Eisenhower Doctrine

11 Key excerpts on "Eisenhower Doctrine"

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  Guide to International Relations and Diplomacy

  • Michael Graham Fry, Erik Goldstein, Richard Langhorne(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The Doctrine essentially expanded the arena of the struggle to include the Middle East and marked an escalation of the Cold War. It also marked a significant change in the US strategy of containment. Whereas before non-Soviet-backed communist nationalist forces could prove beneficial in the UNITED STATES 411 struggle against the Soviet Union - for example the United States looked approvingly on Tito's seizure of independent power in Yugoslavia in 1948 -according to the Eisenhower Doctrine, the threat came not only from Soviet Communism, but from communism in general. Therefore the Eisenhower administration took the position of opposing communism wherever it mate-rialized and in whatever form it took. Nevertheless, Eisenhower and Dulles believed it was necessary that this be done without financially bankrupting the United States or the capitalist system. The Doctrine was part of an overall strategy of containing the advance of communism and the spread of Soviet influence through nuclear deterrence, regional alliances and covert action. While the Doctrine was criticized by some in the United States for giving the President too much power, it was criticized by others who believed it failed to grant authorization of the use of US force in cases other than those of overt armed attack. Scholars have noted that the Doctrine lacked the sophistication to deal with complex issues in the Middle East such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, that it was too simplistic in assuming that the problems of these states could be understood in terms of the US-Soviet struggle and that it ignored important questions of nationalism. The Eisenhower Doc-trine also resulted in a more interventionist US policy in the region, in the Lebanon on 14 July 1958, for example. Nixon Doctrine (Guam Doctrine) The Nixon Doctrine was a declaration of principles to guide US foreign policy, particularly in Asia, presented by President Richard M. Nixon at a press conference in Guam on 23 July 1969.

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  Leaders at War

  How Presidents Shape Military Interventions

  • Elizabeth N. Saunders(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  154 These arguments make sense but must also be seen in the context of Eisenhower’s beliefs. As long as Iraq retained its pro-Western orientation and participated in security arrangements that suited the United States, Eisenhower worried little about Iraqi domestic institutions and even ignored the domestic political damage Nuri’s regime suffered as a result of its pro-Western stance. Furthermore, from Eisenhower’s perspective, taking on a new ally like Iraq when the British already had a strong position there would be redundant and costly. Replacing the British might also leave the United States looking like a colonial power and burdened with responsibility for building up Iraqi military institutions. Aid to Lebanon came with less colonial taint and was less risky in terms of Arab-Israeli politics.

  THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE

  Almost immediately after the Suez cease-fire, Eisenhower ordered a major review of U.S. policy in the region, with a particular emphasis on the Soviet threat. The review culminated in the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine. As presented to Congress, the doctrine called for an aid program, backed up with the threat to use force to defend states in the Middle East “against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.”155 For Arab governments, however, embracing the doctrine meant openly associating with the West, a stance not likely to go over well with their domestic audiences.156 As Gaddis notes, by this time Eisenhower had privately expressed some skepticism about the wisdom of a black-and-white alliance policy that had no room for gray areas such as neutralism, writing to his brother Edgar in 1956 that “it is a very grave error to ask some of these nations to announce themselves as being on our side.” But his reasoning concerned the international and military consequences of forcing states to declare their allegiance rather than the potential domestic repercussions for these states: Eisenhower worried that the United States would have the “impossible task” of arming new allies that were militarily weak and that new military allies would potentially invite a Soviet or communist attack.157 At the time of the Eisenhower Doctrine, he did not consider the local domestic consequences of asking Arab regimes to publicly trumpet their relationship with the United States, consistent with his externally focused view of alliances.

  The form of the Eisenhower Doctrine itself also emphasized international matters. Administration officials decided that the doctrine should be directed only at the threat from communism rather than also at intra-Arab rivalries or other regional threats. The doctrine also explicitly stated that the United States would only use force to protect nations “requesting such aid”; Eisenhower himself suggested the provision requiring a request, though Dulles objected.158

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  Containing Arab Nationalism

