The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (review)

As this carefully researched and remarkably comprehensive collection of essays makes clear, decolonization was a source of intense concern for the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In the 1950s the rapid collapse of European empires across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the growth of radical activism in Latin America, and the rise of an articulate non-aligned movement all presented enormous challenges for U.S. policymakers. Yet, as the contributors to this book argue, President Eisenhower and his advisers offered few innovative responses to these global forces. Unable to reconcile the significance of anti-colonial nationalism with their overriding determination to contain Communism, preserve ties with European allies, and promote a liberal capitalist international economy, officials in the Eisenhower administration endorsed conservative elites, opposed structural reforms, backed repressive regimes, and resorted to covert operations. The result was a policy that alienated nationalists, damaged the prospects for democracy, and helped to fan the very kind of revolutionary violence that U.S. officials most feared.

This is not a new or surprising conclusion, and it echoes a line of argument already well established in the scholarly literature by the likes of Stephen Rabe on U.S. relations with Latin America, Douglas Little on the United States and the Middle East, and Robert Schulzinger on the American intervention in Vietnam. Taken as a whole, however, the essays in The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War provide an opportunity to analyze the Eisenhower administration's policies across a vast range of geographic and political settings. The contributors emphasize the agency of nationalist actors abroad and raise important questions about the diverse sources of U.S. policy during the years in which the Cold War first became a truly global phenomenon.

For several contributors, the overriding imperative of anti-Communism stands out as the most significant factor in explaining U.S. foreign policy. As Robert McMahon argues, a fixation on the dangers of Communist influence in Sukarno's Indonesia led the United States toward operation "Haik," a deeply flawed plan to back a thinly supported military rebellion and secessionist movement. U.S. officials were confident that they could replicate previous successes in Iran and Guatemala, but they ended up stumbling into "one of the riskiest and most audacious covert operations of the entire Cold War era" (p. 88). Jason Parker's analysis of the U.S. response to the 1955 Bandung Conference also reveals the extent to which fears of Communist opportunism foreclosed other policy options. Fearing that the Soviet Union and China would turn the non-aligned movement against the United States, the Eisenhower administration reacted to Bandung with a public relations offensive that combined vague promises of economic assistance with plans to encourage Western allies at the conference to condemn Communist imperialism. Yet, as Parker argues, the United States missed the opportunity for a more forthright response that would have entailed a more tolerant view of neutralism and stronger support for the objective of decolonization. Instead of a clear anti-colonial stance, U.S. officials were reduced to debating Henry Cabot Lodge's proposal for "trips by high-ranking officials . . . which, while brief, would yet be long enough to do a certain amount of sociable drinking, dining, dancing, and laughing" (p. 168).

Other essays shed light on the Eisenhower administration's commitment to a liberal capitalist international economy. In an outstanding chapter, Michael Adamson analyzes the administration's strong aversion to the idea that publicly funded foreign assistance should complement the workings of laissez-faire international trade. Only in the late 1950s—after Nikita Khrushchev launched a Soviet "economic offensive" in the decolonizing world, Richard Nixon encountered life-threatening hostility in Venezuela, and the Cuban revolution got under way—did Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles turn toward economic aid as a potential Cold War weapon. Even then, however, aid was still...