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Eisenhower's
National Security State and the Third
World
 Eisenhower
followed two principles that shaped his foreign policy. Communism
must be contained and American capitalism and the liberal
international system must not go broke in doing this.
In his view economic expansion was more favorable to political
expansion. He agreed in the end that war was caused by an
economy dependent upon on a military industrial complex and
so in his view deterrence was to be the cheapest and yet the
best possible defense against Communist expansionism. This
would limit troop numbers and the cumbersome military bureaucracy
that accompanied it. Secondly he favored covert ops and military
coups to protect economic interests rather than political
interests as well a campaign of propaganda. The problem was
that the bureaucracy that formed around deterrence and spawned
the overall national security state created an even larger
military industrial complex that Eisenhower never intended
to create. Here again the ideology of the Cold War coupled
with the this foundation for mobilization and arms proliferation
would later set the tone for Kennedy's "flexible response,"
program, and provided LBJ with the means for escalation of
the Vietnam conflict. Deterrence had short term value and
long term administrative implications.
Disarmament & Proliferation
Eisenhower is elected in 1952. He begins a program
of lowering taxes and attempts to contain spiraling military
costs. He does this by relying on the doctrine of massive
retaliation. This ushered in an era of massive nuclear weapons
proliferation. This policy occurred at the end of the US's
atomic monopoly and spurred a policy massive nuclear arms
proliferation among the Soviets. Atomic diplomacy was then
replaced by the threat of, MAD, mutually assured destruction.
The Geneva Conference of 1955 was held between the
two superpowers in order to discuss the alarming rates of
arms proliferation and yet these talks produced little in
terms of international arms control treaties. The Soviets
wanted American disarmament and the Americans wanted Open
Skies, the ability to fly over each territory to confirm that
disarmament was actually taking place. In all the chief policies
of the Eisenhower administration were the deterrent capabilities
of nuclear weapons as the dominant diplomatic device, supplemented
by covert ops in the third world in the third world as in
exercise in maintaining a cheaper form of containment.
In 1953 a major policy paper
NSC 162 built on the outlines of NSC 68
and formally replaced containment with deterrence in
order of priorities. NSC 162 outlined that Soviet hostility
and military power were a threat to US national security.
The policy outlined the key Soviet goal was the destruction
of the US dominated capitalist economy through means of economic
warfare. This paper was to provide the bureacratic impetus
for mass nuclear weapons proliferation. The ideology behind
this was that nuclear weapons were cheaper to maintain then
traditional occupying armies. The threat of massive retaliation
would be the deterrent to Soviet Communist aggression. Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles explained
the premise behind the use of deterrence:
"We
need allies and collective security. Our purpose is
to make these relations more effective, less costly. This
can be done by placing more reliance on nuclear power
and less dependance on local defensive power." (Major
Problems in American Foreign Relations, 424)
***
The
realist Robert
Divine argues that Eisenhower employed a policy of restraint
backed by ultimate force. He ended the conflict in Korea and
this was the evidence of Eisenhower as being a model of restraint,
unlike Kennedy and LBJ who escalated conflict in Cuba and
Vietnam. However, in judging the ability of deterrence in
decreasing Soviet aggression Divine concludes did not "ease
Cold War tensions."(America in the World, 303) In fact
this policy created an arms race. Eisenhower was able
to achieve short-term national security goals through deterrence,
and yet this policy created nuclear parody--absent the Rosenberg/Fuchs
affair--and would provide the necessary antagonism for soviet
incursion and expansion under later presidencies.
The Eisenhower administration would inherit
themes from the Truman era. However, in the short term that
administration was able to avoid wars of attrition rather
policies of coup detete in the Latin America banana republics.
In the long term Eisenhower would set the tone for such a
war of attrition by establishing military commitments to Vietnam
after the French were defeated in 1954 at Diem Bien Phu.
