Eisenhower Foreign Policy

By the end of World War II, only the Soviet Union and the United States were in a superior position. The Soviets only could boast of the Soviet army, which conquered Eastern Europe and militarily kept power. However, the United States not only became a superpower militarily, with a powerful army, navy, and air force, they were the only nation with nuclear weapons. Due to events at the time, the 3 presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy) all perceived the threat of the spread of Communism in their own way. In 1946, “a career diplomat” named George F. Kennan created a “hard-line” approach for foreign policy. (Roark, p. 867) President Truman believed that the approach known as “Containment” would “eventually end in either the breakup …show more content…
(Roark, p. 903) He feared that “massive defense spending” would negatively impact the economy’s vitality in the U.S. Eisenhower’s defense plan relied on the military’s strength with using nuclear weapons as a threat, discouraging and intimidating opposing forces. He supported friendly governments throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, where the Soviets were working to install their Communist system. Eisenhower’s ideas on foreign policy were different from Truman’s; he used a more “low key” secretive method by using spies within those countries working with our CIA and other operatives. His plan was to remove unfriendly governments, and replace them with acceptable people who were friendly to the United States. Evidence of Eisenhower’s New Look policy in the Middle East was when the CIA intervened, and eventually overthrew the elected nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh and was replaced by Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was acceptable to the United States. The primary reason for the overthrow was to preserve our oil interest in that area. A second example of the “New Look” was the successful overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, that reclaimed “lands owned by United Fruit Company which was a United