  The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East

  • Salim Yaqub(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  It would, in the second place, authorize the Executive to undertake in the same region programs of military assistance and cooperation with any nation or group of nations which desires such aid.” The third provision was to gain the most attention. It would authorize “the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid, against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.” 3 Eisenhower disavowed any eagerness for battle, saying, “It is my profound hope that this authority would never have to be exercised at all.” Indeed, such prior authorization would actually decrease the likelihood of hostilities, since it would convince the Soviet Union and its Middle Eastern supporters that any aggression on their part would be vigorously resisted. Hostile governments, Eisenhower said, “will know where we stand.” 4 President Eisenhower unveils the Eisenhower Doctrine before a joint session of Congress, 5 January 1957. (© United Press) Even before Eisenhower’s 5 January speech, the American press had dubbed the anticipated Middle East policy the Eisenhower Doctrine. Critics of the administration scoffed at the name. Democratic senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota saw nothing in the policy “which should distinguish it as a doctrine in the sense of the Monroe Doctrine and the Truman Doctrine” and began referring to Eisenhower’s initiative as “the so-called doctrine.” Eisenhower himself tried to get the State Department to use the term “American Doctrine” instead, but State Department officials resisted this suggestion, arguing that “Eisenhower Doctrine” was too firmly entrenched to be easily replaced

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  American Presidents, Religion, and Israel

  The Heirs of Cyrus

  • Paul Merkley(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  To address this situation (but without, of course, confessing that anything he had done or left undone had contributed to it), the president brought before a joint session of the 85th Congress on January 5,1957, a proposal (soon dubbed the "Eisenhower Doctrine") "to cooperate with and assist any nation or group of nations in the general area of the Middle East in the development of economic strength dedicated to the maintenance of national independence . . . [and] to authorize such assistance and coop- eration to include the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political inde- pendence of such nations, requesting such aid, against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism." 78 To secure passage of the act, Eisenhower was required to accept an amendment noting the commitment of the United States to preservation of the independence and sovereignty of nations in the area. As it turned out, Israel was the only nation in the region that formally adopted the Eisenhower Doctrine. 79 * * * * * The key to understanding Eisenhower's attitude toward Israel is the resentment he carried since his failure, in the days when he was chief of staff and George Marshall was secretary of state, to have persuaded the Jewish people and their American Zionist allies of the irrationality of Zionism. To Maxwell Abbell, president of the United Synagogues of America, Eisenhower once wrote, "I grew up believing that the Jews were the chosen people, that they gave us the high ethical and moral principles of our civilization." 80 This did not prevent him from believing that the Zionist venture was perverse and irrational. Indeed, he seemed to have thought that Jews, precisely because they were generally so intelligent, should have been able to see the irrationality of their goal.

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  George W. Bush

  Evaluating the President at Midterm

  • Bryan Hilliard, Tom Lansford, Robert P. Watson, Bryan Hilliard, Tom Lansford, Robert P. Watson(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Crabb Jr., The Doctrines of American Foreign Policy: Their Meaning, Role, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President; Takeyh, The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine. 9. Eisenhower, statement made on August 5, 1957, in Department of State, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1957 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1961), 863. 10. Crabb, The Doctrines of American Foreign Policy, 156. 11. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), 178. 12. House Report No. 2, 85th Congress, January 25, 1957, in Department of State, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents 1957 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, Government Printing Office 1957), 813. 13. Senate, Hearings on the President’s Proposal, 29. 14. See J. William Fulbright’s speech of January 24, 1957, in the Congressional Record, 85th Cong., 1st sess., Pt. 2, 1855–57. 15. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). 16. See Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order,” The New Yorker, April 1, 2002, 42–48; Nicholas Lehmann, “The War on What? The White House and the Debate about Whom to Fight Next,” The New Yorker, September 16, 2002, 36–44. 17. The Bush Doctrine appears in its most complete form to date in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which declares that “our immediate focus will be those terrorist organizations of global reach and any terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or their precursors.” Further, “The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.

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  The Road to Tahrir Square

  Egypt and the US from the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

  • Lloyd C. Gardner(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Saqi Books

    (Publisher)

  3

  Eisenhower Doctrine TO SIX DAYS OF WAR

  I hope that our NATO friends will understand clearly that we have no intention of standing idly by to see the southern flank of NATO completely collapse through Communist penetration and success in the Middle East while we do nothing about it. I am sure that they know that we regard Nasser as an evil influence

  .

  —President Dwight D. Eisenhower to John Foster Dulles,December 5, 1956

  Right now, of course, your task and mine is not to look back, but to rescue the Middle East—and the whole human community—from a war I believe no one wants. . . . I do urge you to set as your first duty to your own people, to your region, and to the world community this transcendent objective: the avoidance of hostilities

  .