The major policy platforms Eisenhower inheritied
from Truman where limited containment and as previously mentioned
committment to intervention. However, unlike Truman's broad
application of the Domino Theory, Dulles and Eisenhower were
to incorporate that theory into a policy reality by clear
regional demarcation as to what was to be in the capitalist
zone and what must not be lost to the communist zone. Any
major provocation by the Soviets would lead to all out nuclear
war . Hence deterrence as a philosophy was peace backed by
the threat of nuclear war, and total annihilation. The third
major policy was the establishment of covert ops and propaganda
in the communist bloc countries, such as Radio Free Europe,
a program sponsered by the CIA to undermine communist ideology
in E.Europe with news from the West.
Nuclear weapons
were viewed by the administration as being cheap. By virtue
of just having stockpiles was enough to avoid war during the
early part of the administration. The policy paper NSC
162 established this view. This was meant to make the
Soviets fully weigh the alternatives to expansion since such
an act would result in eventual nuclear holocaust. The first
test to this theory came in 1954 when Maoist China began
shelling Taiwan. Rather then send military troops and
undergo the previous policy and practice of containment Eisenhower
used the threat of nuclear war to force the Chinese to back
down. The approach was successful and China's priemiere, Zhou
En Lai indicates that good relations with the US are more
essential than China's plans for immediate reunification with
Taiwan. Divine argues that Eisenhower's success in this had
to do with his deliberate vaugness as to whether he was fully
committed to defending Taiwan as Truman had been. However,
as Divine also asserts that:,.."he took Dulles concept
of massive retaliation and refined it." (Major Problems
in American Foreign Relations, 441) He made China weigh the
options of a possible nuclear strike without having to act
first. The residual effect of this short term policy gain
as Gordon-Chang
argues was the long term development of nuclear weapons proliferation
in China.
In 1955 there is an effort to create arms reduction
at the Geneva conference. This was the first attempt at arms
detente and it failed miserably. Eisenhower as Divine maintained
was able to create short-term stability through the use of
deterrence. However massive nuclear arms arsenals on both
sides entailed an uneasy peace preserved by the threat of
total annihilation, proliferation corresponding more to mutual
paranoia then as necessary measures for real security.
There is also an attempt by Eisenhower to establish
the Atoms
for peace program, and to supply civilian nuclear
technology to the third world and also to the Soviets. However,
disarmanment polices failed due to mutual mistrust. Eisenhower
insited that a policy of Open Skies exist between the
Soviet's and the US to verify that disarmanment was taking
place as a part of this program. However, at the same time
the US military detonates a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific,
at Bikini Atoll. This effectively ended the Geneva talks.
The Soviets refuse to take part in any Open Skies agreements
and Cold War escalation increased. The Soviets also begin
a massive program of H-bomb testing on their own.. In 1957
and in 1958 there are attempts at further means of arms reduction
and a nuclear moratorium is agreed upon until a summitt conference
can be held in Geneva in 1960 could stipulate a test ban treaty.
However, that convention was doomed to failure, when pilot,
Francis
Gary Powers, flying a U-2 spy plane from Pakistan is shot
down over Soviet territory.
***
The question that emerges here is how much does
an individual, for instance the President of the United States,
have control over his own bureaucracy? Revisionists claim
that Eisenhower was in almost complete control by maintaining
that he attended some 339 NSC policy debates and operated
an open forum of discussion in these proceedings. In reality
Eisenhower delegated his authority through channels depending
upon the region in question, for instance Latin America was
a veritable fiefdom for the Dulles brother's and United Fruit
company. In terms of overall policy committments Eisenhower
was profoundly influenced by the Domino theory and limited
containment. He relied on covert operations and sent military
advisors and weapons to pro western guerrilla
fighters in countries such as Zaire and
Tibet. He also militarily intervened in the middle
east.
However, the overwhelming evidence would seem
to point to John Foster Dulles as more or less micromanaging
Eisenhower policy in concert with the business establishment's
intrests for economic spheres of influence in third world
nations. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were both on
the board of directors of United
Fruit Company. Arguablly, during this period the Cia's
policy in Latin America was based more on the interests of
the Dulles brothers then on real interests of national
security. (Stephen SCHLESINGER & Stephen KINZER, Bitter
Fruit: the Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
(New York: Anchor Press, 1990)
Q/A Were the fifties a search for a corporatist
world order.
