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Eisenhower: Philosophy One of the Cold War’s greatest ironies is that no president was presented with as many chances to wage war against the Soviet Union as a former soldier who hated war. Even though tempers ran high during the early years of the Cold War, Eisenhower viewed the conflict not so much as a crusade or a holy war (as did his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles), but more as a problem to be managed. This does not mean that Eisenhower was soft on communism. But it takes into account the formative foreign policy experiences of his generation. The former general was determined to prevent another Munich and to avoid the short-sighted isolationism that had kept the United States out of the Second World War for the first two years while Hitler consolidated his gains. Traditionally, most American presidents are elected after service in a job like state governor, where knowledge of foreign affairs is hardly a criteria of success. But Eisenhower was the exception to this pattern. He had little experience in domestic politics, but (thanks to his role as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe) he had firsthand experience of negotiating with heads of state. Once in office, Eisenhower applied this experience and changed the way American foreign policy worked. Shorn of some of the idealism of the Truman and Roosevelt years (although still heavily tinged by Wilsonism), Eisenhower and Dulles worked with a clear-eyed view of American policy. They both believed that containment policy would lead to bankruptcy and overstretch, since it gave the Soviets the initiative of where to fight the Cold War. Instead, during the 1952 campaign, the two men explored two options: retaliation (if the Soviets made a move against American interests, the United States would launch a nuclear strike on the Russian heartland) and liberation (taking moves to roll back Soviet domination). On the campaign trail, liberation rhetoric ruled the day, appealing to an electorate sick of a two-year-long stalemate on the Korean peninsula. Yet in office, Eisenhower changed his mind, and liberation became little more than a rhetorical device. Still, the ultimate effects of this rhetoric was a bloodbath in the streets of Budapest as the United States backed down from its rhetoric after a Hungarian counter-revolution. For most of Eisenhower’s term, then, the United States would rely on a mixture of containment and retaliation, upping the ante in the Cold War. |
Philosophy
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