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by Joseph Enge
Dwight David Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election with a mandate to end the bloody stalemate on the Korean peninsula. The country was frustrated with over two years of conflict with no end in sight. America was bogged down in its first “limited war” and turned to the former supreme commander and national hero who led American and British forces to victory against Nazi Germany less than a decade before. Eisenhower visited the Korean front in December of 1952 as promised during his election campaign and also kept his commitment to end the fighting in Korea seven months into his presidency. Both President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles credited their use of nuclear weapons coercion to end the communist delay tactics at the negotiations at Panmunjom to bring about the July 1953 truce. This also validated their New Look approach to national defense threatening “massive retaliation” when U.S. national vital interests were at stake. Scholars have been divided in the six decades since the truce in Korea ended the war, or “police action” using the Truman administration’s euphemism. The debate and historiography centers on cynicism regarding the effectiveness of “massive retaliation” as a defense policy in general, and specifically whether President Eisenhower’s hint of considering the utilization of nuclear weapons to break the deadlock in Korea produced the truce. Some scholars assert no such nuclear threat occurred; and as David Mayers contends it was the combination of Stalin’s death in March of 1953 with the new Soviet leadership wishing to reduce tensions with the U.S. to concentrate on political consolidation and economic development. It is also asserted China and North Korea were weary of the war and also wanted to focus on domestic economic development as their primary motivation to end the fighting in Korea.
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2008
2013, Congress and the Presidency
Existing scholarship describes Congress as deferring to Dwight Eisenhower on foreign policy during the majority of his presidency. In this article, I demonstrate that Congress resisted key elements of Eisenhower's foreign policy agenda throughout his presidency, and that Eisenhower needed to employ a variety of sophisticated strategies to obtain congressional backing. On foreign aid—one of his top presidential priorities—Eisenhower launched a multifaceted and innovative campaign to build congressional support, which included the establishment of White House-funded private advocacy groups to educate the public about the issue. Eisenhower's approach on foreign aid reveals that he was willing to depart from his “hidden-hand” leadership style when necessary to advance a top priority, but that even when going public, Eisenhower relied in part on others to deliver his message.
2010
This paper examines whether President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "New Look" defence policy made the US safer in the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union (2010).
1995, Diplomacy and Statecraft
... Jackson, Eisenhower's speech-writer Emmet Hughes, Charles Bohlen, Counsellor in the State Department and Ambassador-designate to Moscow, and Paul Nitze met on the same day to discuss the proposal.66 The crux of the problem was soon pointed out by Hughes. ...
The Quemoy crisis of 1954–1955 found the Eisenhower White House struggling to appear tough against Mao's China and supportive of Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan while not triggering World War III. When the initial rhetorical campaign of " fuzzing " failed, Eisenhower's team switched to launching threats of imminent nuclear war—yet both strategies of deterrence were beside the point, for we now know that Mao had no intention of invading Quemoy or Taiwan. In this classic Cold War conundrum, what I call " the agony of sovereignty " left American leadership grasping at straws while misreading the trajectory of postcolonial nationalisms in Asia. Nonetheless, I demonstrate how, by the spring of 1955, Mao, Eisenhower, and Chiang all felt a sense of triumph, as they each evolved responses that left their main interests intact while avoiding what observers had feared might become " a chain reaction of disaster. "
This article historicizes the contemporary relationship between the United States, its leading United Nations allies, and the two Koreas through the lens of the post-1953 history of the Korean Armistice Agreement, demonstrating that the US–UN allies were responsible, not only for significant violations of the truce, but also that these violations escalated the ongoing conflict. The article explores how the United States and its allies in the United Nations understood the legacies of war associated with the Armistice, how they conducted their diplomacy in relation to the Armistice Agreement, and how their reactions to a series of post-1953 crises—the Ameri-can introduction of atomic weapons to South Korea in the latter part of the 1950s; American and allied diplomacy surrounding North Korea's seizure in early 1968 of the US spy ship, the USS Pueblo; and the Joint Security Area (JSA) War Crisis of August 1976—involved warfare strategies intertwined with violations of the Armistice Agreement. Far from creating peace or stability, the manner in which successive American and allied UNC governments have dealt with the Armistice has fueled and escalated the ongoing militarization of the Korean peninsula, of which the contemporary nuclear crisis is just one obvious by-product. The Korean Armistice , constantly violated by North Korea and the UNC, and still not adhered to by South Korea today, has not inhibited conflict in Korea or mediated tension. Indeed, US–UNC violations of the Armistice have been a major reason that the agreement has become part of the many obstacles to creating peace on the Korean peninsula.