To answer this question one must view ideology
as a common consensus builder. Both Eisenhower and Dulles
were vehemntly anti-Communist. However, they had different
reasons for acting in concert. Eisenhower identified nationalism
with communism as much as Truman did and in the case of Guatemala
he had Dulles overthrow the elected government of Jacobo Guzman.
Guzman had wanted to nationalize United Fruit company
lands and redistrubite them to the peasants. To Eisenhower
this was Soviet Communist ideology infilitrating Latin America.
To Secretary of State ,John Foster Dulles, the attempted nationalization
of the United Fruit Company meant a major loss in personal
net assets.
Historian Walter Lafeber maintains that Eisenhower
on record maintained that it was Dulles who implemented the
national security apparatus that would have us in vietnam
and in every other fault line war."Eisenhower, meanwhile
set important precedents by using the CIA to try to overthrow
nationalist popular governments in Iran, [installing the pro-western,
Shah to protect US-British Interests] Guatemala, Indonesia.
Dulles fashioned a far flung network of alliances that
in Eisenhower's words committed Americans to support the defense
of almost every free area..facing the Sino Soviet complex."(American
Age, 572)
In some instances Eisenhower does appear to
have excercised unilateral authority. In the case of Korea,
Eisenhower overrules Dulles and right wing republicans who
favor escalation. He briefly thought of using nuclear weapons
as a last ditch attempt to secure a victory from the north
Koreans and wisely did not act upon that perrogative. However,
the nuclear option was non-negotiable when it came to the
issue of Taiwan and China.
The Third World
Dependencia
theory was the chief theory relied upon by the majority
of Cold War nationalists inclined towards Communism. Dependencia
theory held that colonialist rule had caused their
countries to be rendered into a state of "economic backwardness."
Nationalism in the Third World often borrowed from Marxist
Leninist models of the command economy and this came
to undermine the fourth pillar of American foreign policy
the maintenance of free trade. The US policymakers
of the time viewed the world in terms of spheres of influence,
core states, and peripheral states. Containment the second
pillar of American foreign policy took significance in the
fact that the third world was the most populous. Hence Containment
also became an ideology of maintaining the free trade system.
Thus, one had to create an ideology on containing Soviet influence
and the fanaticism they aroused in nationalists and on the
other an ideology of the administration itself having to maintain
the third world, through often ethically compromising means
to safeguard trade and prevent war.
US policymakers viewed nationalism as dangerous and
usually synonymous to Marxist-revolution.
The ideology of Marxism had
maintained that revolution could only come after industrialization.
The third world was primarily agrarian. However, Marx's theory
of colonialism producing nationalism catered to these nationalists
and fit into many of their agendas,-- hegemony over local
and provincial political forces. Marxism was a simple book
on how to mobilize and monopolize control if you were a nationalist.
It offered simplistic explanations as to why third world countries
were in the economic positions they were in. Economic determinism
maintained that in the end there is violent revolution and
then there is utopian peace. That peace could only come when
the workers had claimed the means
of production and received the "fruits of their labor."
In reality often it allowed
Marxist nationalists to develop police states, and conduct
genocide on their own people and in the territorial expansion
often committed the same acts of colonial oppression that
spawned their original nationalist tormented cries for freedom
and nationhood. As many of these Marxist countries sought
to industrialize they relied on Leninist theories of production
and building of large infrastructure and factories. Case in
point for example in China during the Great
Leap Forward Mao's economic plan for modernization,
over 60 million people died of starvation, due to forced communalism,
and the lack of farm tools to grow crops, since most of the
material had gone to building huge grain processing plants
and foundries that remained empty and useless.
In all there were two options
for nationalists. Democratically supported fascism or Marxist
inspired mercantilism. However, due to the large disbursement
of foreign owned capital in their land with little control
over that material flow of wealth, peripheral countries under
the international trade system would suffer violent swings
in monetary and price value for the goods they produced. This
led many nationalists to attempt to nationalize industry
and this brought the ire of American government and its constituent
business interests as well as those of the other industrialized
nations. Hence the US administration's virulent application
of an anti-Communist policy, in both Latin America and Asia,
the former region was already deemed to have precedents
of intervention going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
There was real fear in Washington
as to the functional application of Marxism in the Third World.
As an ideology it justified violent overthrow of the capitalist
system, and a mobilization of the means of production in order
to sustain that revolution until some state of utopian
equality could be achieved. On a smaller scale it justified
monopolizing power into an autocratic state controlled system
in the guise of public welfare.
However, beyond ideological concerns, the chief
fear for US at this time was the supposed threat to the fourth
pillar of American foreign policy, free trade. This was posed
by either nationalization of industry absent Marxist ideology,
or the implementation thereof, a closed economic system with
a command and control economy, and virtual political hegemony
sustained by the Soviets. On the one hand Washington could
not promise clear results in the international system. On
the other, the Soviets ran a superb propaganda campaign and
promised third world countries rapid economic development.
(Calloss, Lecture)
It has been argued that Eisenhower's National
Security State, i.e., the CIA-multinational corporate connection
to the US has historically held a class bias towards issues
of global and regional security, as its political and diplomatic
means of liberal interventionism. So the common Third
world view towards the historical experience of colonialism
as now having evolved beyond monarchy into the modern imperialist
corporatist structure of today. Hence the differences were
only in the details, the complexities and sacrifices of moral
conscience to wit the unconscionable blind support and aid
to decentralized paramilitary groups, a proliferation of genocide
and mercenaries for hire. For example one could look to the
later case of Chile, and the CIA's attempt to thwart
the election of Allende
in the 1970's as evidence of the Richard Nixon - Kissinger
(Real politic doctrine in action.(Walter Isaacson,
"Kissinger:
A Biography," 1992. p 655-657, 764-767) Also: (Please
see: 1975 report from the US Senate Select committee on Intelligence
activities, 'Church
Committee,' Senator Frank Church, US Covert Activities
in Chile, 1963-1973.) Also these recent FOIA declassified
links outline the extent of the close political relationship
between the US corporate Multinational Intelligentsia and
of Kissinger to Pinochet's Junta, during the 1970's. NSA
Archive @ GWU.edu &@ US State Department
****
In 1952 the EEC is formed in Europe backed
by US investors. The theme of US foreign policy at this time
was to lock countries into alliances based on the material
flow of international trade. Eisenhower advanced this aim
by enlarging the scope of the Export-Import
bank developed by Roosevelt and incorporating it under
the World Bank. The World Bank was designed to provide long
term loans and long term capital investment projects in third
world nations providing assistance to those nations seeking
economic integration into the new international capitalist
system. The stability of Europe relied on the freeflow of
trade and commodities from the Middle East, i.e., oil, and
from other regions that had large reserves of raw materials
for extraction.
Furthermore the Eisenhower
Doctrine outlined the administrations policy
in the middle east as one of which the status quo must be
maintained at all costs, oil must flow freely to the US and
its allies. If a nationalist such as Gamul Abdul Nasser
appeared among the Arabs the CIA would be called to either
quarantine or overthrow the regime and in the case of Lebanon
American troops were deployed despite the knowledge that that
the movement in Lebanon was nationalistic and not communist.
The Eisenhower administration's viewed this as a case in which
the fragile economic order was deemed necessary to preserve
or the domino theory would manifest and lead to the disintegration
of alliances in Europe as well as create a world wide energy
shortage leading to inevitable war.
In all Eisenhower, viewed nuclear weapons as
foundational to his deterrence policy, and this was supplemented
by covert ops in the economic peripherary. Yet Eisenhower's
policy platform was more or less an inheritance of Truman's
security affirmations in the Middle East, Latin America, and
Asia. Truman created the National Security Agency and the
Central Intelligence Agency, and Eisenhower was the first
President to more or less incorporate those institutions into
integral elements that would shape American foreign policy
for years to come. These intelligence agencies would create
a security apparatus predicated upon interventions in foreign
countries perceived to have geo-strategic value to the US.
The clearest example of this was when Eisenhower began to
send military and intelligence advisors to Vietnam. The French
had been defeated at Diem Bien Phu in 1954 by Vietnamese
nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh. Here again the Ghosts of
containment would committ Eisenhower to this region to support
French colonial interests that still remained in the region
and provide an attempt at quarntining Soviet and chinese influence.
The ostensible reason for intervention in Vietnam
stemmed from the fact that the US needing support from the
French in terms of its mutual treaty obligations with NATO.
Hence the US became saddled with the economic burden of keeping
the post colonial world from turning Communist or creating
political fissures in the political and economic system. The
Geneva conference of 1955 divided Vietnam into North and South
regions with line of demarcation at the 17th parallel. Eisenhower
and Dulles install Ngo Dinh Diem as President of South Vietnam.
Diem in reality was corrupt and inept like Chiang Kai Shek
and yet Eisenhower overlooked this. Historian David
Anderson argues that "The administration tied US
global credibility to the survival of the regime, pouring
military aid..to reaffirm its faith in containment and the
domino theory."(American in the World, 312)Meanwhile
Ho Chi Minh is established as the defacto ruler and president
of North Vietnam.
Eisenhower was more or less re affirming the
existence of the Greater
East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere which had provided the
ideology for Japanese colonial expansionism during
WWII, and in the undertaking of this policy of intervention
in Indo China more or less was a creation of America's attempt
to exercise hegemony in the raw markets of East Asia by grafting
original Japanese imperial designs into the American capitalist
system. Since Ho was a communist, despite his intial overtures
for US recognition, the Eisenhower administration became constrained
by its own anti communist ideology. The Domino theory more
or less envisioned that if Vietnam fell to Communism, then
Malay and Japan would follow suit since the vital hub of Asia's
tin and rubber trade would fall under a Sino-Soviet orbit.
Furthermore, Eisenhower viewed the potential loss of Vietnam
would mean the loss of American naval power in the pacific,
to the chinese and their supposed russian allies. In all of
this Eisenhower creates the Asian military alliance's counterpart
to NATO, SEATO, in 1954 that provided the mechanism
and precedent for unilateral intervention into Vietnam under
LBJ. Furthermore, as Lafeber maintains: "Southeast
Asia had both strategic materials (such as oil and tin) and
locations (for air and naval bases) that the west required
for its Cold War build up." (American Age, 548)
The US national security state under Eisenhower
also had other reasons to feel threatened. In 1959 Fidel Castro
defeated Juan Batista and entered into a diplomatic and political
alliance with the soviets. Cuba nationalized its sugar and
oil industries and the US followed with an economic embargo
on the island. The administration would sponser asassination
attempts on Castro just as Keneddy would later implement the
same program later with Operation Mongoose. Eisenhower would
also allow the CIA to spy on americans and as such this era
is defined as the emergence of the imperial presidency.
The Historian H.
W. Brands maintains that deterrence during the Eisenhower
administration along with Dulles implementation of a national
security state, created a military industrial complex
that Eisenhower sought to limit in spirit due to his reliance
on deterrence and that such a policy created increase military
arms build ups globally and increased nuclear arms proliferation,
due to Eisenhower's belief in the conventional uses of nuclear
weapons.(American in the World, 318) The presidencies of Kennedy
and LBJ would be beholden to massive military budgetary increases
due to the fact that nuclear weapons were politically and
militarily, irrellevant in the battlefield. Thus, faced
with huge military arsenals later presidential administrations
reaffirmed political and economic committments established
by Eisenhower. He outlined the foundations for further cold
war escalation in concert with Dulles due to his thinking
that Nuclear weapons could have conventional uses, and could
deter and or secure diplomatic concessions from the Soviets
or the Chinese. Once MAD and nuclear parody were achieved
among the the US and the Soviets they would then increase
their political committments to fermenting revolutions in
the Third World and and in so by doing defense budgets sky
rocketed. In 1961 a new president, Kennedy would be elected
by promises of being tough on Communism.
Kennedy & the
Struggle to maintain US Hegemony
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