Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill and Eden in the Cold War by David M. Watry (review)

David Watry’s short analysis is stark in its argument. Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill and Eden in the Cold War is built around the bleak premise that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an ideologically driven, risk-taking president who steered foreign policy away from the “inert and torpid” (p. 2) containment policy of his predecessor, toward a dangerous brinkmanship that was conspicuous across the piste of U.S. foreign policy during his years in office. This shift in U.S. policy, according to Watry, manifested itself in Eisenhower’s nuclear arms policies, his covert initiatives, and his embrace of economic intervention, as well as in diplomacy more generally. The book is based on a wide reading of the plentiful U.S. and British secondary sources and on numerous private archival collections in both countries, although not upon a systematic trawl of the relevant state archive collections in either the United States or the United Kingdom.

The book begins with a useful chapter that is titled “Conservative Ideology and Brinkmanship” but is in fact more about strategy. Watry’s analysis is based on risk-taking, or brinkmanship, a genre he subdivides into nuclear, covert, diplomatic, and economic brinkmanship. His emphasis is then essentially on Southeast Asia, with an additional examination of policies toward Iran and Guatemala and a final 30 pages on Eisenhower and the traumatic Suez crisis of 1956.

Watry does not, however, develop the case that the Anglo-American dimension is central to his hypothesis, despite the implication in the book’s title and his coda on Suez. So his brief account of the personal relations between British and U.S. leaders, and the decline in Anglo-American cooperation in foreign policymaking adds nuance to the narrative but is not central to the development of an argument that is not primarily about the UK, Anglo-American relations, or even Europe. Great Britain is portrayed as something of a victim of Eisenhower’s policies, as Watry argues that the U.S. president manipulated both British domestic and cabinet politics and hastened Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s departure from office after the disastrous Suez crisis. Suez was of course a defining moment, when the United States exercised ruthless diplomacy vis-à-vis Eden and his bungled effort to knock Gamal Abdel Nasser off his perch. But it would have been helpful for Watry to display a more intimate knowledge about how British cabinet and parliamentary politics actually worked in the 1950s, and to have engaged more extensively with the many other scholars who have written about Suez, including Keith Kyle, W. Scott Lucas, and, more recently, Peter Hennessy (most recently in his brilliant chapter on Suez in Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties), to allow him to add a genuinely new dimension to analyses of the impact of the crisis.

Watry has thus allowed the book to fall between two stools. He provides no rigorous analysis of the machinery of the state policymaking system and how it adapted to Eisenhower’s presidency. Such an analysis, complete with observations from the archives about the government machine itself, might have strengthened Warry’s argument about Eisenhower’s ideologically-driven approach. What was most disappointing, however, was his failure to build on existing studies of leadership and of personality in political decision-making, to allow him to build a picture of the shifting relations between his three protagonists. He offers no extended pen-portraits or an account of how the war and then the passage of the next decade actually shaped the relationships and the individual mental maps of the three men as international leaders. The reader is not even reminded of the overlapping years during which the three held high office during and after the war. So we are left with an assumption that not only do individuals matter but that they can change the strategic direction of global politics, an assumption...