2018, Phi Alpha Theta Paper Prize Competition (Undergraduate)
WINNER of the Lynn W. Turner Prize in the 2018 Phi Alpha Theta National Paper Prize Competition (Undergraduate). The introduction of nuclear weapons in 1945 changed warfare forever, not least in the American context. With the Soviets’ challenge to the American “nuclear monopoly” in 1949, American policymakers and strategists were forced to reconsider the implications of using such weapons. Some suggested using smaller, “tactical” nuclear weapons (TNWs), intended more for targeting an enemy’s military than its population centers. At several points in the early Cold War period, the US almost employed TNWs, but held back. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower restrained themselves from using these weapons due to political, diplomatic, and practical concerns. Specifically, they feared domestic and international backlash, and the possibility of starting World War III. Additionally, many of the situations in which use of these weapons was considered—especially in Asia—were not conducive to mass military casualties, due to environmental constraints (e.g. terrain and climate), and military realities (e.g. enemy formations and positions). While Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both ultimately restrained themselves from employing TNWs during the Cold War, Truman was clearly more reluctant to consider their use. Though Truman saw nuclear weapons as a valuable diplomatic tool, he also considered them to be cataclysmic and morally reprehensible, and was therefore committed to only using them as weapons of last resort. President Eisenhower, on the other hand, was deeply intrigued by their diplomatic and military value, and sought to make such weapons conventional. His interest in TNWs, however, was repeatedly squelched by potential foreign and domestic reactions and military (in)feasibility. For both presidents, the greatest deterrent to using tactical nuclear weapons in the field was the fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union and, later, China. These constraints are evident in the policymaking records from the period, as well as the memoirs and other accounts left by the policymakers themselves.
NATO as alliance has stood the test of time since the early post-war years. Yet similar alliances such as SEATO passed into history long ago. The problem with the NATO model of alliance was its inability to be applied to the Third World. The particular circumstances of Southeast Asia prevented SEATO from becoming a true successor to the NATO alliance system. In addition, the approach of the Eisenhower and his administration to Southeast Asia and anti-communist alliances was undermined by their own political needs and personal experiences. Southeast Asia was fit into the mold of the post-war period and the Cold War.
This article reviews the 2014 book co-edited by Donald W. Boose, Jr. and James I. Matray, The Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War. The essay evaluates the book in relation to the historiography of the Korean conflict, outlines areas where future research needs to be carried out, reflects on methodological issues related to the field of military history, and, with reference to Michael Hunt and Steven Levine's book, Arc of Empire, discusses the Korean War as part of broader histories of empire.
During the 1950s, the United States made enormous strides in nuclear weapons development and in understanding their effects. The arsenal grew from a relatively small number of fairly simple fission devices to a large number of tactical and strategic weapons with a very broad spectrum of yields. The nuclear arms buildup had profound repercussions for U.S. national security policy and for the personnel involved in testing the weapons of mass destruction. On the one hand, the large and rapidly growing inventory of nuclear weapons allowed the Eisenhower Administration to give U.S. national security policy a “New Look,” saving the American tax payers untold millions of dollars. On the other, a number of soldiers and civilians involved in the tests paid for the advances in nuclear weapons technology with their health.
2015, Journal of Northeast Asian History