On 7 April 1954, Eisenhower warned that Japan would turn “toward the Communist areas in order to live” if a communist victory in Indochina “takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area.” Washington’s trepidation of the “super domino” Japan falling to communist influence spreading forth from Vietnam, would remain a serious concern of American planners over following years. In south-east Asia, specifically in Vietnam, Eisenhower again did not descend to an outright military invasion, though he was clearly concerned about the situation. (1)Įisenhower refused to send American forces en masse to invade Guatemala, as former president Woodrow Wilson would have done a generation before but the repercussions for Guatemala and its people were still horrendous, the destruction of her democracy which lingers in the country to this day. In June 1954 the Eisenhower administration once more resorted to the coup, this time in Guatemala, with Eisenhower’s fear in this instance being the expansion of independent nationalism in the United States’ “backyard” of Latin America. After some cajoling from the British pertaining to Iran, the Americans led a putsch in August 1953 against a nationalist government in Tehran – mainly in order to ensure US-British control over Iran’s massive oil reserves, in “the most strategically important area of the world,” as Eisenhower had previously described the Middle East. This was at a time when American power was immeasurably clear of any other nation on earth.Īs president, Eisenhower preferred the coup d’etat to the military invasion.

Eisenhower’s presidency, which ran for eight years from January 1953, is notable in the reluctance of the “great general” to launch large-scale military offensives.

Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky