenhower administration well-prepared for eventualities. As a result, cold war policies toward the third world nations were rather straightforward.
The primary goal of the Eisenhower administration, as Robert Griffith persuasively analyzes, directly derived from Eisenhower's public philosophy was to keep American economy healthy to prevent the United States from becoming a garrison state. One of the main reasons the Eisenhower administration adopted a notorious “massive retaliation” strategy was to reduce the military budget. However, the Soviet success in developing thermonuclear weapons caused Dulles to think of the inevitability of mutual deterrence. Thus, concerns of Eisenhower and Dulles with the outbreak of the third world war, according to John Lewis Gaddis, led to their sincere search for a plan to place nuclear weapons under the superintendence of the United Nations. Nonetheless, why did the Eisenhower administration fail to stop the nuclear arms race? This is still an important topic to be investigated.
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