  —President Lyndon B. Johnson to Gamal Abdel Nasser,May 22, 1967

  Suez marked the beginning of Ike’s troubles in foreign policy. He swamped Adlai Stevenson in a rerun of the 1952 election, but that was the only good news for quite a while. Indeed, the fallout continued to the end of his second term, with its fiasco-like U-2 affair that aborted a Paris summit conference with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev when the president refused to disavow spy planes. During the 1956 crisis Khrushchev had wagged a menacing finger at Egypt’s invaders, Britain, France, and Israel, declaring that the Soviet Union possessed large numbers of ICBMs and would use them if they did not cease and desist.

  It was Washington’s economic clampdown on Great Britain that really forced the issue, but that did not detract from the impression that the Soviet Union’s bullying was a foretaste of what was in store for U.S. foreign policy unless drastic changes were made. Sputnik in 1957 put an exclamation point on the Kremlin’s boast and gave the Republican administration fits as Democrats seized on a supposed “missile gap” to propel them into the 1960 presidential campaign. Hidden from the public was the big secret the successful U-2 flights over the Soviet Union had uncovered before the one Russia shot down on the eve of a summit conference: there was no missile gap. Khrushchev’s pumping up of the Soviet missile armory was, to say the least, premature.

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  Eisenhower Volume II

  The President

  • Stephen E. Ambrose(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Eisenhower Doctrine

  January–July 1957

  “NEW FORCES and new nations stir and strive across the earth,” Eisenhower declared in his Second Inaugural Address. “From the deserts of North Africa to the islands of the South Pacific one-third of all mankind has entered upon an historic struggle for a new freedom: freedom from grinding poverty.” Across this world, he said, “the winds of change” were blowing. The Communists were trying to get those winds blowing their way, in order to exploit the Third World. The great battleground of the Cold War had shifted away from Europe and Korea and Formosa, where the situation was relatively stable, to Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, where the situation was in active ferment. Suez was only the most spectacular event in the process of the breaking up of European colonialism. New nations were emerging, or struggling to emerge, from the wreckage. Most had not been prepared by their rulers for independence. Many had raw materials unavailable elsewhere, particularly oil and minerals that were crucial to the Western industrial system. All of the new nations appeared to be more or less in danger of falling to the Communists.

  Suez made Eisenhower almost painfully aware of the importance of the Third World to the United States, which was why he made it not only the theme of his second inaugural but of much of his second term. “No people can live to itself alone,” he told the American public. If living conditions were not improved in the Third World, it would go Communist. “Not even America’s prosperity could long survive if other nations did not also prosper.”1 Even before the inaugural, Eisenhower had set his Administration to work on what Burt Kaufman has called “the most searching review of the U.S. foreign-aid program since the adoption of the Marshall Plan.” When the reports came in, two months later, they concluded—as Eisenhower already had—that economic assistance to the Third World would lead to economic developments which would lead to political stability and the evolution of democratic societies. To get the process started, soft loans on a long-term, continuing basis were necessary.2

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  US Foreign Policy in the Middle East

  The Case for Continuity

  • Bledar Prifti(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The continuity in for- eign policy was a result of the unchanged status of the USA as the only regional hegemon in the world and its continuing geostrategic interests to contain the spread of the Soviet Union, prevent the emergence of another regional hegemon, and maintain control over the oil-rich region (Deibel and Gaddis 1987; Powaski 1998, 169–171; Viotti 2005, 222). For example, the foreign policy objective under the Eisenhower Doctrine was preventing the Soviet expansion in the Middle East due to power vac- uum created by the departure of Britain and France after the Suez Canal imbroglio (Yaqub 2004, 88). Like the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine grew out of the fear of Soviet expansion in the Persian Gulf and emphasized the responsibility of the threatened states to confront the Soviet Union while the USA would continue to provide economic aid and military assistance (Powaski 1998, 169–170). Also, the main objective of the Carter Doctrine and the Reagan Doctrine was containing the Soviet Union and controlling the Persian Gulf and the free flow of oil. This aggressive behavior against the Soviet Union and its regional proxies was dictated by a combination of several factors, which include the presence of anarchy in the international system, the possession by the Soviet Union and its proxies of considerable military capabilities that could hurt or even destroy US geostrategic interests in the Middle East and around the world, fear from and suspicion about the intentions of the Soviet Union of its proxies, the need to survive in an anarchic system, and the rationality to think strategically about how to survive. All these fac- tors, taken together, caused three main patterns of behavior in US foreign policy: fear, self-help, and power maximization. THE COLD WAR AND THE TRUMANIZATION OF US FOREIGN POLICY... 86 In addition, the strategy to advance that interest was dictated by its geographic location.

