1956-1961
American losses to come:
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| Is that Boris Johnson I see in the back |
· Failed to aid Hungarian rebels
· Unable to stop the USSR from establishing itself in the Med and the Middle East
· Being humiliated with Spunik
· Entering a deep emotional depression by 1959 as it looked like they had lost the arms race
· The Suez crisis created a loss of faith and trust between the West
· Communist guerrillas threated South Vietnam and Laos to communism
· Helpless in the Cuban revolution and let them ally with Russian, making the USSR only 90 miles away
But, they managed to avoid the knock-out punch even with the Russian shift to the offensive. So how much of a failure was it? Was it worth the cost of going to war?
Eisenhower’s values:
+ Intervention
+ Provocative rhetoric
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| Me no like war |
+ Nuclear testing
+ The arms race
– Using American troops in armed conflict
The American successes:
· National product went up without inflation
· West Europe economy continued to boom
· NATO was still going
· Anglo-American Middle East oil interests were secured
· Latin American economy still dominated by the USA
· Military bases in the Pacific were safe
· Chiang held onto Formosa
· Even though Eisenhower was spending 2/3 of what the democrats wanted on defence the US was still militarily superior to the USSR
However, Eisenhower inevitable was unable to contain communism let along liberate the East. This was down to his fundamental flaw of not being willing to “pay the price” that Democratic successors could.
Eisenhower, you chicken!
· In the 1956 presidential campaign the Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson said he wasn’t doing enough to stop communism. Indochina had fallen and America was a “paper tiger”
· He wanted NATO’s decline and Armed Forces increase
· His last assault on Eisenhower was that he had let Russians get ahead in the arms race, “bomber gap”
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