Pursuing Postponement: The Eisenhower Administration's Policymaking for the Developing World
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Eisenhower administration’s positions and policies towards the developing world. During the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, the complications involved in conducting an increasingly global Cold War presented Eisenhower and his officials with extensive and expanding problems. Nationalism, anti-colonialism, pushes for economic rebalancing, and other forms of self-assertion surged in regions across the globe described in this dissertation as the “Third World.” In Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia a variety of drives against the status quo confronted the Eisenhower administration, and Eisenhower in particular, with challenges of immense importance.
The central focus of this dissertation is how Eisenhower chose to meet those challenges, and how officials like John Foster Dulles and Richard Nixon supported and agreed or (more often in Nixon’s case) diverged and disagreed with the President on his choices. This dissertation argues that Eisenhower chose to pursue a policy of postponement toward the Third World; not necessarily attempting to maintain the status quo, but seeking to delay and otherwise slow the forces of change at work in the Third World. Richard Nixon, by dint of his contentious mentor-protégé relationship with John Foster Dulles, and the fact that he simultaneously served as a crucial tool in, and active critic of Eisenhower’s policies and positions in the Third World, provides a representative example of the many officials in Eisenhower’s administration who perceived and disagreed with the pursuit of postponement. Dulles too, though more often than not a strident supporter of Eisenhower, was intrinsically torn between his duty and his fundamental belief in the necessity of dynamic foreign policies. This study explores the means by which Eisenhower pursued postponement in the Third World, and complications and frustrations which arose during this ultimately doomed pursuit.
Description
Keywords
History--United States
Citation
Smith, B. (2016). Pursuing Postponement: The Eisenhower Administration's Policymaking for the Developing World (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27486