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  Encyclopedia of United States National Security

  • Richard J. Samuels(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  isolationism. The Monroe Doctrine was a rejection of European colo-nization that presumed U.S. authority over political and military affairs in the Americas. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the isolationist stance of the United States prevented the development of an overarching military doctrine. The vague idea of Manifest Destiny—the notion that the United States was destined to spread across North America—was probably the closest substitute for U.S. military doctrine in this era. The Spanish-American War and World War I involved the United States much more in world affairs and led to the articulation of new U.S. doctrines. The Stimson Doctrine, announced by U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson in response to the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria, stated that the United States would not recognize territorial changes initiated by force. COLD WAR DOCTRINE In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. position as one of the world’s two superpowers forced it to take a more active part in international matters. Postwar doctrine focused on confronting the United States’ main rival, the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 committed the United States to broad support for nations attempting to resist any form of subjugation, but was understood to indicate support particularly for foreign governments resisting communism. In 1957, the Eisenhower Doctrine was aimed specifically at the potential spread of communism in the Middle East, prompted by the threat of Soviet interference in the Suez Crisis of 1956. In 1980, the Carter Doctrine reaf-firmed the U.S. intention to oppose with force any attempted takeover of the Middle East. During the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the United States adopted several controversial doctrines. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine, announced by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick in the early 1980s, made a distinction between authori-tarian versus totalitarian regimes to justify U.S.

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  Hard Line

  The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II

  • Colin Dueck(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  In the end, Eisenhower won the electoral votes of virtually every region of the country outside the Deep South, recreating a similar out- come to . He immediately called it a victory for “modern Republi- canism.” Again, however, it was very much a personal rather than a party victory, and the congressional GOP did not perform especially well in . The votes that Stevenson won were largely due to persistent Dem- ocratic strengths in party identification and on domestic economic con- cerns—strengths that continued to play well for Democrats in Congress, as well as at the state and local level. 22 U.S. foreign policy during Eisenhower’s second term was dominated by the impression of crises and setbacks everywhere from the Middle East, Cuba, and Berlin to outer space. In the Middle East, Eisenhower and Dulles were alarmed as Egypt’s nationalist leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, took an increasingly anti-Western foreign policy line while ac- cepting Soviet bloc arms sales and foreign aid. America’s support for Egypt during the crucial phase of the  Suez crisis had apparently  C H A P T E R T H R E E won the United States little gratitude; the spread of Nasserism or radical Arab nationalism seemed only to benefit Moscow, and to undermine the influence of Washington’s European allies in the region. In January , Eisenhower therefore went to Congress and outlined the doctrine that would be named after him, proposing that the United States assume a new role in the Middle East by providing economic and military sup- port “to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political inde- pendence of nations requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.” The new doctrine was tested most dramatically in Lebanon. When the president of that country, Camille Chamoun, called in July  for U.S. aid against Nasserite and Communist subversion, Eisenhower sent in the Marines to support Chamoun’s government.

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  Covert Action in the Cold War

  US Policy, Intelligence and CIA Operations

  • James Callanan(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  Enterprises of this nature had been deployed sparingly during Truman’s tenure – in Syria and Egypt during 1949 and 1952 respectively – but the coming of the Eisenhower administration saw the DDP go into overdrive with its use of preventive covert action, mounting operations that spanned the globe, from Iran to Guatemala, Indonesia to the Congo, and ultimately to Cuba and the Caribbean. 6 The individuals singled out for attention were, furthermore, not exclusively leftist rulers who were feared to be leading their countries too far to the left. The roll-call of targets also included reactionaries such as the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, whose repressive authoritarian regime was seen by Washington as holding out the danger of triggering a copycat revolution of the kind that saw Fidel Castro depose Cuba’s rightist dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Commenting on the wider policy dilemmas faced by Eisenhower during his two terms in the White House, H. W. Brands lauded the president for recognising the risks of “erring on the side of activism”, and wisely accepting “a minor setback rather than hazard a major disaster”. 7 When confronted with developments in the third world that he judged to be running contrary to American interests, however, Eisenhower was far less circumspect. 8 Indeed, in his deployment of covert action he demonstrated an appetite for the proactive that, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, went unmatched throughout the entire Cold War period. Ike’s White House Dwight D. Eisenhower was, in many respects, a fortunate president. Having won the 1952 election on a wave of extrapartisan faith in his presumed ability to secure a speedy and honourable resolution to the Korean War, Eisenhower subsequently 88 C OVERT A CTION IN THE C OLD W AR found that his accession to the presidency coincided with a fundamental change in the climate of the Cold War itself.

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