The Eisenhower Doctrine

A Species of Containment

You yourselves must be masters in your own land! You yourselves must arrange your life as you yourselves see fit! You have the right to do this for your fate is in your own hands. Comrades! Brothers! Advance firmly and resolutely towards a just and democratic peace. We inscribe the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the world on our banners. Moslems of Russia! Moslems of the East! We look to you for sympathy and support in the work of reconstructing the world.

— Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, December 3, 1917

The essentials of our global strategy are not too difficult to understand. ... Europe [first]. Next, the Middle East. That's half of the oil resources. We can't let it go to Russia.

— Eisenhower, reply to Senator Robert Taft, April 30, 1953

Congress has no alternative but to go along with the President in this program to prevent the Russians from taking over the whole strategic Middle East. ... The League of Nations collapsed without us, and the United Nations could crumble if we falter.

— Harry S. Truman, newspaper op-ed, January 16, 1957

The United States to which Eisenhower announced his eponymous doctrine was a nation in the midst of great changes. Consumerism, manifested by the advent of popular new products like the refrigerator and the television set, was on the upswing. Transportation patterns were disrupted by the widespread acquisition of the automobile. Debt, as well as marital infidelity, was on the rise. Mainline Protestantism's domination of America's public spiritual life would soon be undercut by the fiery Manhattan crusade of Billy Graham. Massive migration to the South, school integration, and a nascent feminist labor movement all signified a society on the cusp of social upheaval. The political realm was full of tumult as well. The Korean conflict and Joseph McCarthy had been weathered, only to be replaced by the frightening specter of mutually assured destruction, the disintegration of the French and the British colonial empires, and the mass production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Soviet tanks in Budapest crushed any hope that Communism's grip on Eastern Europe might be peacefully "rolled back," and in a few short months Sputnik would soar across the skies, taking with it the warm assurance many Americans had of their country's technological superiority.

It was in this atmosphere of transition that Dwight D. Eisenhower, on January 5, 1957, gave what became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine address. More than anything, the Eisenhower Doctrine was a regionally specific articulation of the larger policy of "containment." First formulated by George Kennan in his 1946 State Department "Long Telegram" and 1947 "X Article" in Foreign Affairs, Kennan's basic premises were (1) that because of internal Russian historical and ideological factors "there [could] be no permanent modus vivendi" with the Soviet Union, and therefore (2) the "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world [was] something that [could] be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force" by the United States and its allies (emphasis mine). In other words the immutability of Soviet hostility and the prohibitive cost of overthrowing the Soviet Union combined to make limiting further Communist expansion the most prudent strategic policy option.

The contours of what exactly defined containment, as this strategy came to be called, quickly became the subject of debate amid rapidly deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The highly classified Clifford-Elsey report, which drew heavily from Kennan's "Long Telegram," framed the conflict as largely ideological in nature. It asserted that the Kremlin's leaders considered themselves the "defenders of the communist faith." According to the report, this meant that

the fundamental tenet of the communist philosophy embraced by Soviet leaders is that the peaceful coexistence of communist and capitalist nations is impossible. ... The key to an understanding of current Soviet foreign policy, in summary, is the realization that Soviet leaders adhere to the Marxian theory of ultimate destruction of capitalist states by communist states, while at the same time they strive to postpone the inevitable conflict in order to strengthen and prepare the Soviet Union for its clash with the western democracies.

This ideological alarmism — belief that the Soviets' Communist worldview made them implacably dedicated to the violent overthrow of the West — reached its apotheosis in National Security Council Report 68, better known as "NSC-68." Developed under the aegis of Paul Nitze and given to President Truman in April 1950, this document stated that the Soviet Union, as the latest of many "aspirants to hegemony," was "animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and [sought] to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." Conflict between the United States and Soviet Union was therefore "endemic" and was "waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency." Given this analysis it is unsurprising that NSC-68 advocated a massive increase in defense spending to counter what its authors considered the growing Soviet threat. When Truman implemented NSC-68 in December 1950, chiefly due to the outbreak of war in Korea, the 1951 defense budget swelled from a projected $13 billion ceiling to well over $60 billion.

Although he did not disagree with the basic concept of containment, Eisenhower was horrified by these levels of expenditure. In his June 1952 speech announcing his Republican candidacy for the presidency, Ike identified four "threats" to the "American way of life": "disunity, inflation, excessive taxation, and bureaucracy." All four threats were the fault of the Democrats, and all four were a direct outcome of Truman's bloated defense budget. In concluding his address, Eisenhower restated his desire for a more fiscally lean military: "I believe we can have peace with honor, reasonable security with national solvency." To meet his goal, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, implemented a new version of containment after the 1952 presidential election. The New Look, as their overarching defense strategy came to be called after a speech by Dulles in 1954, was designed to dramatically decrease defense spending. According to John Lewis Gaddis, the New Look had four main components: (1) asymmetric response, or a dependence on full-scale atomic retaliation to deter enemy use of conventional forces; (2) reliance on alliances, especially to buttress limited U.S. manpower; (3) use of what Eisenhower called "psychological warfare," or the utilization of...