Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., confided to a businessmen’s luncheon in Chicago that President Truman, knowing that Harry Dexter White was a Russian spy, had promoted him from assistant secretary of the treasury to executive director of the United States Mission to the International Monetary Fund in 1946. Chairman Harold Velde of the House Committee on Un-American Activities at once issued a subpoena to the ex-President to testify before the committee. The summons was ignored. In the resulting controversy Senator McCarthy attacked the Administration over a nationwide broadcast for its failure to force all nations, beginning with Britain, to cease their trade with Red China by threatening to cut off our economic aid. We should say, “If you continue to ship to Red China … you will not get one cent of American money.” The fact that our allies provided us, at great danger to themselves, with military bases on their own soil from which our strategic pressure on the Soviet Union was maintained meant nothing to the total irresponsibility of the Radical Right. McCarthy’s attacks on the United States Information Agency overseas libraries as centers for diffusion of Leftist books led to the burning of hundreds of books in these libraries and eventually to attacks on works like Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood as subversive, because they did not picture middle-class Middle West American customs (Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, clearly a Communist tactic).

Such harassments of the new Administration were almost constant, especially from the Right, which was confident it had won the election of 1952 and should be obeyed as a consequence. On April 30th, in Cabinet, Taft blasted the Administration for its inability to cut more than $5 billion or $6 billion out of the defense budget. The foreign aid “mutual-security” budget of $7.6 billion left by Truman was cut by Chairman John Tabor of the House Appropriations Committee to $4.4 billion in spite of Eisenhower’s request for $5.5 billion. Chairman C. W. Reed of the House Ways and Means Committee, despite Eisenhower’s appeal, knocked out the new Truman taxes of 1951 on July 1, 1953, six months before they would have ended anyway.

Under Right-wing attacks such as these, Eisenhower was largely disillusioned with his job by the summer of 1953 and spent much time over the next two years considering how he might get rid of the dominant Republican Right and form a new, middle-of-the-road Eisenhower Party. The impracticality of this became apparent to him long before the election of 1956.

These attacks from the Right were much less disturbing to Dulles than they were to the President. The Secretary of State was clear in his own mind on what his aims in foreign policy should be. These aims were largely acceptable to the neo-isolationists and congressional Republicans. Basic to these ideas was his conception of “massive retaliation.” This was publicly announced in his speech of January 12, 1954, before the Council of Foreign Relations, but had been forecast in his article in Life almost two years earlier. “Massive retaliation” here meant nuclear reprisal by strategic bombing. It was conceived as an alternative to limited war and was intended to be a deterrent to Soviet instigation of such local limited wars. The points at which it would be applied or the degree of aggression necessary to trigger it were both left ambiguous, in the hope that the threat would deter aggression in all areas and on all levels. Dulles was really rejecting the whole idea of limited war, and saw local defense only as a trigger mechanism for tripping massive retaliation. In this view he was at one with most of the Eisenhower Administration. Secretary Wilson, for example, said, “We can no longer afford to fight limited war.” Of course, he was thinking in monetary terms. General Gavin, who heard this statement, replied, “If we cannot afford to fight limited wars, then we cannot afford to survive, for that is the only kind of war we can afford to fight.” He was thinking of the cost in terms of human lives.

As a corollary to the idea of massive retaliation as deterrence, Dulles had the additional idea of local defense, and especially local alliances, as triggers. Combined with this was his refusal to accept anything but a two-bloc world, by his resolute refusal to recognize any right to anyone to be neutral. On June 9, 1956, in a speech at Iowa State College, he said that America had made bilateral treaties with forty-two countries and that these agreements “abolish, as between the parties, the principle of neutrality, which pretends that a nation can best gain safety for itself by being indifferent to the fate of others. This has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception.” Thus the Secretary of State indicated his readiness to abandon the nonaligned countries to the Soviet bloc, and gave Stalin’s successors in the Kremlin a tactical opportunity they were already exploiting. At the same time, as we shall see in a moment, Dulles’s treatment of our chief allies was generally so autocratic and even contemptuous that they were soon alienated, especially France, which did not have the “special relationship” with us which kept Great Britain at our side through any slights.

The reason for these actions by Dulles was that he was really an isolationist, convinced that American defense rested wholly on American strength, and, accordingly, he did not regard his treaty partners as allies at all, but rather as a part of an elaborate network of triggers surrounding the Soviet Union. The chief portions of this network were three regional pacts: NATO, the Baghdad Pact (later called CENTO, or Central Treaty Organization), and SEATO (or Southeast Asian Treaty Organization). NATO included the United States, Canada, and thirteen other states from Iceland to Turkey (by May 1955).

The Baghdad Pact of 1955 was largely a Dulles creation but did not include the United States. Its members ‘were Britain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. It was renamed Central Treaty Organization in 1959 when Iraq withdrew and the United States signed bilateral alliances with all its members.

The third pact, SEATO, signed in 1954, had eight members (United States, Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan). With Turkey acting as a link between NATO and CENTO, and Pakistan in a similar role between CENTO and SEATO, the three pacts were intended to enclose the Soviet bloc in an unbroken perimeter of paper barriers which would deter a Communist movement outward anywhere, by serving as a trigger for American retaliation. Otherwise, CENTO and SEATO had little military or political merit, and created more problems than they solved.

Dulles was not primarily concerned about the military strength of these pacts or about the military contribution any of these countries could make to a war on the Soviet Union. Above all, he was not concerned with any contribution of a military character the United States could make to the defense of these pacts or areas in any nonnuclear war. Moreover, as triggers, Dulles was not much concerned with the character of the regimes involved or with their military strength. Some mountainous country or tropical jungle of Asia was, for his purposes, about as significant as England or France.

Since England and France were already alienated by the whole idea of massive retaliation, which could so easily, by some independent American act, deluge them with Soviet nuclear bombs, they were even further alienated by Dulles’s almost total lack of concern for the fact that they were more cultured and more civilized than other members of Dulles’s pacts, that they shared our common Western traditions (of which, indeed, they were the creators), and could contribute more to their own defense with conventional weapons than could some Moslem or pagan areas of Asia. It is no wonder that Dulles, with his unilateralism, his lack of concern for cultural kinship, his readiness to sacrifice all European states in response to a trigger mechanism in some remote and backward jungle, his almost total unconcern with the possible contribution of limited and conventional warfare to save any areas from Communism, it is no wonder, indeed, that Dulles alienated the United States from its natural associates in Western Europe to a degree hitherto unknown in the twentieth century.