Containment vs. Rollback -- Foreign Policy in the early 1950s

The Iranian coup in 1953 The Iranian coup in 1953

At the start of the Cold War, the Administration of Harry Truman operated under the strategy of containment. The operative idea was that the threat of communism was real, and that it should not be allowed to spread into countries where it had not already taken hold. Most famously, Truman had committed $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey to prevent those countries from falling under the Soviet orbit. Later, he had not hesitated to commit U.S. forces to South Korea to defend that country in the Korean War. Dean Acheson guided Truman's policy as Secretary of State, and it took intellectual inspiration from George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram".

However, even with these actions, many accused Truman of being too complacent with the communist threat. They wanted not only containment but rollback. That is, they wanted to roll back the advance of communism and reclaim as many nations as they could for the Western capitalist system. This was the stance of the Republican platform in 1952, under which Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. Eisenhower appointed two brothers, both of them rollback advocates, to lead the State Department and the CIA. John Foster Dulles served as Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA. They largely defined American foreign policy in the mid-1950s.

Two countries clearly demonstrate the power of the rollback ideology -- Iran and Guatemala. In Iran, a left-leaning Prime Minister named Mohammad Mosaddegh had won election and in 1951 had nationalized the oil industry. This hit the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, now known as British Petroleum) very hard, and that company began to agitate for a change in government. Given that Iran shared a border with the Soviet Union, the United States had its own concerns, and once Eisenhower and Dulles were in charge, the CIA began to plot a revolution. This was effected on August 19, 1953 with success and Iran became a pro-Western monarchy under leadership of the Shah. The eventual aftershocks of this event were numerous, but at the time it was presented as the defense of Iran from a communist takeover.

Closer to home, the actions of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala were also disconcerting to the U.S. and seemed to portend a potential lurch to communism. Arbenz was elected President in 1950 and instituted a program of land reform. This resulted in the loss of land for that country's economic elites, and for foreign corporations. IT also seemed to portend more ominous developments, particularly to the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), which was heavily invested in Guatemala. This powerful company was a strong advocate for U.S. intervention in Guatemala. The Dulles brothers again supported a covert CIA operation to overthrow the government, this one occurring on June 18, 1954. Arbenz resigned nine days later, and a former military officer named Carlos Castillo Armas became the new, right-leaning President. Vice President Richard Nixon visited Guatemala in 1955 and proclaimed, "This is the first instance in history where a Communist government has been replaced by a free one."

Neither of these countries, however, were ever led by communist leaders or a Communist Party. In fact, the CIA resorted to a lot of behind-the-scenes propaganda and misinformation to spread this idea. In the Cold War environment of the 1950s, the agency could then portray these preventative, pre-emptive coups as the actual rollback of communist influence. For a brief time, the Dulles brothers' belief in rollback seemed vindicated.

The idea of rolling back communism (however loosely the term "communism" was used) ran into its limits, however. In 1956 the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to reimpose a communist political order. Eisenhower's administration offered firm criticism, but no practical action to support Hungary. It was simply infeasible to risk a broad war over the future of a country located behind the Iron Curtain. The idea that the Soviet Union could be quickly defeated began to lose its luster in the face of such events. Events in Cuba and Vietnam would further bury that idea in the 1960s. Thus, reality eventually elevated containment to its place as the central U.S. policy in regards to communism.

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